While I’m not a fan of Epic, I do feel there’s a difference between one company basically throwing free games and low fees at us and another company forbidding us to install what we want and asking a hefty cut of developers’ profits.

I’m old and grew up in a world without internet, mobile phones and PCs. There were computers of course, but they were limited in their functionality. We basically used them as glorified typewriters and calculators.

I’m probably younger than you, but circumstantially I’m older than I should be. For example, I didn’t have home internet until I was in my mid-teens, and put quarters into arcades until then. that’s not common for kids born in the mid eighties.

Personally, I’ve gone full circle. I grew up without any of these modern technologies. In my late teens computers and the Internet became a big thing. I fully embraced it. I was an early adopter on it all. Building websites, instant messaging, you name it. This stuff was my work and my hobby. It was literally my life. I was considered one of those “sad people that met their wives on the Internet”. Yeah, that was considered sad back then.

I remember the mere mention of chatting online was followed by (well-meaning) warnings that I should never use my real name and beware of sex-predators. Queue Facebook a bunch of years later.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve been steadily reducing my tech addiction. I deleted my facebook, my twitter and every other social media account. I’ve removed every app and notification from my smartphone other than navigation and calendar notifications.

I also did this over the past years. Somewhat surprisingly, so did a significant portion of my 30+ peers.

I installed uMatrix in my browser to prevent any cookie from being set, and any javascript from running. No more pop-ups, auto-playing audio and video, no more tracking, no web notifications. Lots of sites don’t work anymore. That’s okay. I just won’t use those sites.

I’m okay with that too!

I’ve also become a minimalist in real life. I’ve stopped buying things I don’t need; cruft I can do without. I no longer browse web shops just for the fun of it. I don’t need a big smart TV, I don’t need the latest fashion and kitchen appliances or fitbits. During the corona lockdown in my country, all shops except grocery stores were closed. Nothing changed for me. It was just business (or should I say, “no business”) as usual, except for working from home.

Again, same here. And in my late twenties I’d have argued passionately about this. now I’m more wondering if it’s just part of getting older, and perhaps just a human’s lifecycle mixed with the weirdness of the internet.

I do, however, miss the sense of community that the early internet had. Which is why I’m on Lemmy now. This kind of goes against my “no social networks” rule, but I guess rules are meant to be broken.

More than anything, this is what I’ve been missing too. To get a bit more specific, I’m an '83 kid. I grew up consuming various internet things (Strongbad, ebaumsworld, etc.), but also being a proper participating member of various internet things (gaming forums in all their diffuse themes and qualities). I miss that so much. I miss the unique styling of, say, the Looking Glass forums. The characters on there, ranging from vanilla to self-proclaimed certified insane. The meetups that I couldn’t attend as a teen. The marriages and deaths. I’d like to have some of that back.

So yeah, sorry about the long rant :-) I hope to read more of the interesting discussions here on digitalminimalism!

Likewise!

The problem is that schools, like any similar institution, cannot just upend how they function based on whatever new thing shows up. It’s difficult enough for teachers to deal with the half-decade interval of changes in teaching particular topics.

Of course, the problem with that is that over the past few decades our society has been changing in pretty fundamental ways at a pace that these institutions even in their ideal form can’t deal with.

The rise of the computer and then internet (for us 30+) changed everything. Then smartphones changed everything (only in 2007, and probably ubiquitous by 2010 at latest?).

An institution can’t deal with this kind of speed, but that means individual families or communities or individuals need to. Research can’t deal with this kind of speed, so even knowing the information that helps us figure out how to deal with things is woefully outdated.

I’m an optimist, so I think we’ll figure this out. But we’re in a land of confusion, and for now individually realizing this and acting with the best knowledge or intuition is the best we can do.

Agreed. But I’ll add that in the same way we need to learn to ‘own’ our attention, we also need to learn to ‘own’ our boredom.

For many people, after years or even decades of mind-numbing work followed by a few hours of relief watching Netflix or gaming, it’s one thing to escape that work, but quite another to also learn how to relax without reflexively going for those same timesinks. They’re very much connected and rewiring yourself involves not just rewiring how you spend your ‘active’ or ‘focused’ time, but also rewiring how you think about boredom/relaxation.

(I’m currently still terrible about this, btw, but making bits of progress. When I don’t “need” to work, I’ll either veg out and watch some emotionally gripping tv show or movie, work on ‘self-improvement’ goals, or plan my week. When instead I should probably go for a bike ride, hike, walk, or stroll. Hell, even the bike ride or hike becomes yet another thing to ‘optimize for’ if I don’t watch myself. True boredom/tranquility is fucking hard!)

