Experiences with minimalist technology groups

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I’m looking to hear information and experiences regarding minimalist technology groups/communities, whether in-person or online.

My goal is to simplify and consolidate my digital life, and cut out the things that are harming me, wasting my time and violating my privacy. I’m also exploring the concept that a lot of things that are supposed to add “convenience” to my life are actually harmful in many ways because they have significant hidden costs.

What have been your experiences with these groups, and is there one that you recommend in particular? Mojeek has been wonderful so far and the people here seem knowledgeable, but the topics here do center around search engines, and I don’t want to overload the forums with discussions around only tangentially related things.

Also interested to hear of any books that are considered important/foundational for the topic of digital minimalism.

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I don’t have any suggestions.

The closest things I’m aware of are things like the Slow Movement or niches like Gopher, Gemini, Mastodon social, or even Dev.to.

I’m middle-aged.

And, your question reminds me of a mistake I made. I thought that when I became an adult, there would be a parallel universe filled with people who I liked and who liked me. And, there was some urgency because those people were waiting for me to join them. And, it was only my stupidity which was preventing my happiness.

I’ve never found that to be the case.

Instead, all the people I hated in high school are still around causing problems. And, we still hate each other. It’s not like a person enters a different world in adulthood. Whoever those people are around you, they’re going to be there for the rest of your life. And, they’re going to be the ones who are the same age as you and have had the same experiences as your generation.

To put it another way, a VCR never asked if I gained weight, or a rotary phone never said I need to grow up.

It’s people you have a problem with and not technology.

That said, I’m incredibly isolated. So, if you have one of those influential middle-class experiences like living on campus during your undergraduate years or joining a protest movement then, yes, you can find a group of people that you actually want to be around.

Personally, I don’t have a good way of coping.

These days, my best experiences are reading books and finding out that there are people who agree with me. The downside is I’ll never have a conversation with them because they’re dead, or I’m just an unremarkable member of the rabble they’re preaching to.

If you have a chance to meet genuinely new people, take care and recognize that each of those opportunities will have more to do with your happiness than anything I can say about technology.

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I really only touch the margins of the minimal tech crowd. Online there are people that advocate HTML only web pages, ASCII text only pages and within those a whole range of minimalist, brutalist, retro1990’s web design fans.

Off line there are lots of analog fans, stationary buffs, paper note takers, journal writers, commonplace book writers, fountain pen users, pen and pencil users, analog watch collectors, Zettelkasten-ers, manual typewriter collectors and more. Some of this sounds like fun.

And then there are those that walk a fine line between analog and digital, and avoiding Big Tech, for instance they may carry a simple flip phone instead of a smartphone or use Linux or collect CP/M computers.

People love to talk about their interests and the Internet is perfect for sharing and finding fellow travelers. It’s just all in the niches and once you find one it will lead to others.

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I’m seeking out these groups for the practical advice they can give on navigating a life with less technology, not to find friends, etc. (One example: how do I book and keep updated on flights for commercial airlines if I don’t want to use their apps? Or, to give another example, how do I avoid becoming one of these people that are hopelessly dependent on LLM assistants?)

I have become fairly certain that some aspects of technology are harming me in a number of ways, and there is enough research out there to suggest this isn’t just a “me” problem. And I have already seen benefits (e.g. better mental clarity, less anxiety) from what I’ve been able to cut out so far.

I’ll check out the things you’ve suggested. The slow movement sounds like a good place to start.

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One thing I do is try and minimize the apps installed on my smartphone. Because apps tend to track you and report to whoever. Instead of the app I just use the smartphone browser. I’ve found most of the small screen web versions of sites to be very good and less tracking/reporting. Notifications can be tricky without an app but sometime I set up for email notifications or SMS if they already have my phone number or most likely I just do without.

LLM’s - just refuse to use them when detected.

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This kind of reminds me of permacomputing: https://permacomputing.net

Anyway, I resonate a lot with your plight, @Sanguine. A few years ago, I ran my devices in airplane mode so I could focus on something offline I was doing, like reading. Part of me thinks I should get back into doing that.

If you don’t know about RSS feeds yet, embrace them! Newsraft is my favourite RSS feed reader. Instead of letting an algorithm decide your interests, you choose people you’re interested in following and pull all the updates at once. I follow the single podcast I listen to this way too, since podcasts are built off RSS feeds.

Generally, I’ve found older tech is more minimal. It’s a good place to start for inspiration. Even if the tech itself isn’t viable, it’s likely someone has tried to revive it with an appreciation for its minimal nature.

Gopher is a good example of this. Mike has already mentioned its modern variant, Gemini (and helped me find Lagrange, a lovely Gemini client - thanks @mike!). The problem is the lack of stuff on Gemini that interests me.

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction. It’s not about minimalism, per se; but Cory Doctorow’s Unauthorized Bread eloquently makes a case for my hang-ups with modern tech.

Oh, I highly recommend avoiding DRM-encumbered books sold from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the like. Defective by Design has a good list of places to buy DRM-free ebooks.

If you must visit YouTube, I turn off all the recommendations/shorts in search with uBlock Origin filters. I definitely recommend installing uBlock Origin if you haven’t already. I go a step further and disable Javascript on all sites by default.

Here are my filters for YouTube:

www.youtube.com##ytd-item-section-renderer.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer.style-scope
www.youtube.com###secondary
www.youtube.com###comments > .ytd-comments.style-scope
www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1)
www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)

No more rabbit holes. No more recommendations on the side or in the end cards. And playlists still work if you fullscreen the video. It’s such a nicer experience. You can also just use mpv + yt-dlp to play videos people send you.

