The internet has always been my salvation.
As a socially underdeveloped kid, I’d spend my lunch hours in the high school library on those public desktop computers, reading fandom sites about my favorite video games. Computers always made sense to me. I even owe my entire career to them.
But the internet today feels wrong. Whatever the fuck kind of psychological warfare is happening right now with this Epstein stuff is too much for my mind to handle. I can’t do it anymore.
I will love. I will vote. I will support my community and continue to oppose this fucking nightmarish system we all find ourselves in. But I need to sign off.
Imagine the door closing sound effect when logging out of AIM.
I’m ready to give up on most things.
Already have. Continued existence is mainly just for the benefit of the spouse who actually has things worse than I.
Inertia is really the only thing keeping me alive at this point…
The Internet sucks now. There’s just not “things” on it anymore. When I was a teenager, there was always something new and interesting to do online. Modern Internet is social media, streaming, and shopping. It’s just not the same.
Yep, it was a trove of discovery, now its all data gleaning and AI marketing slop, and other garbage.
The library of Alexandria, burns again.
I’m sure it still exists , it’s just not easy to find these websites. In those times you had search engines that worked, Even before google existed, and the other search engines weren’t as good , you could find authentic websites
No, not “off” the internet.
Off the big corporate-driven soulless sites, maybe. Smaller discussion groups/forums, dedicated services, etc. still works. It’s less tedious, less eating your brain.
Basically, going back to internet before central planetary services that feed on everyone being miserable.
Kind of reminds me of how Pride just became another advertising platform for businesses.
Money really does ruin everything.
Yes, exactly what I said!
Use a custom DNS, don’t use yhr big 3 corpo sites, youll have a great time.
The other thing, get more tech literate friends. My dumb friends are annoying the hell out of me with how ignorant and unwilling to learn they are.
I keep a book on my person at all times now. Instead of mindlessly grabbing my phone (internet propaganda portal), I’ll grab the book instead. Been doing it about six months now, I like it a lot. I still havnt finished a book, I jump from one to the other very often, but I’m reading much more.
Its okay to sign off. I had a panic attack two weeks ago, and basically had to sign off for a time. I’m still keeping distance from the internet though. Renewing my love of reading has been a serious positive though.
Man I feel you. There are so many things I want to read, so it’s hard to stay focused on one thing sometimes. I have like five or six books right now in various stages of completion next to my couch. I probably need to get some ADHD meds.
I have ADHD too. Why remembering to throw the book in my purse, and to just leave it there permanently, is the best strategy I’ve come up with so far. I mean, when I finish it, I’ll swap it out, but I’m on my way to actually finish this book.
If I read at home I jump around from book to book, whatever looks interesting in the moment. Reading while out, I’ve only got the one choice, thw book I’ve carried with me.
We’ll be real though, I’m about to head out for the day, an I want to swap it out for a new one lol
That’s great! I’ve also been reading more than usual, finished 14 books so far this year. I read at the dog park, at the store, when my wife is driving etc, instead of checking my phone. My notifications are turned off except from my family. It’s helped my mental health considerably.
14 is wow! Good for you, I love it :)
I’ve given up on the super-corporate side of the Internet.
99% of my Internet use is Mastodon and Lemmy, both of which don’t really represent “the Internet”. I sail the high seas occasionally to help meet my other needs.
Yes, multiplayer gaming is toxic as hell. If I’m doing that, I have chat turned off, but mostly I’ve managed to finagle the Internet into my own personal, cozy little Hobbiton derivative, so it doesn’t feel quite so toxic to me as it might to the population at large.
If the fediverse were to collapse, I’d be done. Its the one thing worth being hopeful about right now.
Lemmy is a salvation spot for me, been an internet denizen since before I was a teen, it has been sad to see it slide into popularity contest/mass consumerism garbage. But I enjoy my Minecraft videos I’ve been watching for over a decade and getting to chat about homelab/Linux stuff as an alternative.
