How do you deal with your time spent online and the news? - eviltoast

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?

  • Chay@lemmygrad.mlOP
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    1 year ago

    Listen to podcasts over videos, or just listen to videos.

    Here I have a neat trick, I use the Whisper tool to transcribe the audio from a video and just convert it to epub. It’s useful so far and I’ve done it many times

    • Kultronx@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      That is a good idea, but I personally would prefer not to look at a screen. The inverse of that, what I often do is save an article or text from like marxists.org in the Pocket app, which has a function that can read it for you in a good voice. Read many texts while working using this method.

      • Chay@lemmygrad.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        Fair, but the e-ink screen doesn’t have the same effects as a normal LED one. Although FYI Pocket isn’t the most privacy friendly one out there.