How I Internet
I do not have the time to internet the way I want to. In a perfect world, I would stay caught up on my RSS feeds instead of being somewhere around 7,000 articles behind. I would have all three of my email accounts at Inbox Zero instead of just the two of them that I just about kill myself over. My 45 open tabs would all be read and I would be at the top of my timeline on my two Mastodon accounts, Threads, BlueSky, Pxlmo, Refrakt, Facebook, LinkedIn and Warpcast.
The two areas where I currently stay close to batting 1.000 are reading Scribbles blogs and the Micro.blog Discover feed. As Scribbles inevitably grows, I will lose that ability one day but that's OK. It's such a great product and a friendly community that I'll just make a drop-dead RSS feed or some other solution to stay caught up. When I say caught up, I mean I click on the "email me" links as frequently as I can to let folks know that they have a reader and to offer some feedback or relate a similar experience. Maybe some folks are rolling their eyes and thinking "There's Lou again" but I hope not. I truly enjoy knowing how people are coming up with ideas for WeblogPmo2024 or processing their grandmother's handwritten recipes or progressing towards their health/fitness/financial goals. I don't want to be shouting into the void and I would assume no one else does either so that's why I try to offer feedback.
I like the Micro.blog discover feed because it's a good way to greet find and greet people new to the community. It's also full of great photography. With the impending arrival of a new moderator, it's surely going to change character a bit and when it does, I'll be paying attention and ready to offer my opinion for what it is worth.
Another of my daily Internet activities is the search for the link of the day. An item on my daily to-do list is to find one link to add to the list of seven I share every Saturday. My prime sources for these links are from the many, many newsletters I subscribe to. Sometimes I build up a backlog of saved articles and web tools but right now I am only breaking even. I don't have any in the bank.
I've been checking in at Product Hunt every day for months now but I think I am about ready to let that go. It seems like 90% of the new products are AI related and some of them are just gross, like apps that will post fake Reddit content about your brand or write AI generated replies to people on Social Media because you can't be arsed. Both of those use cases go against my own personal standards and it's depressing to think there is a market for them.
Thankfully, my involvement in blogging and the Indieweb has decreased dramatically the amount of hard news I consume. I do good most days to scan the headlines and I'm glad about that. We do not live in happy times what with a depressing election under way, an increasingly genocidal war in the Middle East and a proliferation of evil billionaires trying at every turn to increase the wealth gap between themselves and we regular folk. Thankfully, my Internet has a real international flavor and I hope to be able to celebrate a Labor victory in the UK on July 4th even while my own country descends into authoritarianism.