WhatsApp has little to do with doomscrolling. I really wish I could afford to not use it, but it seems to be impossible.

Scenario 1: video calls

I live abroad. The family, including a 80+ grandmother, has Androids, iPhones, computers. If I were to run something, maintenance would be limited to a few times per year, and I couldn't be there when they get a new device. Besides, remote support on android is virtually impossible.

I'm a veteran sysadmin and I have an XMPP ecosystem working with video calls & all, but that is not common. It needs a secured TURN/STUN server beyond a well configured XMPP one, DNS service entries, etc. For someone less experienced I can clearly see that being a nightmare.

Scenario 2: mailing lists

I'd absolutely run to communicate with the group of people I run classes for on mailing lists, except mailing lists are essentially dead since DKIM/DMARC. DKIMv2 might address this, but if you ask people, especially young ones, they'll look at you as if you're from Mars.

Summary

I'd absolutely love to have a non-profit, cross-platform video call app that comes pre-installed everywhere, just as the phone (aka voice) "app" is there, but there's zero incentive from the current ecosystem for such thing. I'm aware of carrier-level video calls, but I seriously doubt it's used a lot.

I think the algorithmic feeds and attention economy are pretty corrosive, but going retro is only one way to resolve that issue. Primarily, I think it's better to find a smaller community that you can feel connected to, and this is a general trend but someone that's relatively invisible by its own nature. Whether this is a whatsapp group chat, a small discord server, an IRC chatroom, gopher, webrings and email, or just meeting people face-to-face doesn't matter so much (at least as far as mental health effects go: YMMV on other issues like privacy/censorship/etc as well as who else is using the protocol/platform).

I tend to agree, actually I recently blogged[0] about something related but more in general I think it's totally doable to have a sane and very enjoyable digital life today too, perhaps even more than in the past, but it takes effort, of course, like everything valuable in life usually does.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50015169

I do agree that spending time outside of the current internet field of distortion is quite pleasurable. I'm still dumbfounded how we pivoted from an ok-old-world with a bit of cyberspace fun to dopamine altering doomscrolling.

> most of the ADHD generation with depressions, self-identification problems that we see today is exactly because tech made them this way..

Are you suggesting ADHD is something you can "get"?

We are so many steps deeper in. It is now a (payed) privilege of you have the affordance to not be totally connected and the other stuff you mentioned. Currently in a place that is very sobering in that sense.

ADHD is not because social media, it's as ancient as humanity. ADHD is genetic and heritable. Do not confuse natural selected features with the effects of modern technology.

> I don't have Whatsapp, if you want to call me you should afford to call me without making Zuck richer at your own cost

I still don't get how whatsapp makes any money from me. I do know that if I phone someone on my phone the connection is terrible, if I make a voice call on whatsapp it's a far better quality.

> I personally miss times when netiquette (the one that emerged from early UNIX and USENET communities) was still the thing in the net.

Eternal September, the gift that keeps on giving

Kindles are great

And yet here you are on HN.

I've become stuck in a strange metaphor regarding this: Gopher, Gemini etc are like an indicator of "biodiversity". Like a species living happily inside a small, even tiny ecological niche, having discovered that they don't really need much more.

Small protocols don't (?) disturb the mainstream internet in any meaningful way, but they simply deserve an opportunity to "be". They'll never be "big" these days (or, maybe in the scifi-scenario of complete societal collapse?). The content might, indeed, be a from-geek-to-geek thing these days, but they're a lovely sign of cultural richness, different thinking patterns etc.

That's one big issue, but I feel like the even bigger one is that neither of them fixes what's wrong with HTTP: Publishing is not a first-class citizen on the net.

As long as you need to rent servers and domain names all those alternatives are a waste of time, as they are just repeating all the missteps from HTTP. We need an alternative where you can type some text, hit publish and have it appear on the net with zero friction and in a way that isn't tied to a single third party. Publishing a site needs to be as easy as browsing one.

So far Nostr it's the only thing that gets close at the protocol level, but still lacks a good client.

I usually check in on gemini://antenna.michaelnordmeyer.com/ and think the content is a bit broader than you suggest. Recent posts cover topics like OpenBSD, Disney movies, Arch Linux, UK local radio, socks, books, and so on. Yes, there are a number of posts about Gemini, too, but it's a minority.

I feel the same about Gander (the Canadian Bluesky-compatible startup). The only content on it is people talking about how it's not Twitter. One of my top three beefs with it.

What are you missing? Just write a bot that pulls interesting content into gopher, and start filling it. Since the protocol is so easy, nothing could be easier.

gopher://sdf.org and gopher://magical.fish have far more than retro-onanism.

Maybe they are passionate about themselves??

The content split is what keeps me from staying. Once you leave the two or three hosts everyone names, it is hard to tell a technical phlog from another post about the protocol itself. Do you keep a short list of non-meta phlogs, or is it mostly hopping between known hosts?

Why exSDF member? Your account is surely still there waiting for you!

Gemini is essentially GopherS, Reticulum doesn't seem to operate at the same level (it is L3, like IP, from the look of it).

I hold the controversial opinion that encryption can be an anti-feature on the "small web". One of the reason is technical: encryption takes computing resources, and can hardly be made time proof, as it has to evolve in response to threats, and certificates tend to have expiration dates. The other is more philosophical: you use encryption when you want to share secrets: personal data, passwords, credit card numbers, etc... A system that doesn't support encryption doesn't support transfer of personal data, accounts or commercial transactions, which I believe is a good thing in this niche. There is no shortage of secure communication systems when you need one, let that niche stay a niche.

Gemini it's good on legacy machines and some clients can be really barebones (awk+less), and for some security there are clients written in Go. For awk+less, do yourself a favour. Run

    unset LESSOPEN 

Reticulum it's unusable in 32 bit machines, it badly needs a Go port for nomadnet.

On Gopher, well, lynx/sacc and maybe i2pd for some security and anonimity.

As a start, there's:

     gopher://magical.fish
     gopher://sdf.org

     gemini://gemi.dev it's nice.

You can set an HTTPS proxy for it and read news sites and blogs over Gemini.

Just set

     stargate.gemi.dev:1994

For the terminal guys, there's Telescope and it can use HTTP proxies as well. Read the man page.

Time to stop posting about these, there’s no rush for them to have their Eternal September moment. Let us enjoy the good vibes for a while longer.

Gemini is fine with fixed-width. See the Lagrange client: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/

Gopher is plain text and can actually look surprisingly attractive. If you're getting CSS, you're viewing it through a web proxy.

HTML and CSS describe how a document should look like. Afaik with Gemini/Gopher it is entirely up to the client how it should be rendered.

Same applies to HTTP too though