Stop using the Internet?

Would you like to stop using the Internet? I don't know what it is, but using the Internet gives me a deep sense of derealization. Using the Internet is like being in the center of a big city. It's full of people, you hear noise everywhere, but everything is so cold and artificial. People are all around you, but it's as if there's no one there. The Internet seems to have taken away our ability to go home and disconnect from the world. In fact, electronics in general give me this feeling of derealization! But the Internet apparently acts as a great catalyst for this.

Lately, I’ve felt the need to step away from the net too —its noise, its pull, the culture wrapped tight around it. Maybe what I want is smaller. A version of myself made simple. A journal. A blog. Real talk with real people. Text messages over timelines. Words that mean something over the endless scroll of YouTube and dead noise. Life might be better that way. And now, the only thing left is to start. To piece it all back together. Yeah. I will. Someday.

>>89770 the outside is just as cold; as you said yourself it feels like a big city. the precession of simulacra is not limited to the digital

>>89770 No, I really enjoy using the internet, I simply avoid the parts that I dislike. I have made it a rule that whenever I find myself staring at the screen waiting for something to happen I just close everything and open a book (either physical or digital) from my backlog. I don't use much social media besides altchans, boorus and ecommerce platforms. Lately I have been reading Douglas Rushkoff's bibliography, not a big fan of his ideas but the books are entertaining and easy to read. >>89771 It is so weird for me when people talk about not using youtube or discord as if it was a religious experience. You can just do it, it isn't the big deal you think it is. People are people, if I wanted to find interesting people I would focus on that, finding them, rather than on the aesthetics of this or that medium of communication.

>>89776 I have been coming around to this mentality myself in recent years. I think all I really desire is to be able to carve out a group of like-minded people for myself, regardless of what the medium is. It would be nice if it was away from the usual noise but not as necessary as I initially thought.

>>89770 There is this phenomenon when something gets too popularized and therefore becomes trashy (tainted?), for a lack of a better word. There's probably a wikipedia psychology article and a term for it somewhere but I'm too tired to look. So the people who were among the first around the thing, experience it the hardest because part of the allure for many of them was that the "niche-ness" of it let them escape reality in a way. I've noticed that about songs, movies, games you name it. Once something becomes too public it loses its appeal for some people. I don't know if I'm like that. If I were I wouldn't like to be that way. I don't support gatekeeping but I can understand why people sometimes feel the need to gatekeep things. For example, I wouldn't want this place to get too known. Large number of people == more garbage, more scams, more low effort content, more noise. >>89776 >It is so weird for me when people talk about not using youtube or discord as if it was a religious experience. Yeah, I said this too. "Just log off/close the tab, it's not that hard, lol, skill issue" until I realized I had internet addiction too even though I wasn't using mainstream social media. It's not an addiction in the traditional sense, but recently I watched a video from struthless talking about real addiction and it was eerie to hear the same phrases/behaviors he, an actual drug addict (and other addicts) say when they find excuses to perpetuate their addiction. Some people really are that powerless. What actually did turn me away from the internet are the last few years worth of aislop. I'm done. Even now I can't be 100% sure I'm not talking to bots. And I've had instances where it's impossible to tell if the person on the other side is real or a bot. I refuse to participate in that level of deception. I'm thinking of adopting a policy of only talking to someone online if I know them in real life. TL;DR don't spend time on corposlop.net, mainstream media etc. If you do, curate your feeds if the site allows and filter out the noise. Explore personal web pages, get into more physical media. Start using the internet as a tool of necessity rather than a past time.

The internet should be a tool to live better IRL, but for many (including me) it's instead become a substitute. I do not want to stop using the internet. But I would like to use it much, much less. Posting that I got a message. Flood detected post discarded. I guess the system agrees huh. I shall send this at a later time.

>>89772 This. Personally, I initially became obsessed with the internet as it was an escape from the retardation of the real world and normal people. The problem is that now the real world and the normal people have taken over the internet, and vice versa. Now there's nowhere left to escape to, except innawoods or something.

>>89813 But... where do we go from here? What can be done outside the internet? It's raining and dark beyond my window, and I don't see anyone.

