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Reduced Internet day

2021-08-03

Yesterday I was inspired to do a bit of a social media detox. I shut off my social media apps on Sunday evening and kept them closed for the entirety of Monday.

But, because I am not a super big social media user, I also decided that I'd add some extra rules on top of that to make it a bit more of a challenge. Shutting off Mastodon and YouTube for a day is relatively easy for me after all. So, my own rules were also that during my free time I wouldn't use a fully-featured modern browser and would instead limit myself to using EWW. That way I would also be dissuaded from flashy sites like Netflix. What I allowed myself was basically some browsing the net with EWW, checking out my RSS feeds, email, IRC and Telegram.

Because I counted Spotify among the flashy sites, I had to sync up my local music collection to my phone and installed a music player (phones don't come with those anymore, it seems) called Auxio from F-Droid. It seems pretty competent and my audio library of video game OSTs and Green Day is plenty to keep me entertained for days.

Obviously for school and work stuff I applied relaxed rules, since I do have to get those done. But I still tried to avoid tapping open any social media apps and whatnot on my phone during the work. I did slip up once when I absent-mindedly opened Mastodon once but immediately shut it down when I realized what I was doing. Power of social media right there.

At home I finally got started with the proper challenge. It turns out that the Elfeed + EWW combo is actually pretty good at checking your typical blogs and its reader mode eliminates excess links nicely. And because I wasn't juggling a bunch of other browser tabs, I took a lot more time to read each individual post instead of context-switching between tasks constantly.

Since I was already so heavily oriented around Emacs (EWW for browsing, Elfeed for RSS feeds, Circe for IRC), I also decided that I'd check my emails using mu4e. I had configured it previously, but my authentication stuff had gone out of date with new new email credentials and I had to debug that for a while. Turns out EWW isn't too bad for browsing for tech help with sites like StackExchange either.

Probably the biggest win of the day was that I managed to put some hours into a side-project of mine and got it to work. Browsing Rust documentation with EWW was doable but not very fun and accessing any GitHub examples is too painful to be worthwhile. I still managed to be quite productive because I didn't have a whole lot of distractions that tempted my attention.

Whether due to boredom or something else, I also noticed that I got tired much earlier in the evening thant I normally do, so I ended up going to bed almost an hour earlier than usual.

In conclusion, my discoveries are that Auxio is a pretty decent music player for Android, Elfeed and EWW go well together for browsing blogs, EWW isn't that bad in general and not binging YouTube and Neftlix in the evening makes going to bed easier. Now that the experiment is concluded, I shall go back to binging videos on YouTube.