Problem That Needs Fixing
Vitally important fixtures in my life and happiness right now:
- Certain friends I can only contact via The Internet.
- Certain few websites where we do our communicating.
Problems that give me anxiety:
- Eventually, Something will Happen to the websites, and/or accounts of specific Friends.
- When this happens, there will be a Struggle to keep track/stay in touch with Friends.
- They will find other sites to socialize. But they will not all go to The Same One.
Problem I fixate on, most often:
- It is NOT EASY to build a routine of regularly checking on Many Websites.
- However, finding a way to do this is VITAL to the future of internet life.
Clarification:
- Ideal internet experience requires MANY thriving websites.
- Includes social (Bsky, Dreamwidth, Tumblr, Mastodon, etc) and also individual sites (e.g. Neocities, HTML, self-hosted).
- The availability of many different sites allows individuals the freedom to choose their online life.
- It minimizes the danger of one’s social life being at the mercy of one big corporation.
However:
- Socializing online is usually an activity done to relax in downtime.
- Therefore, it is NOT something people will put lots of effort and energy into managing.
- So whatever website you choose, it will be ignored by anyone who is not on that site as their primary socializing place.
- This leads to buildup of activity in big corporate sites, and starvation of small and individual ones.
Conflict:
- Ideal internet experience from individual perspective is at odds with big-picture ideals.
- Checking multiple websites to interact with multiple friends is good for everyone in the long term, but it is a high-effort activity.
- Whereas the ideal individual experience is extremely low-effort: just scroll or click a “next” button.
Clarification:
- By “ideal,” I don’t necessarily mean healthiest or best for everyone.
- I mean it’s the option that people, in general, will choose over other options.
- Any other option is not ideal, because it will fail. Very few people will participate.
- And for a social endeavor, widespread use is Necessary.
Challenge:
- We cannot expect human habits to change on such a vast scale, even if they should.
- How do we reconcile good internet diversity with existing habits?
Type of solution needed:
- Web browsing that allows checking on many websites in an easy, streamlined way.
- This would include friends’ pages on social media like Tumblr, Bsky, Dreamwidth, Mastodon, Discord, etc.
- And would also include friends’ personal self-made websites, e.g. on Neocities.
- Would require easy transition to the next website when done visiting the previous.
Examples:
- RSS feeds are the only example I know that ever found widespread use.
- Their flaw (in my experience) is that some features of the website won’t display.
- Meaning that you often have to click off the RSS feed to visit the website.
- Then your flow is interrupted, and you might not see the rest of your feed.
- This may be part of why they’re losing popularity.
Other:
- There are a few other examples of websites/apps where you can collect links to your faves.
- But none of them, from what I can see, are intuitive enough to catch on.
- Or streamlined and easy enough to replace the one-site lazy browsing that most people do.
Ideal solution, in my opinion:
- A browser, or a browser extension/add-on.
- Easy enough to install that it could find widespread use.
- Usable on desktop, laptop or mobile device.
Description:
- Has access to the user’s bookmarks.
- Has easily-accessed buttons at the top and/or bottom of browser window.
- Buttons always visible, no matter what website you’re on.
Functions of buttons:
- Adding pages to bookmark list.
- Option to rearrange the order of bookmark list.
- Buttons to navigate to Next or Previous site in the bookmarks list.
…
So… that’s where I am in this thought process.
I’m almost certain that something like this could catch on! And if it did, it could fix so many problems with the ways that corporate control of social media divides us…. the way it keeps small independent sites beaten down, ignored and unseen… the way it keeps us separated from people we need to connect with.
…And this seems like something that should be a thing already! Feels so obvious to me, I can’t understand why it isn’t a built-in feature of every browser!
But it’s not.
And every time I’ve brought it up in the past, I’ve been met with pretty much total apathy– like no one can even see why it would be something we’d want.
Maybe this time will be different though. Maybe now the problem’s gotten big enough that people might understand.
We’ll see.