That’s another thing to keep in mind—if you think part of a page doesn’t help you, all you need to do is use uBlock Origin’s element picker to get rid of it. I wasn’t using this feature nearly as much as I should have been.

Don’t know if that helps. But I felt like sharing.

As for communities… no idea!

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The lemmy.world privacy instance can be a good place to find advice on things which is not yet at the size where it becomes not useful: https://lemmy.world/c/privacy@lemmy.ml

As a part of the fediverse it is also pretty unlikely to become so anytime soon

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For aggregated data specifically, the keyword you’re looking for is ‘web scraping’.

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I never thought I’d find another human with “ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer” in their UBlock Origin settings, but now I have! You would think more than 0.1% of the population would be interested in not having their precious time and attention sucked away for nothing, but apparently not. I came up with my Youtube filters on my own but I think yours are a little better designed. I’ll be stealing the ones you have for comments for sure.

I’ve been caught red-randed not knowing how to use RSS feeds. I think they were more popular a little before my time. Having one to use in the terminal sounds cool though, and I do plan to move away from Spotify soon.

Thanks for the other info provided!

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I would be all over this were it not such a clear Reddit 2.0. Some of the qualms I have with Reddit are about its business model its downstream effects, and some are about the nature of the platform and its design. Thanks for sharing though. I’ll have to think about whether something like this is a net negative or not.

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you need not be fairly certain, you can be absolutely certain

things i might suggest that may or may not fit your lifestyle…

  • smart phone > garbage-can it and, if necessary, grab a dumb/feature phone
  • smart TV > garbage-can it
  • home network > hard wire everything (avoid excess exposure to nearby RF transmitters)
  • explore armature radio (HAM) - be mighty handy to have one if/when the SHtF and it’s a very cool hobby

i don’t know of any specific groups regarding this stuff, but maybe these will get you started

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What negative elements of Reddit do you see reflected in Lemmy? I don’t have much experience with Lemmy but I thought the whole point was to provide a Reddit-like experience which avoids the most problematic failings of Reddit.

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Surely this is the easiest part? Just don’t use them? Mojeek doesn’t foist any AI on you the way Google does.

Sometimes these goals might conflict with the goal of pure technology minimalism, for example if a dumbphone doesn’t have secure encrypted messaging, that could be worse for your privacy at the end of the day than a locked down smartphone with a good encrypted messaging app.

You can add uBlock Origin or NoScript to your browser to help protect your privacy and avoid distracting ads (which is great!) but really that’s adding an additional layer of technology so I don’t know I’d call it minimalism. Maybe some kind of “simulated” minimalism.

Using the Tor browser would add even more privacy but adds even more layers of technology on top, so again it is hardly technology minimalism.

A more minimalist approach would be to disable JavaScript in your browser settings or more radically switch to a text based browser such as Lynx, if you are prepared to go without multimedia in your browsing experience (but you might also get blocked more often by Cloudflare because Cloudflare likes to punish people who dare to use a non-default browser). Anyway you can check it out if you want and share your experience because I haven’t used Lynx myself.

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I used Lemmy for a year on someone else’s instance so regularly that I was promoted to admin. I don’t use it anymore. I don’t use Reddit either, actually. Just this Mojeek Discourse, pretty much…

It’s…fine. It really is just Reddit with less people. Which actually makes it more of an echo chamber. But you can still have great conversations, and there are some really knowledgeable people on there. More knowledgeable per capita than Reddit, in my experience.

But it’s still designed like Reddit, for better and for ill.

Oh, and there are whole wars over de-federating instances. So the bigger instances have an outsized effect on smaller instances; if you run a smaller instance that gets blocked by a big instance, you can no longer interact with anyone on the big instance.

And maybe there are even good reasons to ban another instance! You can’t ban people from another instance, after all; you can only ban their entire instance.

Then there are instances like BeeHaw that are really big but trust no other instances, so they’re just one big instance onto themselves. And I don’t necessarily blame them.

So the federation aspect is actually a new thing you need to deal with! Moderation is a lot harder.

I’d rather be on Lemmy than Reddit, but at the end of the day I don’t want to be on either.

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until (or IF) we ever mature beyond a type 0 civilization, maybe it’s best to avoid the corporate run “town squares” of dreadit, flakebook, twatter, instaspam, etc.

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On a related note, does anyone know of any places to buy new or used physical books online that don’t track its users (using cookies or fingerprinting) or work with data aggregators? It seems every option I’ve found so far does these things: Ebay, Barnesandnoble, Abebooks, Thriftbooks, Indigo, Alibris, Bookshop, Indiebound, and a few others.

I know I can implement defensive measures against these things (e.g. UBlockOrigin, arkenfox.js browser, etc.), but I’d rather not support shops that use these technologies. I’d rather just pay a monthly membership fee or pay an extra fee when buying my books.

Thanks @gnome for telling me about Guide to DRM-Free Living: Literature | Defective by Design. I plan to use it for ebooks, but I’m wondering about physical books as well. (And yes I’m already aware of and already take advantage of my local library.)

Ideas?

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From my experience is just about finding the balance between convenience and privacy, it also applies for how we experience technology lately.

For music, I’ve started to shift away from streaming services and gone back to listening to CDs, asking people what they recommend and even go to a local shop and explore titles.

For booking services as well as banking it becomes a bit more difficult, I’ve seen responses on this thread to change some privacy settings and trackers that can help with data collection, but it is more difficult.

I think the bottomline would be to combine as much analog technology along with digital services to creates a physical stimulus without becoming too inconvenient for day to day living.

Physical movies, books, music and limiting usage of social media has aided.

Cheers.

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