What if I stop browsing the web?

Browsing the web sucks these days. Wait! I’m not about to go on some nostalgia trip. It was pretty bad in the early days too. Take a wrong turn and you’d find your screen filled with infinite JavaScript popups. At least those are gone now.

Now there’s a few problems as I see it. First, there’s just so much AI slop that it’s impossible to avoid. Frequently I’ll search for something and find that the first result is completely AI generated. This isn’t an anti-AI rant either, but this low effort, low quality garbage makes me sick. Next there’s the cookie popups, paywalls and ads. OK, ads you can still kind of solve with browser plugins or DNS blacklists, but it’s not the best. Then there’s the fact that so much of the web is centralised and controlled by tech megacorps and their walled gardens, with two main goals: to keep you on their site and to track you, and they’ll employ all kinds of dark patterns to do this.

And it doesn’t stop there. The web browsers themselves are awful too. Dominated by the same tech megacorps to either reduce your ability to avoid tracking, or to pump in as much generative AI as possible, they’re getting worse and worse.

So what I’ve been doing, for quite a while, is to try to be more intentional about my internet use. Do what I want to do instead of having my behaviour influenced by infinite feeds dictated by algorithms. I do this mostly by avoiding the worst offenders and limiting my use to a few known sites, like Wikipedia and Mastodon. And by reading what interests me through my own feed reader (Miniflux) instead. Using RSS feeds, I can mostly avoid having to actually visit the source, so it’s already like avoiding having to browse the web. This works quite well.

But there’s still the issue of having to use web browsers, and usually being on my phone when I’m doing it, which results in more distraction and screen time than I’d like.

So I had a thought: can I just stop using web browsers altogether? Of course not really - there’s many things I still need it for, like work, banking and other stuff. But there is an alternative to the web that’s kind of interesting: Project Gemini.

We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader’s privacy, attention and bandwidth.

It’s like a very minimal version of the web, with its own browser software and very simple ways for people to publish their own content. The FAQ is a very long read but an excellent explanation of what it’s trying to do. If you just want to browse, you can try the Smolnet Portal which makes Gemini and other web alternatives available through an ordinary web browser.

I even have my own ‘capsule’ at gemini://gmi.mike.sg/ (opens with the above portal), although there’s nothing there yet.

Since the protocol is so simple, I made my own personal proxy for it, similar to the portal above. But another cool thing is that since Gemini is all about reading, it’s a perfect match for e-readers like the Kindle. And the Kindle actually has a built-in web browser. Ironically, it’s not very useful for browsing the web, but it’s perfect when using a Gemini portal! So, the proxy I made is optimised for viewing on my Kindle.

I realised that my Miniflux feed also works quite well on Kindle. So now that I’ve bookmarked my Gemini portal and my Miniflux feed, I can do a lot of ‘browsing’ (or whatever it’s called now) through my Kindle, without using the ‘real’ web or web browser, and without using my phone. Gemini even has a mirror of Wikipedia called Gemipedia, so that’s covered too.

I haven’t really explored Gemini yet, but I’m going to try to make my Kindle my main device for a while and limit myself to only browsing Gemini and my Miniflux feed. Let’s see what it’s like!