Over the past few years, I’ve been moving this direction more and more. How are you bringing back control of your life?
I’ve always had a distaste for big tech, and that distaste has only gotten stronger as I’ve noticed an emphasis on engagement-optimized design. To that end I’ve been trying to use Reddit less and Lemmy more to promote healthier, user-run forums. I’m also here of course, and on Mastodon rather than Twitter.
I also spend quite a bit of time reading physical manga volumes rather than just reading online, and I just ordered an e-paper tablet for when I do read online stuff.
I’ve been wanting to set up an e-ink tablet for reading and just can’t beat the friction on it yet. Real books it is, for now.
That’s why I went with a model that runs Android. It’s a little less “dumb” than its alternatives, but being able to just install the Manga Plus app or whatever and immediately start reading is a huge convenience win.
Good Videos 
. Honestly, the biggest help was fixing my sleep schedule. I scroll a lot when I’m tired. A Bedtime Routine Isn’t The Answer ~ Dr. K 
Install Brave browser because it replaces the garbage default Android WebView, making all the apps that use it better (besides Facebook/Meta, they somehow maintain their own in-app browser and removed the setting to use regular browser a while back) and you… are… asking about typewriters, not Android subsystems. Right.
I had a typewriter as a kid, I remember writing fake news on it with my cousin.
- Did you know, back then David Beckham got an implant for a golden beard?
The typewriter’s still out there in the attic. I find its hammers too unforgiving with typos. Using it for random drafts feels like a misuse of that iconic look on paper. Come to think of it, I never saw it used for serious stuff; by the time I got my hands on it, those whippersnappers had moved on to their color-printer Windows '98 picturemajigs. That’s when our Marker-colored gazette showed up under the orange glow of incandescent bulbs, where the end-of-the-line bell took the lead over any real facts.
(How does one recharge that ink ribbon? It lasts for years, am I supposed to just get another one?)
A paper pocket notepad didn’t stick with me, I write a word or two, a hook to remember-by later; then I don’t remember what did he mean by that, lol. I used it to plan out the big phonebook(new part coming soon 
), but not much else, I prefer FUTO’s voice-to-text, 30 seconds of yapping can contain the whole idea, and saying it out loud is a quick check if it sounds stupid.
As for typos, I’ll mention those new gel pens with rubber erasers on the end; I saw notebooks with plastic pages for those advertising wet-wiping entire pages. No lines, just a grid of dots, it was a big leather-cover agenda 
with daily dates and tables, maybe if it was a smaller pocket notebook…
Journaling on paper feels good 
, with the freedom to switch up colours, stickers, write upside down sideways and whatnot.
Shout-out to Joplin/QOwnNotes for storing notes in normal .md text files, and OneTab for being a one-button way to turn my forest of browser TreeTabs into one text file I think it flattens the structure actually, but they’re still next to each other.
Music 
Idk, for me local back-ups feel like “I am done” with those songs, move them to the archive, no need to open them again lol. I’ve been getting back to those, AIMP bookmarks, keybindings for instant ratings/deletion, community Winamp projects and themes etc.
I bought my first album discog on Bandcamp today, Risk of Rain’s Chris Christodoulou: Full Digital Discography. FOMO fumo (ᗜˬᗜ)
There’s a pile of CDs from the 2000s sitting around that wants new jewel cases.
The discovery is massive on Spotify.
I like Wrapped goddammit!
It’s a cool holiday where people post their top most whatevers of the year, it’s nothing but discovering new stuff for a week straight! It got better in the last two years and even if you delete your Spotify account, you benefit from other people publishing playlists during that time.
As for dumbifying, on PC SpotX to keep the old interface and shoo away their DRM’d podcasts, and Spicetify · GitHub for everything. They only seem to care about banning custom clients on mobile, that’s where the bulk of their users are.
oh no I'm getting bitter again(expand)
It took it years to start making good recommends for me. I really didn’t see what the fuss was about, for the longest time I kept asking people what do they see that I don’t, what is here that isn’t on Youtube. Then the yt app got worse and worse, and they started taking songs off yt. The little heart button to recall found songs instantly made sense with the focus on discovering new stuff (and Mobile). It keeps coming back to mobile. On mobile, Discover Weekly and Recent Releases don’t have the limitations of “regular listening”. You know: 6 skips an hour, forced on shuffle play and recommendations shoved in your playlists and all that; then they go ahead and claim they don’t put their finger on who gets more plays… I just got an email “Personalized playlist recommendations, curated just for your taste.” It’s the official Cod: Modern Warfare 3 playlist by Spotify).
iPod?