I use uMatrix and it starts out by very strictly blocking stuff for a site. I’d say it doesn’t quite break 90% of sites. Maybe 70%-80%, which is still a lot.

In most cases where the site is not obviously shit, I’m lazy and I just ‘allow’ everything in uMatrix and reload. I’m okay with that.

If I find myself visiting a site more regularly, I either permanently whitelist it, or, if I’m not lazy or particularly distrustful of said site, I’ll progressively ‘allow’ more and more.

What I like about this approach is that it’s a minor inconvenience, but it keeps me aware of how most sites do need to load various external scripts to function, but thankfully also how many of them do fine without first asking me to share my visit with dozens of tracking/ad sites.

There really does seem to be a clear distinction between ‘some tracking/external js’ and ‘holy shit popups and tracking and taboola and other bullshit everywhere’. The latter I usually end up blocking entirely.

Are you familiar with uMatrix? and if so, what made you pick noscript?

That’s a huge assumption to make… but honestly I agree.

I can recommend this article: https://www.newyorker.com/books/book-club/on-boredom

“The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom…To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable…If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

I would interpret ‘bureaucratic’ pretty broadly. It can be sitting bored during a church service, funeral, or waiting in line at the DMV. Or being bored at a family gathering, during a class, or some company ‘morale improvement’ activity. Or a SCRUM meeting in a dysfunctional company (read: almost everywhere).

Perhaps not coincidentally, these are all situations that for myself (and I suspect many others) cause immense anxiety.

I might have ADHD or perhaps I just never learned to handle this type of boredom (on account of just not showing up, or avoiding it in other ways). but as I’ve entered my thirties I’ve come to believe that it’s crucial that I either learn to deal with this bullshit/boredom, or I figure out a sustainable way to avoid it entirely.

for now I think it’s possible, for some anyways, to find a balance where you deal with this type of boredom for a certain period, and then recharge with other, healthier forms of boredom (the stuff that we’d associate with mindfulness, which really in practice is not all that boring in the conventional sense).

I do halfly agree with this. Let’s not forget that they EVOLVED to such state but weren’t born with disrespect to users in their mind. Let’s take a Facebook as an example: it was born to unite classmates together and keep in touch with them BUT after it started scaling worldwide, it’s team saw an opportunity for largest profits in the history.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don’t know why.

Zuck: They “trust me”

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

I admire your optimism, but Facebook was rotten from the start. And in my experiences many more corporations than we think either also are from the start, or swiftly become so because of ‘profit’ or ‘investor pressure’.

those arguments are crap, and I’m pretty sure you know it.

From what I’ve seen around here so far, you’re safe from getting banned unless you show the same patterns of behavior that PF did. I’d seriously be surprised and a bit disappointed if this comment would get you banned.

the “ps pls don’t ban me” makes me think you might not be acting in good faith though. Hope to be proven wrong.

That’s an excellent question!

At the very least we can probably conclude that things aren’t going great, but it’s still important to realize that this is a very broad stat and an aggregate of many causes.

Over in my country, they’ve been all-around pretty strict in enforcing ‘social distancing’, but we had at least one BLM protest where this was not observed, and at least one anti-social distancing protest before the crackdown on those. I’m very curious to see whether we’ll have statistics granular enough to tell how much these affect the number of covid-19 cases. Quite likely we will, as AFAIK stats are available per-region and these two incidents were in very different places.

All that aside though, the fact that we’re generally still pretty observant of the rules, even if less so than before, gives me hope that we’ll not have an unmanageable spike soon. I’m really worried about the US though. I sincerely hope summer weather ends up being a mitigating factor for y’all!

We Dutch are total chuds, but this is pretty cool.

Sorry if this isn’t the right place to ask, but does it make sense to set up an account on another instance what with the upcoming federation? Could it cause issues when using the same username on different Lemmy instances, or can they be consolidated somehow?

Also, thanks for y’alls work!

Haha, much as I’ll miss my fancy reddit phone app, I was honestly hoping for this to happen too. Couldn’t imagine the various good reddit communities to migrate to a better place unless they were forced to.

I’m going to build my own Lemmy client though, mobile-first and everything. The API seems okay enough, even if it’ll probably change from under me a bunch.

While I’d prefer something not encumbered by CTH (not that there’s anything /wrong/ with that), I do think it’s a decent argument that something still somewhat related would make it easier to find.

Wouldn’t know what though. maybe just cth.something(.something?).

Either way, anything’s better than the current nothing. This instance is a bit slow so having a separate instance of Lemmy would be a great start.

+1 for pigpoopballs, but let’s get a funner extension!

Yas!

It’s like Digg, but with subreddi… dammit!

hey dont get us banned again, person

You got any more of those invite links?