>>89815 If you are in college then research clubs and activities to partake in and show up consistently over a semester - then just contact those people regularly If you are not in college - move to a new city and use meetup - repeat above and make sure you are seeing the same people consistently. Also if weather is like kicking dead whales down the beach where you live I highly recommend moving to a warmer climate where you can be outside and interact with people. Make a website just for contact info and hobbies and then just keep showing to social environments. If all the people ever do is talk about gossip and drama on the internet within the social environment then ditch them. Stick to topics that interest you in real life like projects or real life hobbies you are working or books you are reading. I got an ereader and mass pirated tons of books for the year and mass pirated all the movies and shows I'll watch for the year on my laptop. I also have an rss reader, but only check that once a month. I think the only real solution though is pulling a luke smith, joining a church, and buying some cabin right near it so you can interact with the community in real life all the time.

Elementary school "computer class" where I attended they could afford a computer lab. Teacher was a charismatic young guy with a beard and long hair in a ponytail. I remember he explained the internet is great because if we wanted to learn about "koala bears" we have access to up-to-date information. Our class spent most the time fooling around on mspaint. Clicking away at the dynamite icon that erased our drawings. We played online flash games, slime-ball, configured for 2-players on a single keyboard using the arrow keys for movement and the other a, w, s, and d keys. Currently I find much of the internet rather stale. I believe its best utilized for learning rather than entertainment.

>>89821 University clubs are all about drinking and thinking that drunk dancing is the paragon of human experience. Even the sex is lazy. Hobbies for social environments? Where? Everyone uses Discord these days for niche stuff. Church... come on... If I don't mind adopting a couple new grandparents... There's literally nothing outside, you practically said it yourself with these "suggestions". Worse, the internet is mostly fake now, thanks to cheap chatbot api tokens... We are living in that picture where everyone sits in cubicles getting juiced on pleasure chemicals.

>>89824 The best you're going to get, if you want young friends this is, find a couple people interested in becoming influencers. Yeah, none of you are going to make it, but you'll likely do actual outside stuff that might be pretty cool. Afterall, influencing is the new eyes and ears of humanity. It's about doing stuff that people are too lazy to do themselves and would rather watch someone else give it a go instead.

>>89824 Dungeons and Dragons/Other board or roleplaying games, hiking clubs, cycling, running, fuarrrking anime club, martial arts... Unless you live in a small town there is always stuff to do

>>89833 If you have social anxiety it can be really hard to start talking to people in those environments and then ask them out, outside of the specific hobby. I am struggling to do this and I never know what to talk about with them outside of that environment. I’ve had a lot of flakes and lots of people I’m just not compatible with in terms of personality I guess. I wish I could just have a best friend that I was comfortable meeting and we could just talk to each other forever for hours and hours.

My latest exercise in avoiding internet indulgence is to limit internet access to the AI. If I need something, I will only access the internet through ChatGPT and let it provide the final links. That way I avoid looking at soykaf and advertisement that I never asked for, and I don’t have to look at different websites at all in many cases. just the clean chatbot text interface. You have to know what results you want of course. If you’re an NPC glitterboy, AI will not improve your life.

>>89821 >luke smith Luke is a normal person retard and his situation doesn't apply to most people with these problems. If you can just go to a random church nearby and find people you actually get along and connect with then you're a normal person, that's how it works.

Theres nothing cold or artifical to me about a city so its a bad comparison to me id be interested in seeing a poll of what kind of area average poster lives in (rural, urban, subburban). I dont feel a sense of derealization cause there is nothing real about it to me to be derealized so I probably agree with you. The most disengaging part of the internet for me is there is no work to be done here, I ultimately have to face that every time I use it nothing was actually accomplished (except learning but that will also soon fall by the wayside I think with just as much disinfo as info). I dont even mean in some hustle grind way if I sat there and stared at the ceiling id be doing a work of sorts but if I wrote an elaborate essay and published it online no work would be done. Staring at the ceiling is more aligned with my lifes purpose than posting is. No i wont elaborate.

>>89804 >If you do, curate your feeds if the site allows and filter out the noise. i feel like all of my old wild-west (late 90s) internet skills for curating these kind of feeds and finding those kind of havens has left me completely unequipped for the post-death 2.0 world. i don't even know where to look. i surfed neocities, dug into gopher and gemini, tried to reconnect with tty, and found death and decay. i honestly would like to understand how to find something. and when i tackle that, i realize i struggle to articulate what i even want in an internet community anymore.

>>89770 “This may be a virtual world, but I feel more alive here than in the real world.” ~ Kirito <Sword Art Online>. fuarrrk reality and people.

