I am not enjoying the time I spend on the internet these days.
Internet these days has become a chore to use and something that I’m tolerating than something I love to spend (waste) my time on. As an extremely online person who has been that way for most of my life, I don’t know and have not experienced a life without the internet. But because of the direction most platforms and companies are taking, I am hating the hoops that I have to jump through to just do the thing I want to do.
Things that I could take for granted before such as messaging my friends or searching for reviews of a restaurant now need so much thought and planning that its not fun anymore. To message a friend I need to think about encryption, device support, updates and even after that I am not sure that my friend would receive the message because notifications are such a pain in the butt to handle for most of the open source apps. If I am searching for a place to go have dinner its me vs the entire might of Google’s ad business combined with the huge volume of obviously fake five star reviews. In the early days and mid 2000s these things like emerging platforms and ad businesses helped support the internet infrastructure and provided the user important information which would otherwise be very difficult to get. And stuff about streaming services and subscription fatigue has been talked about so much that there’s no need to mention it again.
The small web or indie web is often mentioned as an alternative to this mess. Mastodon, Bluesky, blogs, peertube and other platforms that are progressive, decentralized, open, less prone to censorship and with better moderation at the same time. Using these pieces of software brings me so much joy and shows me an alternative to tech dystopia outside of these platforms. But the main problem is nobody I know or care about uses these platforms. Network effects are very real. Mastodon and Bluesky are very West focused. I did not see a single video on peertube in any of the languages that are spoken in India. I feel like I do not belong in those spaces or worse it sometimes feels like I’m intruding someone else’s space. This blog has sort of been a response to those feelings. I can express hyper specific things without feeling like those feelings are unwelcome or unwanted.
This blog has taken several forms over the years. I used to own the nachiketh.com domain for a while. I forgot to renew it and now its some kind of Chinese crypto scam site. I used Blogger, Wix, webs.com and probably others but never stuck to a single thing. And it was never a serious blog, I wrote about a new pen I bought or a car that I read about, because I was a kid and it was always low effort. I had so many useless opinions that were obviously wrong. Advent of Instagram and Facebook have made things redundant and I was posting the same stuff there that I already posted on social media where my friends actually saw the things I posted because they were already there on the same platforms. But today using these apps makes me feel less happy, less content and overall less happy about myself. I used to love seeing updates from friends. But I rarely see anyone I know on these apps anymore. Its content creators and content farms and bot comments everywhere. These days I actually spend more time on forums such as Team BHP, Hacker News than traditional social media. These forums are niche but they are to the point, user supported and genuinely care about the user experience. I used to spend time on Reddit until they’ve decided to go against their users and started to become user hostile but there are some niche communities on there that I care about that don’t exist outside. But except for these I don’t think there are any more places that are sacred, peaceful and enjoyable to just browse except for the blogs.
I don’t know if I can do the Paul Miller style one year without the internet challenge. Services like UPI and ride sharing apps have made things a little too convenient to avoid. But I think I am going to reduce the time I spend on the internet especially on mobile.
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