Digital Hygiene

I archived my entire inbox today. This doesn't quite qualify as 'email bankruptcy' as I have addressed every email in my inbox. But I just left them in my inbox as 'read'. That isn't great for knowing 'what has come in and out'. But it also means it's easily to let a bad thing fester. I have been getting emails that are pointless to me, that I will never deal with, but harmless overall that I just don't bother to filter. So after listening to a podcast about a very similar subject I decided to improve my overall digital hygiene starting with email.

Email is great and bad

Email is amazing. It is honest crazy how perfectly email just took snail-mail and moved it onto the net. It suffers from all the same problems. They barely solved any of the existing issues.

I am exaggerating, slightly, as I can't click 'unsubscribe' from that magazine that showed up in my mailbox one day. But _anyone with my address can send me something_. I donate to one political campaign and now I get emails from every organization on my side of the political spectrum.

But at the same time: having an open standard, accessible way to be contacted is amazing. I use protonmail as a hosting service for my own domain. So if PM goes under I can just take my address elsewhere. That's amazing. I could even spin up my own mail server. But I am not yet equipped to expose :25 from my home internet.

Good email hygiene

Now that I have essentially 'started fresh'. If I get an email I don't want I'll either unsubscribe or filter it out. I don't mind getting some promos as I do shop occasionally and it's good to know when a too-good-to-be-true deal pops up. But also I don't want to be the chump who pays full price when I could have a coupon in my email waiting for me. But I certainly don't want to read them, or get a notification on my phone, every time they come in.

Good internet hygiene

I also extended this to my web presence. I don't want to accept your cookie banner, I don't want to see that ad. So I updated my pi-hole, started flagging things in uBlock. I tried the no-js but honestly I only visit a subset of sites anyway and all of them require it so some capacity. But I'll revisit this.

But also what junk am I consuming? Youtube is fun, but can quickly turn into the modern day laying on the couch mindlessly letting the TV play. So I unsubscribed or clicked 'None' on the notification settings of a bunch of YouTube channels. It's okay to support content creators. It's okay to use YouTube. But like anything, in excess it's not good for you, hence the 'hygiene' theme.

YouTube App Ads

I use patreon to support the creators I truly believe are making good content. I understand ads help but I have my limits. I'll give you $5 a month, but I don't want to give That 'Do You Want Bigger Balls' ad any justification for existing. I use an ad-block on my phone, so why not benefit from it? Honestly, if you don't use Firefox on Android with uBlock I highly recommend doing so. I can watch YouTube videos in High Quality, without ads, and with my screen off (if the video isn't needed). That is amazing. However, if I get a push notification from YouTube I either need to 1. dismiss it and navigate manually to the page on the browser. Or 2. click the notification and get the first-ad, while I copy the link and re-open in Firefox. But I think I have a solution

RSS

I don't comment on YouTube videos. I can be 15 minutes late. I don't really engage in Livestreams that aren't announced elsewhere, and most if-any of my YouTube creators have a patreon discord that I am in where these YT announcements are as well.

So I drop the YT url into a RSS reader on my phone and that will notify me when a video goes up and I can watch it. I am trialing Feeder off of F-Droid, but am on the lookout for a good FOSS RSS program on Android. (So email or irc me if you have any).

[https] Feeder

Purging Apps

I also tried to find any FOSS alternatives a while back to the primary apps I use. I honestly only use: Firefox, Spotify, and my 2FA application (Aegis). Right now my battery is at 68% from 17hrs since charge and my apps are:

Aegis

Nova Launcher (higher than usual?)

Firefox Nightly

Ariane

ProtonMail

Notes (Simple Notes)

Feeder

Totaling usage of: 14% with a max of 4% for Aegis (which to be fair was left open for a bit while at work).

I have 115 apps installed. Some of which are stock OnePlus and Google apps you can't remove, and other android/oxygen OS services (like ZenMode) of which I get 0 use of.

My home screen is just 6 applications most of which are located in that usage list above.

[jpg] My homescreen

Goodbye Reddit

I deleted all of the time wasters off of my phone. I have a draft gemlog about social media, but I decided to just remove the reddit app (Red Reader, from F-Droid, a great app if you do want one) off of my phone. I honestly barely used the site to begin with, I mostly just scroll and close it without any engagement. As I alluded to above, I want to do the same with YT barring the notification issue.

Do I really need notifications though?

This is something I was thinking about as I was writing this. I enjoy seeing a video come up, and watching it. But I think that feeds into the bored moments later on, where it would be nice to have a cache of things to catch up on. So I am on the fence about deleting them all together. Part of why I liked it was it prevented me from browsing the website, but that is part 2 of the experiment assuming RSS fails me.

Filling time with something more meaningful?

I am lazy. That's something I struggle with daily. My anxiety feeds into me not wanting to do anything for fear of embarrassment or burdening someone else. It is hard to explain. But what that results in is me sitting in front of a computer, noodling on my guitar (not the worst way to spend an evening) or watching (or worse rewatching) something on YouTube I don't really care about. I use to just watch TV shows but I no longer have streaming service subscriptions so its harder for me to just log into Netflix and pick a random show.

Learning

While noodling on guitar isn't brain rotting as watching trash on the internet is, it isn't doing me any favors. So I have restarted (for the like 3rd time) ear training. For those who don't know ear training is, it is practicing hearing and identifying intervals in music. Either melodic or harmonic intervals (separate or together). And general music theory training but focusing on the listen aspect. So hearing a scale and identifying which scale it is. Things like that.

If you are serious about music and getting better at it, and work within the western music style (12 tone equal temperment) I cannot recommend practice it enough! I use Rick Beato (another YouTube creator and music producer)'s Ear Training program. As it has _a lot_ of training. But you can find apps online for free, or even just grab your instrument of choice and practice yourself.

[https] Rick Beato's Ear Training (paid program)

Programming

I also have been working slowly on my own gemini server in Java (if you've read my devlog).

Podcasts

If I want to take a break from music, I started listening to the Cortex podcast, which actually is what inspired me to clean up my email and phone to prevent noise and distraction. The cortex podcast is a podcast co-hosted by CGP Grey (from YouTube) and Myke Hurley the co-founder of the podcast network. They talk about their work lives as content creators which also means discussing tech, productivity, working from home, and other things that actually are up-my-alley.

[https] relay.fm/cortex

Conclusion

I don't know if I have a meaningful conclusion here. I just wanted to document the steps I took to try and be more mindful of the waste I endure in the digital world, and how I am trying to address it. Albeit disjointedly.

Have you ever done something similar? Do you have advice or tips on how to make best the digital experience? I'd really love to hear it!

- Senders

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