Am I becoming a ”digital minimalist”? Or just a low-tech nerd? Or paranoid? I've been gravitating towards more and more of the social media hater side of the internet, which is self-evident by the fact that I have a personal website. I'm definitely not perfectly disconnected from social media or tech giants in general. It's just that I'm continuously trying to think how I could do things differently. People have different reasons for straying away from ultra-modern technology or social media services: mental wellbeing and less phone addiction, nostalgic value of gadgets, repairable tech and environmental values, privacy, dislike of large corporations.
Most of the popular ”digital detox” -type of writing seems to be mostly focused on the first one. (This is not counting any of the specialized retro tech enthusiasts. It's a distinct hobby that will always be kind of niche by definition.) It's a very marketable thought to quit social media to increase productivity, who could have believed? Of course not all of the people quitting social media for mental clarity reasons are just in the search of an optimal lifestyle. I don't think TikTok addiction or news app doomscrolling are a moral responsibility! But sometimes I wish that the other cases would also get some attention outside of certain communities. Maybe the large amount of people fleeing Twitter right now is a small nudge to that direction...
Quitting social media is of course not the only thing that people want to do. There are many ways to use less Google, Meta or Microsoft stuff in your daily life. But for most people, convenience goes above the dislike of technology corporations or a need for privacy. Sometimes the inconvenience is imagined: why do people not use adblockers? Why don't people switch from Chrome to Firefox? In some cases the nice solution does require more time and effort than the default one. Regular people aren't going to have Linux on their laptop yet, considering the computer literacy of an average person. And smartphone operating systems are even worse. I truly hope that de-googling ones life (and other such efforts) will get more mainstream, as it probably would bring these things closer to the people who aren't actively interested in this sort of stuff.
Here are some related things that I have done or would like to try in the future. I don't claim to have perfect solutions suitable for everyone, or perfect, non-wavering opinions. I might elaborate on my thoughts and experiences later with some of these, but I'm no expert.