I have a nugget Shufflé-bootleg mp3 player. Mushy buttons feel like trash and no playlists, but I do have an extra sd card so it’ll get some use.
I kept an older phone around (3.5 jack my beloved) for listening to music. Smartphones used to have the best bits of the iPod integrated, even going above and beyond with simple drag & drop file transfers, microSD cards, media buttons of the headphone wire; LG, the mad lads, had Bang & Olufsen (B&O) audio tuning for their fancy quad-DAC on the LG V20-30-40 series and the LG G5. Recent phones dropped all of those, but the demand didn’t go away, and phone brands* keep refusing to accommodate music, iOS recently made it even worse , so people want iPods again. 
The Dankpodalypse seems to be over, there are some cheapo iPods out there… I’ll stick with my bucket of old phones for now, Murena’s custom ROM lets me use the 3 physical keys on my phone as media keys and I like how podcast apps bind “seek back” to going back 30 seconds instead of jumping to another file. If there was one of those Xiaomi fitness bands with physical keys I’d be set.
Still, can’t deny the power-statement of going for a device with no antennae at all for your music.
No Radio, No Servers, Only Personal Computer.
I ain’t going back to flip-phones, (imagine trying to sell off VGA 0.3MP sensors in #currentyear). I’d like Institutions to believe I have a flip-phone, I never ever want to have to read another 50-page bank-contract on a phone, as a queue lines up behind me k thx.
I can handle the inconvenience of tinkering with incomplete community software, I can handle the life changes of finding my own music files outside of Spotify, techies are supposed to do that, leave it as an option. I cannot handle the expectation of multiple integrated security measures for the sake of mandatory Laundry apps. You know, “Google Maps is nice, but don’t take down the street signs” kind of thing.
I don’t even mind smartphones that much, it’s like game streaming, it’s nice as an option, it probably solves something for somebody’s use case, but exclusives is where we’re starting to have problems. Smartphone exclusives and mandatory apps. I should probably say something about Romania having the largest gap in the 
EU between tech literacy and social media usage. Eh, no kind words from me about life before the internet, but I am an isolated weirdo, there was no grass to touch. Reading books stopped being fun too when school wanted summaries for each one.
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I didn’t get much out of Filterworld, but I am a techie so it was probably because I was familiar with the topics before reading it.
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I’ve actually bought a couple of newspapers out of curiosity last
weekoh I wrote this on here already. I’m not paying by the word like they do! I ended up with the very thick “weekend editions”. I was expecting some sort of “long take”, 6-ish pages dedicated to the cover story like magazines used to do. They’re just filled with ads like everything else. And a TV guide!
The last video talks about smoking. I’ve seen a trend mention people not looking their age, and a few back&forths later the conclusion was that younger millennials avoided smoking. Then vapes and juuls made tobacco cool with the youngsters again.
I had to make a new instagram account to get the algo to behave and show interesting stuff (and to be able to use a client that blocks ads, my regular account didn’t take). I’d rather scroll on PC, opening inspiring posts on new tabs to handle later, but Insta on the Web has arbitrary limits. I should just uninstall it outright… eventually. It’s the last website with activity from colleagues and people that I met in real life. Weddings season will be over soon. That “Only Following” filter feels a bit like embrace-extinguish, it doesn’t take much to see that nice “you saw everything from the past 3 days!” finish line. Will you keep scrolling past that? Probably, it never stays on Following and you only need to forget to set it once to get back into the slop.
Hmm, MMORPGs used to be heavily reliant on players helping other players, you couldn’t even level-up without an elder mage or whatevs to “teach”/unlock your spells. And then a game released that was solo-friendly and World of Warcraft became part of history. Social media is fine when you’re in school and you can add 30 people on the day you make your account, but outside of that you’re playing an MMO alone. So they have to find stuff to show you. The feed definitely decays, if I scroll over 15 minutes it starts showing random stuff, if I come back a couple days later it’s focused again.
More web stuff
I generally agree with move to meaty long-form content and substacks and anything-but-shorts because context is important, it’s less about the picture and more about the trusted network of people checking the facts behind posting it. But my God does it get tedious getting 3 new 10-tabs’s worth of research projects every time I open youtube.
- https://unhook.app/ can force yt homepage to always redirect to the subscriptions box and remove other recommends.
I add websites to my RSS feed and they immediately fall in the memory hole.
Brainrot Explained: Why You Can’t Stop Watching and how to fix it ~ HealthyGamerGG yt
Notifications
The biggest use case for “apps” and webapps is notifications. Android’s been pretty good about implementing all the settings possible and the users have gotten better at ignoring them. Separating Messenger from Facebook was a smart decision—no one wants to sift through their feed just to check direct message notifications. We had a university class WhatsApp group that was a permanent flood of memes and random chat, but I couldn’t mute that because that’s where the random " 
20:30 Hey guys get on Zoom right now, the teacher found more homework for us due tomorrow" was announced. Another time I was waiting for an important message on Skype, so I kept it open on PC. Skype silently crashed, while still looking fine, and it didn’t send any notifications anywhere. Also, why do notifs. disappear when clicked? If it doesn’t immediately take you where it’s supposed to it’s just… lost.
With users neglecting to disable notifications, important ones failing to come through, and the barrage of spam, it’s no wonder people are throwing in the towel and returning to phone calls. It’s also a clearer way to sort out details.
I have a couple friends from the old web that straight-up do not open messages received while offline, only the emails. In a way, this is the change I want to see in the world, to push back against the “people are available 24/7, so we can display one notification on a Saturday night and that’s enough to change contracts” kind of… (if I wasn’t so afraid of getting blocked/ ignored).
- WhatsApp used to work like that because it didn’t store any user data, it was all peer-to-peer, so if the other person wasn’t online it simply couldn’t transfer the files.
It turns out his discord bugged-out on the phone and it never receives the messages. And on PC it starts minimized so it shows nothing, but it starts blinking orange at new incoming DMs/@pings
Wishful thinking
Now that the EU will make Apple let you remove Apple online services from devices, I hope iOS gets its own Blloc event: design elements from Ratio (a minimalist Android launcher) made its way into base Android.
Point-of-sale systems evolved into microphone-less phones tied to receipt printers even here in rural Romania, so I’d like to see those at home, to handle authentication and secure payments and whatnot, separated from the ad-delivering mediabox. You know, so phones can go back to being teens’ customizable toys instead of the dreadful mandatory work-brick.
Getting rid of my smartwatch and going back to a “classic” one was one of the best things for me this year. Sure, it was handy but I feel less distracted and a bit more “free” in a way. I’m also currently trying to break my dependence on Android Auto and just streaming my music via bluetooth.
The more things I think about listing out, the more ridiculous they sound - but I like the changes anyway. It seems for me it’s more about avoiding the ecosystem lockins so I can have freedom to change apps/services whenever I want without too many pain points. I am still very much a tech at heart, so it’s about the freedom to hop around.
A big one for me is also pen and paper. No matter what I try, there’s still nothing that replaces the ease and reliability of a pen on paper.
Yeah I don’t usually have memory issues w/ physical writing, but ever since grade school days, it’s just been too rough on my hands for long-form, unless I just don’t have a choice. I NEED physical notebooks/pads for to-do lists, notes, ideas, etc. but if I want to sit down a “write”, it’s usually gotta be typed.
As much as I loved the organization stuff of Notion/OneNote, I just hated the idea of losing everything and went back to Google Docs (still not as secure as local files, but convenience+likelihood of randomly being taken from me being low, tradeoff).
Couldn’t live w/o pen and paper, though.
I am obsessed with Bandcamp purchases at this point. So many neat albums distributed on cassette/CD plus the download in any format you want (FLAC > ) but I have spent an ungodly amount of money on CDs recently.
I feel like I never learn anything from anyone’s wrapped. IDK, I’ve never liked Spotify. I’ve been using YouTube Music (previously GPM) bundled w/ my YT Premium sub, but I just cancelled that now that I’m using an iPod.
May I interest you in the current #digicam trend?