Just a guy. I work. I wonder. I write.
Please note that this is about how I intend to use the internet in the short term on a *personal* level. Professionally I have to use online products and services that I find reprehensible. Occasionally and accidentally these two worlds may collide.
Having discovered the joys of more simplicity and less distraction I want more of this in my life and that is essentially the reason why I am doing this. I want less noise and more simplcity in my internet experience.
My hardware is nothing really to brag about. It is a Lenovo laptop with whatever the latest Windows version is. I can not change this for reasons I shan't get into but I have the Windows Subsystem for Linux on and operational. The Linux part is running Debian in more or less CLI.
Emacs is what I try to use for everything. I can do pretty much everything I need to do from my Emacs. Once again this is about my personal use not my professional use.
Like many folk I have had trouble understanding how to setup up mu/mu4e for email and I have yet to get all my GPG keys on this computer in a place where Emacs can use them. This is a work in progress. Right now my email is running through Thunderbird. This will change when I have the time to stop and concentrate for more than a minute at a time.
All the cool kids have staked their claim to land in the geminispace. When it first became public I thought about staking my claim but really did not want to add more stuff to my life so I stalled around. I finally got around, this week in fact, to setting up housekeeping in Geminispace and think that I finally understand the beauty of this part of the internet.
I was in absolute joy the other day to be able to read some news and do some research about one news story in particular without distraction. After I had read various articles in geminispace for about an hour I discovered that I actually understood most of the stuff I had been reading and I think that the reason for this little miracle is that I was not distracted by ads, javascript popups, pings, or any other distraction that the WWW seems to bombard us every 15 seconds.
My account here on smol.pub automagically builds a website for https, a geminipod in gemini, and a gopher hole in gopher. Choose the one you want to use and read me there.
Elpher is the program I use in Emacs to read both gopher and gemini.
The stuff that interests me should come to me. I am too prone to falling into rabbit holes when I am left alone with an internet connection too long. RSS is still one of the best things created for people who do not want to waste time on the internet.
My biggest caveat to what feeds I load into my feed reader (Elfeed on Emacs) is that the feed must give me the full article. I will not chase down the article. I do not want to step into the noise. If I can't read the full article in my feed reader I will not read it. Plain and simple.
Gemini feeds can be read on my Deedum browser on my phone. Not sure if I can get Elfeed to read feeds from Gemini.
Anything that involves coming in contact with human beings will be done via email. I have not had accounts on any of the major social media platforms in many years. The Fediverse has become more of an aggravation that a conversational tool. After years in the trenches trying to get people to use "better" things I am tired of trying to convince people to use XMPP or matrix and I refuse to use Slack, Discord or a whole host of other things. AND I LOATHE TEXT MESSAGING WITH A PASSION THAT RIVALS WINNIE-THE-POOH'S PASSION FOR HONEY!
Here is the kicker- everyone that you know has an email account. Why reinvent the wheel? (I think SMS is just a boogered up email.) Sure some folks like to criticize this or that about email but it has been around forever, everyone intrinsically knows how to use it and it is ubiquitous. If you are a paranoid I can sign and encrypt the email. We can send each other a passworded VeraCrypt container. I can sign the email so you know that it is not a phishing attempt.
Another little perk of email- file sharing and file storage. Did you know that you can send files as attachments and depending on you email service you can even store the files in your inbox for an indefinite amount of time? Who needs Google Drive?
Also, when one stops to ponder on it for a minute the subject line in email is as big a miracle as the hyperlink. SMS, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, XMPP, et. al. do not have subject lines. Have you ever forgotten where a thing was being discussed? Did he say that on Facebook? Where was that product number? Text or Slack? An email with a subject line solves this problem.
Walking away from email has caused a drop in productivity because no one can find the info that they need to do their jobs anymore. That is an opinion based on my life experience and is probably not true but I am still going to believe it just because I have a reputation as a crank and curmudgeon to maintain.
Do I really I really need to tell you that I use EWW for my web browser? No JavaScript, popups, and/or other BS. If your site doesn't work without JS I may not be seeing it in the short term.
---
PLEASE NOTE: Most of the links on these pages are to sites using the gemini protocol. What that means is that instead of a link being https://example.com the link is gemini://example.com . To my knowledge no regular web browser works with the gemini protocol. Some browsers may have an extension for browsing gemini. Otherwise you will need a gemini browser to work the links.