I found myself on the Archivebox website earlier today. After reading some of it, that's the kind of program I could use. The ephemerous nature of the web is bothersome, so much content is lost for one reason or another. Archivebox seems to be one of the most popular tools, and it can automatically mirror my locally downloaded website to archive.org, which is great. It seems complex though, maybe more complex than I usually tolerate these days. Which is why I am asking if anyone has personal experience with Archivebox or other similar programs. Do you find them useful and reliable? Have you ever found in your local storage a webpage that you really liked, which was gone from the web? How's your setup?

Thank ;)

Cohost.org, an independent social media blogging platform, will be shutting down as early as next month. A lot of users are talking about how their time on Cohost changed the way they think about what an experience in an online community can be like in the modern age of the internet. People saying that they'd rather move forward with spending more time offline and with their hobbies than chasing the next social media site after Cohost's closure. I tend to agree.

After checking an old forum recently that I used to frequent in the heyday of internet forums, I found it filled with racist fear-mongering that is left unmoderated after the driving force of the community passed away half a decade ago. I wonder how much of the spirit of the old web we can realistically rekindle. If you're on Tildes, you probably know everything about the faults of giant social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit. Heck, the poor quality the YouTube comments section was a meme when YouTube was new. It was never good on those sites. Just tolerable and everybody was there so you kind of had no choice. Now, many of those platforms are self-imploding.

Cohost, like Tildes, created an atmosphere where you didn't feel like you were committing a moral wrongdoing by not immediately spewing scalding hot takes about current events, drama and conflicts. You were encouraged to write text that wasn't throwaway garbage. You could have meaningful conversations about issues and find an audience. Cohost was not without its flaws. People of colour in particular recently shared experiences of racist harassment on the site that was purely handled by moderation. But overall the takes I'm reading now is that most people will be able to look back on their time on Cohost fondly. I've seen people calling it "the Dreamcast of websites".

Cohost was a social media site that was a joy to visit for me and didn't put me on an edge by interacting with it. I could write posts, long-form posts without pressure to hit out another one-line zinger while a topic "is still relevant". I didn't see endless chains of subtweets that deliberately avoided explicitly mentioning the drama they were commenting on, lest the hate mob find their comment. I didn't get into that kind of unnerving cycle of "I don't know what this post is about, but the infrastructure of this social network suggests it's a moral failure to not chime in on the topic de jour, so I better get going and scan vile tweets for an hour to find out what's going on".

And before you say that this is only a Twitter problem, I have had pretty much exactly the same experiences on Mastodon and especially Bluesky. I feel the same in over-crowded Discord servers where it's very difficult to keep track of what's been talked about and what the current topic of discussion is. I feel the same on the few active forums that still exist, like resetera, where there's just posts upon posts that you're kind of expected to read before you chime in into a thread.

So where to go from here? I'm thinking about setting up my own proper blog, maybe hosted on an own website. That way I can continue to create long form posts about topics I want to. And bring back a little more of the spirit of the old internet. Cohost is dead, but there's no going back to me to doomscrolling. Today I set my phone to aggressively limit my daily usage of Reddit & Mastodon. I said the following when Twitter crashed and burned, but this time I'm not desperate, but genuine when I say: It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

I find myself scrolling through YT hoping to see something to play in the background, occasionally checking things like TechLinked or MichaelMJD with occasional PointCrow and Dougdoug. But really just wasting time doing nothing, just scrolling.
So I want to cut it off but I want to fill in that time with something else.
Anyone else has tried to cut off YT(Or at least minimize) YT from their life? I’m probably using YT the wrong way.
I would like some RSS feeds or podcast to make me go on YT less. Or thoughts/opinions/experiences from other people that used to have YT on almost all the time but minimized the time on YT.

These could be blogs, forums, any online space where you visit semi-frequently at least.

Here are some based off my interests:

A Year in the Country - Blog on folk horror music

Gwern.net - blog about AI, statistics and psychology

Articles on the work of Lacan

Petit Tube - Random brief YouTube videos with few views