| HN Mirror

I have a plan for this, and it involves scraping content and using the web that way. This is something I have started work on, on a small scale for the stuff I care about the most.

Ideally (well ideally really, companies themselves would provide APIs for accessing the content but unfortunately that makes it difficult for them to make money, both directly through loss of ad revenue when clients don’t show their ads and indirectly by making it easier to pirate stuff), we’d have a joint open effort to do this on a massive scale. For now I am doing it on a small scale on my own, writing tools for my own use only.

In addition to this I have also started work on retrieving the content that is walled off in apps that I use. For example, there are some magazines that I used to subscribe to for a while, and I’d rather be able to keep my access to the content indefinitely than to see it disappear whenever the publisher decides that the magazine has run its course and subsequently stops updating the app and then shuts down the servers that host the data.

On top of this, I have for a longer period of time (years now) been using for example Facebook as little as possible. I only use it for Messenger and for upcoming events mostly. Meanwhile, Instagram also owned by Facebook is worth it for me to continue to use much more actively for now. But I am also slowly working to make something of my own to host content that I myself produce, with the intent of continuing to consume content shared on Instagram but to cut back on posting to Instagram and instead to post my stuff on my own server. It’s not like any of my stuff gets much attention anyways, so for me it will not be a big difference in terms of engagement. Mostly the way I use Instagram in terms of the content that I myself post, is that I post pictures and videos that I have made that I think are worth sharing and then when in conversation with friends and aquaintances I sometimes pull up my phone to show them in person something that I did or made recently. A self-hosted service could serve the same purpose.

As for the increasingly slow experience of browsing the web, I come to realize that this might in fact contribute to what the parent to yours said, about people on HN not reading the linked article. At least, for myself I find that I often don’t click through to the linked articles, and I think the experience of slow-scrolling, megabytes heavy pages is contributing to this. I try, however, to not comment on the story itself unless I have read it first. Meanwhile, HN itself is lightweight and comfortable to be on. And often the comments will encourage one to click through to the linked story if it is worth reading, either directly stating that it is worth reading or indirectly stating it by quoting something good from the page or talking about some good data points or novel information from the linked page. (Novel to me, I should note.)