#internetaddiction — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #internetaddiction, aggregated by home.social.
-
The formative experience which shaped my perception of the Internet were internet forums, I wasn't much of a blog reader or an IRC chatter, but I was active on a few hobby-themed forums. Such forums usually had an offtopic sub-forum for socializing. Such places usually were pretty welcoming and well moderated. They also were not dependent on good will of a single company, which was both a blessing and a curse.
And then great siloeing happened…
Users were slowly but steady migrating to big silos like Reddit, and forums started getting quieter and quieter, some died completely. I kinda sleep through this phase reading comics, mangas and watching anime.
Since then I was chasing that specific feeling of once again being part of some tight-knitted online community.
Reddit was pretty close, but the community feeling was much more shallow, and later the enshittification happened.
I think in meantime I've discovered Fedi, which was really quiet at that time and I was not sold on microblog format, yet.
Later I fell in small tech rabbit hole very deep and discovered the Gemini protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol).
My time on Gemini was nice. I learned that blog (called gemlog on Gemini) format can be nice. And there were/is something similar to BBS/reddit. But Gemini is small, like very small. For some time I've hoped that one day I'll see FLOSS organizations providing resources like distro sites, news from projects on Gemini but it never happened, and there were a few storms making me worry about the whole protocol future. I've used both Gemini and Fediverse for fulfilling my needs for connection with the FLOSS world.
At that time I was painfully aware of how much time I'm wasting on the Internet. I wanted to heal my burn-out and create something. In the past I've tried to make a webcomic but failed quite a few times, and had really good time playing with RPG Maker and GameMaker. But since I've started binge watching anime and reading mangas, I was always wasting my time consuming, consuming and consuming things on the Internet. I've tried blocking some sites but I was always finding alternatives pretty quick and not changing my bad habits at all.
One day I've had enough and started quite brutally cutting cruft from my life, blocking a lot of sites, removing accounts and creating rules what I can use and when. This still ongoing process for me. Even cutting few minutes from using the Internet per day matters (this is why I decided to resign from being on Gemini). But I still want to feel included in some online communities and FLOSS world, so I'm here.
And listen! I feel like I'm winning 🎉 Healing is taking time and some progress sometimes reverts, but I no longer have Firefox open all the time, and those top icons which Firefox has on a new tab page are showing me that most of time I'm using internet in more productive ways, which I think is true.
Being here is enough for me for feeling enough comradery and staying informed! I would say I haven't feel so well mentally since long, long time.