Smart people at all times tried to isolate themselves from society, invent their own fantasy world, populate it with their alter-egos and enjoy it [this is the real essence of meditation and Enlightenment, actually], but the OP of the thread says that society is more valuable than one's own fantasies - from which I conclude that many imbeciles, norm users, who do not understand the essence of imageboards and solitude, have flowed onto the boards. Go back to social networks and cafes, cretins.

>>90303 >but the OP of the thread says that society is more valuable than one's own fantasies - from which I conclude that many imbeciles, norm users, who do not understand the essence of imageboards and solitude, have flowed onto the boards. Disregarding another on assumptions about whether they are 'new' or 'old' because they disagree with you is silly. >Smart people at all times tried to isolate themselves from society They did not. In fact, there were specifically scientific societies. The old hacker scene was very communal and social. Do you mean to say they isolated from wider society? How? How would they do that? There is no way an individual can directly participate in the 'wider society'. >this is the real essence of meditation and Enlightenment, actually I've never heard of this. Do you care to explain? >the OP of the thread says that society is more valuable than one's own fantasies I wanted to revisit this point because something kind of strange sticks out to me. You talk about 'value', yet I cannot imagine in what way you could strictly say that imagination is more valuable than participating in the world. Sure, you could eschew the bogus idea that your life should be optimized to do valuable things, because this is a miserable existence. But to say that fantasy is more valuable than society comes across as bizarre, and needlessly contrarian. >from which I conclude that many imbeciles, norm users, who do not understand the essence of imageboards and solitude, have flowed onto the boards. Go back to social networks and cafes, cretins. You come to imageboards because you yourself crave socialization. Maybe board talk makes more sense to you than normal conversations (it does for me), but you cannot pretend that you lack a social desire at all.

>>90304 there is a difference. Avg people who want to socialize talk nonsense to each other aka small talk because they dont care about the topic, they just want the interaction. Outliers hate people but seek information and aggregate therefore with other people. They are thus disgusted by normal people who talk without providing value in their speech.

>>90303 there is death in the one just as there is death in the many. this article isn't exactly well written but I thought the first part with the game of life worked as a beautiful allegory. gold where you usually condition yourself to ignore, too, so it kind of works as a meta thing! https://utsavmamoria.substack.com/p/how-to-live-an-intellectually-rich

>>90305 You failed even to address the single point you responded to, let alone the rest. >talk nonsense to each other aka small talk because they dont care about the topic, they just want the interaction >normal people who talk without providing value in their speech Ridiculous you can say this about another without noticing you are the most guilty.

>>90321 Skill issue understanding whats been said. The essence is some crave interaction while others seek information. Those craving info aren't there for socialization which directly addresses the post earlier.

>>90322 >Skill issue understanding whats been said. Let this be judged by lains who witness this.

>>90303 >invent their own fantasy world, populate it with their alter-egos and enjoy it Things can always be better inside one's head. However, escapism itself is still an act of weakness. And I recognize that I'm being weak when I seek for it.

I specifically wanted to stop using -chan type websites because I realized how much free time I was dropping on them and thought I might develop more interesting/valueable timesinks if I took a break. Now I only use them for 7 days on, 7 days off. I've been doing this for a few months now, so I think I'll continue. I basically didn't notice the time 4chan was down because I was already used to ignoring it. However, the rest of the internet is fair game during this time. I stopped using youtube like a year ago, so I mostly just read wikis and blogs on the internet now, which somehow feels better. Traditional social media has never appealed to me.

No, I'm fine with the internet as it stood fifteen years ago. I don't need for it to go away because I have self control

>>91740 Well, did you end up developing more interesting or valuable timesinks?

>>89821 >use meetup shame on you for recommending this properietary weekly subscription based load of soykaf. why the hell would anyone want to pay to use social media. you'd be nicer to recommend people put up flyers in their town or post to their local subreddit long before suggesting them to pay for some crud like this.

>>89801 There was a time when it was possible to find such communities, one for you, when forums were many and independent from one each other. Internet also becomes a drug when there is a lack of something more meaningful and fulfilling in real life. Meet people online, run them through the funnel, keep the good ones and try to meet IRL no matter what. Yes, it does mean you will have to find people locally. Perhaps organize an event at your home or rent a local community house for an evening, advertise a little bit and see what you can achieve with that. In the end, we need social interaction. Don't let the virtual world take that away from you. >>89804 >There is this phenomenon when something gets too popularized and therefore becomes trashy (tainted?), for a lack of a better word. Perhaps the solution is to make something niche, culturally irrelevant and sufficiently highbrow or strange that it does filter the mass out.

