Death and Rebirth of the Web; The Future that’s already been + 3 Useful Tools to take back Your Internet.

We aren’t progressing towards the digital age. We’ve been here for a long, long time. And within this world of bought time and impatience, it seems WE are the product.

Many of us have sadly fallen into having our news… our information, delivered and personalized. From our favorite social platforms, content delivery sites, hell even in our daily operating systems which many of us use hours upon hours a day. It seems tons and tons of people are completely comfortable (semi, or not at all) with having their information selected. What is good, what is bad, what is fact and what is fiction, all decided by an algorithm and those with the largest pockets to feed the machine.

With Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter having many questioning their daily social media use, I’d like to take a moment to appreciate the tech that can be utilized to reclaim your time spent on the internet, and make sure you’re receiving the content and news you’d like to see. Below, I will be listing 3 tools/tips I believe can help you achieve a cleaner, more fair, and overall neater time online.

3 | Utilize RSS

RSS was first introduced in 1999 by Netscape, and is still one of the most concise wise to receive news and info, all selected by the user.

You simply input feeds to receive articles and videos from your favorite sources. Below are two of the tools I use to not only obtain RSS Feeds from given websites, but also read through them neatly!

Fluent Reader: https://hyliu.me/fluent-reader/
Get RSS Feed URL Extension: https://github.com/shevabam/get-rss-feed-url-extension

2 | Support FOSS

FOSS stands for Free and Open-Source Software. FOSS apps are freely licensed to use and study, as well as focused on security and stability. There are a plethora of great ones. As a matter of fact, there are so many, it would be impossible for me to even begin to list the “best” or “most useful” software, as that would be different for everybody.

FOSS is the backbone of the internet, in my opinion. While many know of traditional paid software that helps them achieve their goals (Adobe, Microsoft 365, etc), many are missing out on what independent developers are providing, which is a great service to all users of the web. As stated above, it would be quite literally *impossible* for me to lsit anything regarded as the best software, as there is simply far too much I could recommend. As I’d like to give examples still, below are a few FOSS programs that I utilize on a daily basis.

Obsidian; what this article was written using: https://obsidian.md
Cider; a community-oriented Apple Music client for Windows, Linux and macOS: https://cider.sh
Kdenlive; great video editor that I use regularly: https://kdenlive.org/en/
ShareX,; Screenshot, Screen recording and sharing/uploading utility: https://getsharex.com

1 | The Fediverse/Mastodon

The big one I believe many of you reading were expecting. The Fediverse is a collection of federated (interconnected) servers that can be used for a multitude of reasons. Blogging, image sharing, or what I’d like to focus on here, social networking, specifically Mastodon.

With Twitter on a massive decline, and many looking for alternatives, Mastodon has come in like a knight in shining armor for many, including myself. To get started on Mastodon, you select an instance (many are listed directly on the Mastodon site; https://joinmastodon.org) and reigster your account. After that, it’s all about exploring and learning. It may be overwhelming at first, but trust me when I say that many people are willing to help, and you should feel no fear in asking for advice. I’ll leave the instance I am on below.

Mastodon: https://joinmastodon.org
Instance I use: https://c.im/

While brief, I hope this article is able to help you get started with taking back your internet, and seeing more of what *you’d* wanna see. There is so much more to get into, this is just a general gist of where to begin. I appreciate you taking your time to read through this. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and stay safe.