onfocus

Heckuva week, politicswise. I am not enjoying the firehose of news and I read a couple good reminders recently: Matt Haughey's Protecting your mental health during a clown president's second term and Mike Monteiro's How to survive being online. I especially liked this bit:

Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends. And if you want to remain on social media, as I will be, do your best to separate the signal from the noise.

These were a great reminder that I am in control of the information I take in. The timing, the quantity, and the sources. I can turn off notifications, unfollow accounts that post breaking news, and batch my online reading time so it happens all at once instead of in constant drips.

I definitely do not want to tune out the world. I want to know what’s happening in a way that lets me contribute effectively over the long term rather than feeling constantly defeated. Here are some changes I’ve made recently to my media habits.

Tuning my social media

I’m not on the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or any of the ad-supported corporate social media sites. I removed those during the last Trump term and I’ve been enjoying the (soon to be nonprofit) Mastodon ever since for what I think of as big group social. However, I do follow many people who post breaking news and I’ve had to cut back on those. Mastodon has a mute feature that lets me mute accounts for a certain time period and then they’ll show up in my feed again. I’ve done a 7-day mute for about a dozen news-based accounts I follow. Now my timeline is much more social and less doom-y. I’ll see how it feels when the news shows up again. With the pull of breaking news gone, I can look at Mastodon less throughout the day and just catch up every so often.

I really like Sill for aggregating links from my Mastodon feed. It’s one of the only news sources I let into my email, but it arrives at the same time every day so it’s easy to add to a reading batch instead of consuming it as soon as it comes in.

Small group social media like private spaces, text groups, or other forums haven’t really needed any changes for me. They are super helpful for commiserating and don’t tend to turn into constant doom like big group social can. Maybe I’m just lucky on that front.

Tuning my news sources

As I mentioned in a post here the other day my window on the web is an RSS reader. I use a self-hosted, open source reader called Tiny Tiny RSS. tt-rss has an API which lets me write my own interface for consuming feeds—something I'm lucky to be able to do because I'm a web developer. But I still encourage people to look into hosted RSS readers. I read any email newsletters through RSS instead and I keep my email focused on alerts, notifications, and personal short reads. Anything longer goes into a newsreader.

I have had to remove a handful of breaking news and politics-related sources from my newsreader. So what sources do I tune into? Here are a few news-adjacent sites I keep up with regularly: Dan Gillmor's Cornerstone, Garbage Day, 404 Media, Press Watch, Vox Technology, and emptywheel. I also subscribe to weird art tumblrs, D&D blogs, music gear blogs, and a metric ton of personal blogs. I haven't needed many changes here.

Tuning my phone

Notifications are a tricky balance. My rule is that news, big group social, and most apps have alerts turned off. Small group social is ok for alerts. This has been a rule for me for a long time so nothing really changing on this front, but I remember the days when news apps were constantly grabbing my attention and it took a while for me to realize that was awful.

One big change I’m making is eliminating anything with advertising. The hardest on that front has been the Gmail email client on my phone. It includes ads in several places so I’ve been moving to Proton Mail which does not include ads. For the moment, I’m finding it a good substitute and anytime I can move something away from Gmail that feels like a good step. I think we have enough evidence to say ads are poison and will lead to constant enshittification.

Tuning my in-person interactions

I’m not a very in-person social person but I’ve been trying to change that by saying yes to more in-person social things. I think it’s important to make sure I’m not isolating myself in front of my numerous screens. Joking around and commiserating and having fun creating things with people is a nice shield against that feeling of doom. More of that in 2025 is my plan.