Things have shifted with time. At first it was actually the internet which was able to pierce through a soykafty life situation to offer some comfort. And now it is feeling more cold and clinical to me, now that I have more personal relations. Frankly I've largely stopped "using it" already, but I kind of miss the flow state of doing interesting things with computers that went along with it. In a few weeks when I am less busy this world might become open to me again. Being an active participant rather than a passive one seems like a key.

I haven't yet fully migrated, but I am in the process of moving away from the web2.0 part of the internet, completely if possible. >1. I don't ever want to stare at a cloudflare screen ever again. In practice, I only do this when I go to annas-archive. I consider cloudflare a "self-DDoSing suite", because it takes minutes to load (sometimes as much as 5 minutes!), and, essentially, if I see one I close the tab almost as a knee-jerk reaction. >2. I discard anything that takes a while to load or pops up ads It's funny how 30 years after I first used the internet, some sites still load as slow as they did on the days of dialup. >3. No search engines Other anon already made an argument for this. I'm all in. Word of mouth and "surfing" is how I find new sites. Seldom does a serch engine return something useful. I usually just use it when I forget the name of a site I already know I want to visit. A bookmarks file should be enough to solve this. >4. Wholesale rejection of anything AI Call me reactionary, but everything now wants to use AI, just to get in the hype. AI is not very useful in my experience, and I fuarrrking hate when every site or service or ""app"" throws in the buzzword these days, just for the sake of it. It also requires an internet connection, but what if I don't have one, or don't want to connect to the internet? >5. RTFM Everything is in the docs, and they can be downloaded and consulted without an internet connection. >6. Anything I can do outside a web browser Which is quite a bit. There's IRC, email, MUD/MOOs, pubnixes, gopher, gemini, and of course, ftp and git for downloading. There's also bittorrent and other protocols that I don't use, but they are there. And if I need static sites for the info, I can always use lynx. The greatest benefit is that I can use all of these from emacs or the terminal. I imagine it's mostly a change of habits, and it puts my programming skills to test, at the very least, it gets me to do things in my computer instead of just being a passive doomscroller. Again, I am in the process of migrating. Right now I'm posting this from a browser, but I expect to be able, at some point, to remove the web browser from my system and never look back.

>>93119 I can't really get rid of search engines completely since they do help to look up small worthless snippets of information on certain topics or book recommendations. I also can't agree with getting rid of a web browser *completely*. Using a mix of tor and a CLI browser gives you exactly what you want most of the time, which is information. Information is a massive boost to live in this age. The problem with the internet is more about learning to surf through the noise to get what you want. Lynx/EWW get the job done in my experience.

>>93119 >but what if I don't have one, or don't want to connect to the internet? Use a local model on your phone? >-rw-rw----. 1 2.6G Jul 12 07:54 google_gemma-3n-E2B-it-Q4_K_M.gguf (Note, it doesn't work with the version I have of the ai app I use, so don't jump to download it, I may have gotten wrong parameters.) One day I put together a oneliner that has Termux speak out ai outputs from the local model. I think I could even use a keymapper app to hack together a triggerable speech parser and auto-answerer via hardware keypresses from lock screen / screendisabled phone, but I think the keymapper required a bit too many permissions. (It was libre and cut off intetnet, of course, but still.) >>93121 >Lynx Not unless you fingerprintproof it. Like make a Tor-Lynx. I remember I would run it from a separate user whose homedir I made unwritable (or on a ramdisk? I forget), but clearly this is undoable on unrooted phones. >>93119 >I consider cloudflare a "self-DDoSing suite" My funniest experience with turnstiles was whenever Google refused to serve recaptcha because "automated requests". That's right. How about you put a captcha for the privilege of accessing your captcha. >A bookmarks file should be enough to solve this. I have begun to use Keypassdx as a web bookmark manager. Just web items without either logins or passwords. Convenient, crossapp, cloudable if one likes, secure. com.github.warren_bank.bookmarks Is also a curious app, but has been buggy for me, losing data. >IRC Ironically, I couldn't find an irc client that works with Orbot. I do not want to use Termux for everything. I used to be more for commandline, but in time I realized some applications (abstract sense) are just naturally graphical.

>>93126 (Although I do sorely miss the fact that apps do not seem to expose api hooks of their functionalities to Termux. It should be routine, baked into development in fact. I'd go as far as to want subroutines to be addressable from Termux etc. by default, opt-out.)

