Where do you go to veg out online?
I enjoy Tildes a lot for its thoughtful discussion and well curated links. It's a site you can enjoy casually and not get addicted to.
But sometimes you're dealing with a cold, or laying in a hotel room after a long flight, or just feeling lousy, and you start to long for that infinite scroll, dopamine hit, image / video cornucopia. Or really, there are just times I want to laugh at memes, people's drama, etc., until I'm ready to get out of bed and back to the world.
In the old days, we had things like memebase, or early reddit to scratch that itch. But these days social media algorithms have gone nuts. For example, I can't spend five minutes on reddit without finding myself in a racially charged discussion. Platforms like TikTok likewise seem appealing (an endless scroll of silly videos would be great), but again the algorithms are there to highlight conflict and make you miserable. I feel like even if you work hard to curate on these platforms, you're not safe.
So for anyone who feels like me: is there a solution to this? Perhaps a fedeverse instance still small enough to avoid astroturfing. Or non social-media options with a huge amount of content (something like thedailywtf, or hitting random on a quality web comic). I would love to hear about what you enjoy when you're looking for internet junk food.
Honestly, as someone who loves learning random facts about the world, especially math and science, I sometimes spend hours just browsing Wikipedia. I often start with some mundane everyday concept that I thought I knew everything about, inevitably learn something new about it, and then get lost in a sea of obscure tangentially-related topics. There's just so much there to read, and while the actual content isn't always well-written, the links to primary sources can be fascinating as well.
And for a combination of the 2 there is: WikiTok
Yeah, this was my immediate first thought. It's remarkable that Wikipedia hasn't enshittified after so many years, and I'm grateful for that. No ads, just endless content about any domain you've ever heard of.
Favorites of mine are looking up staple foods around the world, and looking up the history of tiny towns I've never heard of.
I use Discuit.org. It’s still pretty small, but the community is really charming and friendly. The site is a non-profit, open source, and completely ad-free. It pairs well with Tildes as the two sites together pretty much cover everything I used Reddit for: Tildes provides the in-depth discussion and Discuit provides the cheap dopamine.
I hadn't heard of this one, it looks interesting! I might need to add it to my repertoire. Thanks!
What's the vibe there though? Pretty open to outsiders and/or different opinions or pretty tight nit and homogeneous? Apolitical?
I’d say it’s a pretty open and welcoming community to anyone, except trolls, which there have been a few in the past. Most of the posting is memes and current events, but there are lots of cute little niche discs that we always like to see get some love. There is political and non-political content but it’s easy to filter the politics out by muting certain discs. The site does lean left probably, but there are known conservatives on the site that get along just fine because they aren’t being trolly about it, and they get the cozy hangout vibe. What the site needs more than anything is more people contributing content. I mod a couple photo discs, but they don’t get much love except from me, and even I can be a pretty infrequent poster, preferring to stick to the comments usually.
YouTube Subscriptions. I just turn off my history and recommendations and get a constant feed of everything I'm interested in. I lose a good chunk of time between that, podcasts and audiobooks.
I didn’t know you could do that! YouTube without recommendations would be awesome. Thanks for mentioning it.
Can you give advice on how to make that work? A “constant feed of everything I'm interested in” sounds real nice. However, I find that if I subscribe to channels willy nilly, there will be tons of crap that I'm emphatically not interested in, and if I try to curate it, I end up with a small set of channels that I've mostly already fully watched — not remotely enough for a “constant feed”.
Are my interests just too narrow?
An embarrassing amount of my YouTube time is video game long playthroughs that I follow so that I can scrub through and skip around or drop in case I get bored. There's also the four hour video essays about media franchises turned into hotels or how the alt right pipeline is ruining your internet experience, but they're an acquired taste and you start to get diminishing returns after a while. You can also just follow playlists and if you follow feeds marked Podcasts, a curated list shows up as it's own feed in their own section. (You could also follow podcast feeds in YT Music which will mix in with your YouTube feeds labeled as Podcasts, but no watch history would apply to your podcasts as well, so that can get unwieldly.)
