Hi comrades,
As the title suggests, how do you manage your time spent online? I personally don't use any social media aside from Lemmygrad, but I'm still struggling with being online too much, even if it's lurking here or on other websites. I try to focus on offline things, such as books mostly that I download. My biggest problem is the refresh feature, even smaller sites such as this one just become an issue because of refreshing for new posts or discussions.
As a Linux user, I can say I tried to make my desktop as offline-focused as possible. I don't use any "cloud" services etc., though I still find myself dealing with this. Perhaps it's the interface.
I do like the Small Web movement, especially protocols like Gemini or Gopher. From what I see, they're filled to the brim with conservatives and anarchists, sadly. I do lurk on YouTube via Invidious, which is probably the biggest time-waste, though there's much valuable niche content on there. Sometimes at least.
Speaking of this, I sometimes take breaks from politics to not get overwhelmed. To get updates, I usually use RSS and the Hexbear News Megathread. For the most part, it's enough. Though FOMO (fear of missing out) hits here too, as what if I'm not up to date with something important globally.
What's your experience with this, comrades?
I spend too much time looking at memes, watching YouTube, and [like you said] refreshing here. I finally deleted Instagram and discord, but I still waste time on the latter two, like you. For news I generally try to read articles posted here, and listen to podcasts like Geopolitical Economy Report, and trashfuture. I’ve been reading more than before I got rid of discord, but I still should read more. I also read theory articles, have a few essays open on my browser, and need to try and use my ereader more than at night. I generally am not too scared of missing out, but if you want to get the important news rss is nice and you could try first thought in YT.
I have an ereader too and see that I can focus much more if I read on it, I usually convert any article I find online to an .epub file and upload it, reading it at my leisure. I experimented with only updating the RSS via a script at a set interval, like 24h, and only get the news from there + stuff I download and save. Would be cool if I somehow managed to get posts from here on an .epub format, probably can be done via an API.
Like I mentioned, I like the slow internet movement overall, and I think even if Lemmy is FOSS, it still inherently has some of the addictive features from the mainstream platforms. Or perhaps I just need a new pardigm to computing.
Downloading articles sounds like a good idea. I feel like if I even have my phone in the room I’ll get pulled in. I think my Pocketbook has an RSS feature, but I haven’t figured out how to use it.
You can use Calibre's ebook-convert feature and convert a Markdown file to an epub easily. Or beforehand just use pandoc to get any of your desired formats into .md
I just save articles as pdfs and export them to my ereader’s app.
The formatting is often wonky for pdfs, at least on mine. I prefer epubs where I can change the font et al.