Still Jingling Miserably Across the Floor

Hello there! Are you tired of modern social media being oversaturated, overstimulating, overwhelming, and leaving you constantly doom scrolling? Do you want a place you can disappear onto and create yourself a little safe haven for yourself away from socmed? I have some very cool places to share with you, that I think should become utilized more!

I myself, have been working on weening myself off of modern social media, there are certain ones I haven't left yet: Tumblr, Bluesky and Toyhouse being the main ones, but they don't have that toxic addictive feeling for me personally. I can step away from them when I want to easily. I had the most difficult time letting go of Xitter, Instagram, Discord and Tiktok for some reason. But I am rid of those thankfully now. So, here are a few options, in categories that I hope you will explore, see if it's up your alley or not! You never know unless you try it first, yknow?

Journaling/Blogging - Dreamwidth - Livejournal - Write.as - Status Cafe - DeadJournal - Pillowfort - Mbin - Bear Blog - imood

Alternatives to Main Social Media - Lemmy (Reddit alt) - Spacehey (myspace rebuilt by fans) - Pixelfed (Instagram alt) - Peertube (youtube)

Forum sites - Raddle - Lainchan - Vk.gy - MelonLand Forums - Cult9 - 32bitCafe

Music/Video - Bandcamp - Soundcloud -Radio Garden - Vimeo - last.fm - Rate your music

Make your own site - Neocities - Nekoweb

Anime/Manga/VN - AniList - MyAnimeList - kitsu - Nyaa

Fun stuff/Misc/Art - Moth.Monster - Sheezy.Art - Unvale - ComicFury - Cara - Geocities Gallery - Internet Archive - Hotline Webring - Retronaut Webring - Wiby.me - Marginalia Search - Yesterweb - Novel Updates - cinni.net - Libera.Chat - Atabook - Virtual Galleria File Upload/Share - Catbox - Filegarden

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

Everyone in this world is just living their lives, each with their own complex needs and desires and interests and emotions. They all have hobbies and friends and families and favorite foods. They all have their own motivations and varying political opinions and views on their governments. They all weigh the risks of standing out or speaking up and they all make their own decisions about that.

They all fear the same in times of danger. They all feel grief and pain and terror the same. They all love and hate and bleed the same.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

So what REALLY got me was how Google was NOT trying to show me anything when I went to look this up. Why y'all don't want me to see all the "fun" everyone's having?? I wanna see the "destressing" everyone's getting!

I met this very polite young man today!

Typing this from Graphene now, in fact. But, both of those take the Android Open Source Project, without all the bloatware--and largely de-Google the whole thing. They give you much more control over privacy and what the apps you choose to install can do and access on your phone.

I know Graphene sandboxes everything, including the optionally installed Google Play Services which a lot of apps unfortunately require to run. (Lineage uses an alternative to Play Services instead.) So, you can install what would normally be unacceptably intrusive apps and just lock them away from pulling any funny shit with your data, or phoning home. Including the couple of Google things I do still keep around.

I also prefer running much more transparent, privacy-respecting open source apps where possible. Besides the transparency, I'd rather avoid the shitty tech corps entirely where I can. There are pretty good alternatives available for a lot of the usual suspects.

An alternative app store:

Edit: