offline, online, and balance
I've been thinking of the phrase "very online" and what that actually means. Is it amount of time spent online, or how niche your little neighborhood is?
Who is more Online, the people deep into the indie web enough to find this blog, or the people spending 4+ hours a day on TikTok? Are you still "very online" if you spend less than an hour catching up on your RSS feed?
I have found that the further down the web I go, the less time I've spent on screens total. I am really happy with my screen time when it's mostly spent on forums and feeds that I can truly catch up with versus an infinite scroll. But I had to be very online to stumble upon the pieces of the little ecosystem I've cobbled together.
Where are you Online: low-stim and hi-stim internet
I really try to separate the time I spend online into low-stim and hi-stim browsing sessions.
I consider low-stim browsing to be most indie web spaces - 32-Bit Cafe, my RSS reader, my Neocities feed, or Status.Cafe (my favorite way to find new sites). I also would include a curated Reddit feed: r/CenturyHomes, anything that ends in "livingspace," r/Medaka, r/AquaSwap, r/PlantedTank, r/Baltimore.
I consider my "hi-stim" browsing to include the Reddit homepage, Mastodon, Bluesky, and any endless scroll that prioritizes reactivity and divisiveness. I'm a leftist, and I'm exhausted by poor-faith and low effort online political discourse designed to make people feel really self-righteous. R/teachers is another space that makes me lose my mind as a professional that actually communicates with my kids, colleagues, parents, and admin. All news in these times also counts as hi-stim browsing.
I really struggle with using what I consider hi-stim internet in a healthy, well-regulated way. I have a part of me that loves to be mad, since I was disregulated for most of my young life. It feels safe in the same way a Coca-Cola does - and in a way that makes me feel like shit at the end of the day.
I limit my exposure to hi-stim internet content to two hour-long blocks using the LeechBlock browser extension. I usually spend about 20 minutes total using these sites.
What it feels like to shift from one Very Online to Another Very Online
I was a chronic Facebook group user back around 2015-2018. I spent hours and hours online every day arguing and making my personality around my preferred form of dog training (I stand by positive training, but I'm not arguing with people online anymore). I had probably 1500+ "friends" on the platform. I had an art account on Instagram with about 6k followers and sold most of my work through the platform. I would list a print on Etsy, post on IG, and I would sell out.
I spent all day refreshing. It was awful. I was truly hooked. I thought about my IRL experiences as content towards the end. I thought about all those people who were wrong when I went to bed at night. It made me think people were generally bad.
A series of things happened that led me to the indieweb - getting sober, learning to drop my resentments, and the 2020 election making my family show their worst selves online. My local leftist community was attacking itself. I just had to stop.
For my art account, I promoted a mailing list for a year. I left my account up, but I don't post - it feeds people to my site or mailing list.
For my Facebook, I shared my email and told people I was leaving. I gave them an opportunity to email me. A couple people did, but most people I wasn't on a texting basis with disappeared from my life entirely.
I appreciated this bit from Dave Rupert in I Wish You the Best in the Offline
There’s a sad irony when someone jettisons from social media, they’re gone from our Online worlds but I’m so happy for them. And I mourn what we don’t get to hear from them. We don’t get to hear about how wonderful they feel, how beautiful their skin is now, and how they restored their mental health. We don’t know if they make more money or less money. We don’t get further inspiration from them to leave the Online.
A weird toggle to my "old" online life is Venmo, which used to be connected to my Facebook. I see people I met at parties and parasocially followed use Venmo to pay the mortgage with their now-partners and wonder what their lives were like. I can see who from college still has brunch together. I see someone who backed me up in a dog group is alive and paying for god knows what and I remember when they backed me up against prong collar use in 8 week puppies in that breed group I'm so happy I left. And I grieve!
I'm in a much better place with my internet use these days. Low-stim browsing doesn't make me compulsive, I eventually get bored and go for a walk or something! I liked this bit from from Imperfect's response to Dave:
As hyped up as I am about the prospect of thriving online, neglecting your physical context as a result can have disastrous consequences. I believe there's so much untapped upside to harnessing both realms' strengths instead of just picking one over the other. Your physical presence and virtual portals can elevate each other instead of having their connection wholly severed.
I think that's where the indie web shines. It's a perfect place for me to be "Very Online" about a life that's very much happening in real life. While some people only blog about their online/fandom/Discord lives, my RSS feed is full of recipes, plants, photos of life outside, sewing projects, and glimpses of a very IRL social life.
I got to hang out with a fellow indie-webber in Baltimore yesterday! It was so cool! We were able to bridge that gap of online to offline so easily. And then I went home and ate a version of a recipe I found on Neocities (that you should make, it's delicious).