11 KiB
How I Internet
TL;DR: Self-hosting is not only about controlling your data, it also influences how you consume Internet for the best.
The way I and most people use Internet as changed drastically in a few years. It started with social networks and smartphones. More recently, applications started to introduce "features" targeting our "lower brain" or "social brain". It is not unusual to stay a lot longer on our smartphone than what we expected. Since the introduction of those methods, more and more people experience difficulties to balance their life, to focus a long time on some subject, and even might feel a lot more social anxieties.
One solution is of course to totally get rid of those platforms. But it would mean throw away all the benefit they provide.
So my personal solution is to still keep the best of those platform while minimizing my exposure to most anti-features. All start by how I produce content. And it naturally affect also how I consume information on Internet.
Producing
I self host many services. I control my data, and then I broadcast those info to different platforms.
Articles: Self hosted blog
First thing, is I blog. Writing a blog article is an intermediate format. A lot simpler than a real article for some journal, but also should contain more details than just a "micro-blog status" where you can mostly express an impression, a photo, an opinion…
I wrote an article that explain the technical details behind my blog. It also describes how I try to make it a respectful blog.
The harder part if you want to do it yourself will be about self-hosting it. You need to buy a domain name, and configure you DNS correctly. This is not something tremendously hard, but don't expect to do that as easily as registering to a private service. But hey, I really believe this is worth the price.
Code: Git Broadcast
I also self-host the code for my open-source projects. But, Github is the developer social network. It is easier to find contributor on Github than on your self-hosted repository.
So, I sync my code between my self-hosted instance and GitHub. So if tomorrow something is wrong with Github, I could easily switch to my self hosted repositories only.
Here is how you can configure your git repositories to push to multiple URLs:
git remote set-url origin --push --add <remote-url>
git remote set-url origin --push --add <another-remote-url>Bookmarks: Espial
I also like a tool to synchronize articles on the Internet I like and appreciate. For that, I use espial which is an open-source, web-based bookmarking server.
It is a very easy to install, this is a single binary. Your bookmark are kept in a single sqlite file.
This is perfect if you want to keep a lot of bookmarks some private some public.
Notes: Espial
Another feature provided by espial is the ability to save notes.
You can generate public or private notes. I intend to use those notes for my "micro-blogging" needs. Useful, for just making some short remark without investing in a full blog post.
RSS for articles, bookmarks, notes
It is important for me to provide RSS feeds. People should know when I update my content.
So my blog, bookmarks and note generate RSS feeds6.
Syndicate Elsewhere: node-red
With those RSS, it is then quite natural to syndicate elsewhere. For that I use node-red.
This is a web-based tool that make it easy to write flows. Think about it like a super IFTTT.
To give you an example, each time I save a new public bookmark, a new blog post, a new note, I tweet it.
Consuming
As I said, now that I can generate my content using my own, self-made environment, it also influenced a lot the way I consume and interact with other people on the Internet.
I consumed a lot of news directly from my smartphone. Most of the time using an app dedicated to some social network.
The natural presentation is an infinite scroll of content, with buttons to engage in the social network with likes/upvotes/comments etc… Most of the time, with enabled notifications to answer ASAP to anyone that might "be wrong on the Internet".
Here is how I consume Internet content now.
News
Before explaining how I consume Internet news, I like to make a short digression:
By writing this article I realized that, I mostly consume Internet content via news. More than that, that now, Internet is almost synonymous to news on the web. Which is only a very small part of the Internet.
Consuming news via a social network platform makes you a lot more passive. I can remember being a lot more active to consume the Internet content years ago.
This is something to keep in mind I think.
So my entry point to news consumption are:
- highly selected RSS sources (for example HN posts with > 500 upvotes)
- lobste.rs
- popular pinboard.in bookmarks
- very few sub-reddit with small volume
- laarc.io
- Fermat's Library newsletter
I plan on generating RSS from those different sources with "smart filters". Typically number of upvote filters for lobste.rs, laarc.io, sub-reddits, but also number of bookmarks in popular pinboard, etc…
I use elfeed inside Spacemacs. I really enjoy staying inside emacs as much as I can. This is a clean, dense, text-oriented environment.
I also use elfeed-org to organize my feeds and I also take care to remove feeds with too much volume. Generally we shouldn't read more than a few articles a day.
Most of my notifications go through my email. Social network notifications are moved inside folder and are not directly present in my inbox. I check my social notifications once in a while. So if you are waiting for an answer, sorry for the late reply, it might take a while.
Github
I still get notifications on Github because I use it a lot for my work. But only via email and the web interface. So even for Github, I can take a few days to react.
Conclusion
So I described how while still using centralized social media platform, I still own my data, I protect myself from new attention grabbing features and design / UX pattern changes in those platforms.
Mostly, I take the positive aspect of those platform while not paying most of the negative price.
For now my system is quite tailored made, and adapted to me. I think we could imagine that we could offer that to more people by having a single, easy to create platform.
The bit sad state, is that I know there are a few system that try to make it easy for more people to self-host, or provide self-hosting for a small community or family. But this is still reserved to technical people in my opinion.
I think we could be inspired by espial2 to create a simple small platform to provide those feature to most people.
- ability to blog/micro-blog and syndicate
- ability to publish securely private info to a small group of friends and family
- generate RSS for different group of peoples
I would personally prefer that to a Federation platform (like Mastodon). Unfortunately the federated network mostly replicate the anti-features of twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. While I believe we should change our consumption habit.
RSS is already a great tool for that.
Anti-features
A last note about anti-features used by social media platforms. Those are anti-features, as they provide almost no benefit for the user. All those anti-feature share the same pattern. They use spaced random reward:
Spaced Random Reward
Typically the few first random gifts in a new downloaded game. The main way used to hack your brain, is by giving it something he likes at a random time. Then you start to give reward with lower and lower probability. Your brain will then be in a search mode where he will hope to get another reward by staying a bit longer in the system.
- notifications ; they are here to grab your attention when you are away doing something else.
- likes / upvotes / retweets / pokes… ; those are also Internet reward but are even stronger because they also target your "social brain". They reinforce a feeling of social approval. More than that, we generally fall for most psychological tricks with those and make our production oriented to short content, memes, etc…
- infinite scrolling ; make you brain want to look a bit more, because it creates a fear to lose a great new info.
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comments ; Unlike likes or retweets, comment are a lot more useful, they can start a discussion. They still have two problems:
- Public comment are subject to spam, troll, attacks, etc…
- Generally comments are associated to real-time notifications, and thus break a slower, calmer, more respectful communication channel. We are not all meant to react instantaneously.