>>93119 >>93119 >>93119 Anway, care to exchange some libre resources you've downloaded? Here are some of mine. * Wikipedia (English and in my language, then minis in a dozen other languages) * Wiktionary and Freedict (likewise in many languages) (converted to Aard format) * Stackexchange from Kiwix * Gutenberg and Openstax * Anki decks for scripts * source code for a handful of os's (I shall get Lineage's one of those days) * Projectawesome + Rosettastone + Rfc (highly arbitrary and probably obsolete, yes, I know sorely, trust me, I do -- this pertains of all of the above and the below, too) * Osmand maps from across the world * some rightwing / conspiracy infographics, just in case * ... It's painful to collect those, but, yea. Ebooks too, but that hurts even more. Also ought to do things like harvest major Reddit, imageboard, Github trending threads / topics. Rss may work for those. Oh, and also some 100000 random midis. Ought to get a script for converting them to scores. Ah, and games for Retroarch, too. And, of course, ought to have an local indexer server for all of those. As yet, I put together a tiny fzf searcher through a simple plaintext list of all filenames. (Btw, Fdroid ought to offer the option to download source of apps it installs. Is compiling apps in Termux easy yet?) (Senseless.) Ah, forgot (at least) two. A hundred or so of interactive fiction games, and also that one time I wgot all .txt files from a piracy site. Note for mods or whatever: most if not all of those was just short Internet lore. A couple thousand random manuals, howtos, turorials, leaks, and I don't know what, that've been circulating licencelessly, possibly from Usenet days or before. I figured why not. (fuarrrking senseless, a ghastly unlife.) Ah, right, also a compressed database of all books, ever. Titles + isbns. Some million records I think. Have no space to unpack, but good to have. You know, to know what I do not know. Probably ought to so same to top x most cited science papers, by a handful of metrics. (Senseless. Hell.) Oh yea, I remembered. I meant to do an iteration or two of top starred Github projects; say top 100, then download all those which those 100 mention. The first iter may have its nomedia source files gotten, too. Oughtn't weigh more than a dozen gb. Ah, right, and the human genome of course. Ought to get. I asked ai about the options of compression; amount of metadata beyond the pairs, or to get medatada only for human-variable genes, and raw data for conserved ones. (Hell.)

>>93133 It's all just trying to find a meaning in a separation, a disconnection. It's unnatural and irrational. And the more perverted and despiteful meaning, reason, I carve out of all of this, the more I despise it. Why won't anybody acknowledge that and kill me. Human connection is the rational choice, the only one, and I hate the living blood out of connection, and I hate that I see it, and I hate that I will not do it. Hate, hate, hate.

>>89814 >the real world and the normal people have taken over the internet, and vice versa. Now there's nowhere left to escape to this anon pointed out something which this thread is still missing - the internet is no longer a service for connecting computers, it's a meme in the proper sense of the word. everybody is chronically online. that used to be a general insult towards nerds but even the biggest normal people spend their waking hours on insta or tiktok with their accounts crafted to reflect what they are, when in reality what they are is just approaching what they present themselves as on the web. so the next time you see somebody calling a person chronically online, know that that means that they simply move in different net spaces. memetically, as soon as i talk to somebody, i'm already online. or as lain would say, “No matter where you go, everyone’s connected.”

>>93137 Yes. Humans do not act. Only in the sense of physical boundary are our actions "ours". An act is "ours" as much as a branch falling "belongs" to the forest.

>>93133 This is what happens when you combine visceral hatred of the Internet with love of it. I despise the Internet, abhor it. On clearnet, I visit a strict handful of same sites, and only a strict number of subpages (3, 5, powers of 2). When I want to visit something I am interested in, I erase the correlation-attack of its connection by drowning it in parallel or randomized requests of unrelated info. So that the info I want reaches me indiscernibly from all others. Sometimes, for statistics' sake, I end up finishing a browsing session on a topic I actually AM interested in, but in those cases, I do not obscure it, because consistent evasion of a particular datum would result in a negative-correlation in the long term. I love poisoning data. Sometimes I look something up that interests me, and then I admit the possibility of changing my outlook on it, so that there is sown a discord between what could HAVE been inferred about my visit of it, BEFORE I changed my opinion, and what is NOW the case about myself. I also do this on Tor. 98 % of things I am interested in, I do not look up at all, ever. I sometimes look up old interests of mine and delight in how they will mislead people into thinking that I still hold them. I despise my brain for being inherently interconnected; for there existing no volition that airgaps me from leaking information. Don't begin to hate the Internet.