Edit: What I do is add everything I'm interested in to my subscriptions, then go through my list and add anything I'm the least bit interested into my Watch Later playlist. I organize it by watch length, but you do you. Then I just start at the beginning, and clear it out when I'm done.
I've been using Bluesky, but I'm not on it that often. I use it to look at art accounts. I curated it as much as I could to keep it calm and just about art. There are also some feeds dedicated to just calm things.
So that's my safe place to zone out for now.
Same. BlueSky is really nice to configure with what you follow that way. It's not perfect of course, but for the cheap dopamine in the diet I've found it to be the best fit for me.
It's also easy to switch between alts if you want to have some dedicated to only positive/negative things depending on your needs.
I mostly use Lemmy for mindless content. Memes, Comics, Ask, and some smaller communities tend to be mostly free of the toxicity like on reddit. While new content is a bit slower I think as long as you avoid politics and world news it's not too bad.
Lemmy+Tildes+Tumblr scratch the Reddit itch for me. Though both Lemmy and Tumblr needed a bit of curation before they hit the sweet spot.
Lemmy is the #1 location for any Star Trek news and memes.
http://startrek.website/
https://lemmy.world/c/tenforward
well I now have a new community sub'd.thanks :)Nevermind, another downside of lemmy is how broken it can be sometimes. Attempting to subscribe to that community from another server just returns "Server Error". :(
Reddit usually, but to specific subreddits. Usually for whatever aspect of one of my hobbies specifically interests me at the moment.
I don't do it much, maybe 10 or 15 minutes every couple of days, but it's low impact and easy. Reddit is so frustrating to use and riddled with ads these days that is impossible for me to really get sucked into it, so it works great for me.
I use old.reddit with Firefox. With adguard blocker, bitwarden, privacy badger, unlock origin extensions and get no ads.
I may be a bit in the same boat. I've been trying to build up a list of sites to browse, like I had before the rise of social media and Reddit. I feel like the Fediverse should be a good match here, because it's not designed around the same algorithmic engagement and therefore some of the behaviors shouldn't be as prevalent.
Lemmy was already mentioned, but I have a bookmark for trending in the last 6 hours. But, I think there's still a lot to get charged up about there, at least on the main page. Sometimes I'll also just drink from the fire hose of Mastadon.social's live feed and hope to stumble into something interesting.
Although I believe in the Fediverse, I haven't quite committed to accounts on various platforms yet. However, you may be interested in Pixelfed. Every now and then I'll hit the explore tab on some of the servers and the communities seem a lot more focused on photography and art, which may make for better veg material.
Pixelfed also has a project called Loops, which is meant to be similar to tiktok, but I haven't tried it yet and don't know what the vibe is.
I suspect that some of these communities are small enough, even if you got addicted, you'd run out of content. Nebula sort of feels that way to me, I find it a little hit or miss from day to day so I literally can't spend all my time on there.
I don't think I've found a great source of humor, but maybe I've just turned into a grump.
https://boardgamearena.com/ and go play a simple game against random strangers.
Honestly, for Art browsing I love Pinterest. Their algorithm still actually feeds me the stuff I want and the saving organization is smooth. It has been inundated with AI art lately but they've started to flag it and if it bothers you hopefully you can block it soon.
I love just doomscrolling pinterest and adding different pins to my various boards. I have a specific board that's just for scrolling and adding the most weird, random stuff to give me the dopamine hit.
As you mentioned reddit, I find r/Historymemes sometimes funny and educational.
Definitely keeping an eye on this thread.
Lately I've been getting diminishing returns of dopamine from Reddit, YouTube is always latching onto the wrong things of what I'm interested in, and so I end up just browsing Thingiverse looking for cool projects to 3D print.