how i stay connected as a digital minimalist

12 Jun, 2026

When Juni announced her carnival topic, a lot of us in Simple Chats were excited. It’s a Bearblog classic, though it being a carnival topic promised lots of fun insight into how people deal with it. Naturally as someone who’d call himself a luddite (in the original sense: one who is critical of „tech“ and „progress“), I knew I wouldn’t skip this carnival. I began blogging, like many others, because I wanted to nuke a lot of my accounts, among them social media accounts, and it just so happened that I had just read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. It wasn’t the book that made me go ahead with it because I was already determined to go through with what I had in mind by the time I got the file loaded onto my phone. If you’re curious about the topic, don’t waste time reading that book or any self-help in general. Spark Notes or the equivalent are more than enough for those. Anyway!

I have no social media accounts and don’t use YouTube directly. My RSS reader shows me that I follow 55 feeds which is a bit inflated as I separate people’s status from their regular post feeds. Of those, 26 are blogs, 7 are YouTube channels and 1 is a podcast. I also follow various project-focused blogs to keep up with them. The YouTube channels either post video essays (the majority) or something akin to a podcast (the minority). They cover topics I care about like social media trends, meme culture, political insanities, film, fashion, beauty or music. Sometimes it’s all of that in one video because they intersect a lot, so I would say I’m very well fed. I don’t need to know about every minuscule thing that’s happening in my niche(s) and I’m more than happy letting someone else sit through it to report back to me and others. That’s basically the whole premise of reading ‘20s Naomi Klein after all.¹

For browsing, I occasionally browse the Bearblog feed and one Reddit community to keep in touch with the funny parts of pop culture. If you dropped a bomb on r/popheadscirclejerk HQ, it would be a terror attack and a hate crime. You’ll figure out the hate crime part 5 minutes into your time on there. In terms of the broader pop culture, I also get a lot shared with me by my friends, even down to tour dates and album releases. I just don’t mind missing out on either, if I’m being honest, because I can’t be arsed to succumb to the competitiveness of hunting tickets. If it happens, it happens. As for album releases, there’s no rush. I can listen to an album now or in five years—it would be the same. Anyway, aside from that, I occasionally browse the Privacy Guides community for some news/privacy invasions. I get the rest from Ava, my trustworthy AI news aggregator that masquerades as a human.² She simply knows what I like, has access to my mind and sends me stuff I would freak about together with her. For less techy, more electoral-democratic news, I occasionally check local newspaper websites to see what’s going on. For other topics that interest me, I look for papers that dive deeper into them or, what I usually do, a book; You can be almost sure that someone would’ve written at least a paper about your interest, if not even a book.

While posting isn’t directly relevant to the question asked, I still consider the ability to share stuff a core part of social media that digital minimalism excludes unless necessary for one’s profession. While I agree with that, I still need an informal, non-binding place to share things to only familiar people, something I can’t do via a blog. That function is handled for a lot of us at Simple Chats via private Matrix rooms that we manage ourselves and only we individually can text in. They’re functionally a private Twitter feed where single messages can be linked back to from the regular chat rooms for further discussion if need be.

That’s all from my digital minimalism and I hope I answered the prompt dutifully.

#event