I wonder how many people have found a way to pull in their own
channel of information in a satisfactory manner after leaving
the mainstream behind. To myself it feels like the mainstream
is looking for some kind of balance with the pain and pleasure
as to be able to keep the maximum amount of people in while
exploiting them the maximum amount possible.
Personally I think there is something in me that notices when I
am being exploited and keeps nagging at me. It's impossible for
me to keep in a situation where I see myself being put in a
losing position by design.
But I can see why people would keep up with increasingly painful
mainstream for a lot longer than they should. It's a sort of a
hostage situation. If you want to perceive yourself as a person
who keeps up with people in a certain way and keeps up with some
information streams, you would have a very hard time escaping.
Facebook was always an uncomfortable match for me. I think I may
have posted something like two posts that actually depicted my
thinking. After that I started to realize that there are too many
people in my "circle" who are just going to thwart me if I let
them comment my thought process.
Lately I had similar experiences with Mastodon, surprisingly.
I am not exactly sure what it is in that case though, since I
don't actually know those people and they are not picked from
as big pool as people on Facebook. I see myself as sort of an
anarchist, so in a way I should fit in there. But there is
something in the athmosphere...
I guess it could be the relative power between posting and
commenting. When you have a limited amount of characters, it's
easier to comment. Also, I think public comments are not really
a discussion between the author and the commentor. It's between
the commentor and their followers. So you will have a dynamism
that stifles discussion about ideas that are less mainstream
on the platform.
I haven't really found a place to be social online on my terms.
I am not sure if it is a problem. I am thinking of having some
kind of webpage for myself, but I am not sure yet how to go about
it. On one hand I like the idea of a static site. On the other
hand webmentions and indieweb are interesting ideas. I am also
thinking of having a whole cluster of webpages for different
purposes.
For news I have realized it's not a problem to not get the
regular feed. News are mostly useless info and the few topics
that are important seem to trickle through anyway. In addition
to getting news through whatever random channels, I started
listening to a news program in a foreign language that I am
not very good at. This way I can say to myself that even if the
news were not useful to me, the act of listening was not a
waste of time since I am learning the language.
I think the biggest change in my behavior has to do with how I use
search engines. I realized that I had given a lot of my power
away by not bookmarking things, but instead always using the
search engine, even for sites that I in theory know the address
for. So, I have worked on building my own bookmarking system
that is independent of the browser I use.
I guess I should start using RSS. What I find hard with it is
just the act of reading through the feed. I have considered
the possibility of turning the text into audio.
I guess there are many things I haven't considered yet. I feel
like I am only a small distance away from the mainstream and that
there are very powerful tools and sources to be found that are
hiding or being obscured by the noise.