Its not like the real world (in the us at least) is doing any better lmao
Nah, it’s just getting good. The Epstein/Mossad files are slowly melting the fascist tide by exposing the perverts behind the curtain. The billionaires are losing their control over information to first hand accounts posted live so we can all see the truth before the spin. The Internet is the forefront of understanding what is about to happen.
Don’t quit now. If you want to see the truth, the Internet is the last place to host it unfiltered. Quitting is how the billionaires get people to only see the world through captured media.
Fucking optimist over there. There is nothing to celebrate, all epstein has showed us is nothing will force consequences for our connected rich in the west, our opposition to fascists is controlled to prevent us from seeing them face consequences, and that the worst people in the world hold an absolute veto over a critical mass of our lawmakers with that information.
You might be done with people, not the internet.
I still doomscroll to stay a little informed but my recent salvation has been free ebooks on my phone. Same phone strolling action but instead of doom, I get fun little mysteries.
I viciously “edit” the internet as much as I can. I block toxic social networks and have deleted any accounts I had on them. There’s a Firefox plugin that lets you individually block sites in search results so you reduce scraper garbage SEO sites in your results. PiHole, uBlock, and whatever else that is available to block ads, tracking, etc. “-ai” when searching. Use SearXNG or non-big data search tools when able.
News comes from places like AP or Reuters. Not perfect, but better than half-true at best MSM clickbait.
It sucks. It takes work to enjoy what used to be better a decade ago, but let’s face it it’s been steadily downhill since ‘10 or so. I truly miss the “old” web. Yeah, it had its own problems, but it was far, far better and more egalitarian than this war zone of monetization and manipulation we have today.
If you feel you have to step away, then do it for yourself - keep being mindful of the cause. Because it’s not a shut and close situation.
Life is always changing, tonight you might not want the internet - half a year from now you might need a very obscure information and you will be able to look it up and log off again.
I love the internet, because it is amazing tool. And so much knowledge is at the tip of your fingerprints! In my childhood if I wanted to learn something I hoped we had the right book home, or it’s library time with the cards and looking for books and hoping the book had an appendices…
Internet does have a rotten part to it - but to give up all the free education YouTube has, all the wikis on the world - it would be going backwards for me.Knowledge was at your fingertips. Now it’s not quite that. I put a question into a search engine and don’t get a good answer. Not from the search page, and the enshitified results are almost all written by machines, repeating the question over in every way it could be said, and explaining in exhuastive detail why someone would want to know the answer, all to hit the search engine requirements, then maybe a sentence or two with a lousy answer.
But you might not be able to find the answer on the page. I’ve to cycle through multiple pages and scan ai written prose to find an answer that I used to get instantly right from the search page.
I know it can work better, because it did work better. 2021 the enshitification became ubiquitous. That is hardly the only way information is no longer available. Dependent as we are on Search Engines for access to this information, and malign forces having their hooks into those For Profit search engines, we are entering a dark age.
Unless we get some players not in the Shit Trust, the anti competitive providers of any sector that have decided to all do a shit job to maximize profit rather than compete to offer the best products.
Or Trustshit, trustshittered search engines, I’m still workshopping the name.
I mean I gave up on web 3.0, bloated to hell web pages and telemetry shit. Stick on the small web and fediverse much as you can. Its still fun but it’s like music, you have to look hard to find good things now because its not right out there in front of you because there’s too much of it.
Instead of giving up, keep learning so you can explain and help the non tech illiterate how to run their own servers and docker containers etc etc for when every application requires a brain chip supplied by musky to log in. A lot of the normies are lost right now at how all this works and no one is explaining it to them. Now, 98% won’t listen to you, but you can try
Great comparison to music.
Good luck! Come back and let the rest of us know what it’s like out there.
It’s hard to get a recipe off the internet without having to hunt for it after a 14 mile long backstory no one on earth cares about. To me, that sums up the internet. It’s damn near dead.
