#instant messaging

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Catch this!

I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.

Call it "lifehacking," or just call it, "paying attention to how you stay organized" – I don't care what you call it, I am an ardent practitioner of it.

I like improving my processes because I like what I do, and the more efficient I am at all of it (with apologies to Jenny Odell), the more of that stuff I can get done:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/09/how-to-do-nothing-jenny-odells-case-for-resisting-the-attention-economy/

I want to do a lot of stuff. I am one of those people who is ten miles wide and one inch deep (it probably has something to do with imbibing Heinlein's maxim that "specialization is for insects" at an impressionable age). There's a million waterways I want to dip my toe (or my oar) into, and the better organized I am, the more of that stuff I'll get to do before I kick off. I'm 54, and while there's a lot of road ahead of me, I can see the end, off there in the distance. It's coming, and I'm not done – I'm barely getting started.

I've been around lifehacking since the very moment it was born. I was there. I published the notes on Danny O'Brien's seminal 2004 talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks":

https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

In the years since, I've cultivated a small – but mighty – repertoire of organizational habits and tools that let me get a hell of a lot done. Weirdly, many of these tools are things that other people hate, and I can see why – they use them in very different ways from me. That's true of browser tabs (I loooove browser tabs):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/#unfucked-rota

And to-do lists, which will totally transform your life, once you realize that the most important to-do list is the one you maintain for everyone else who owes you a response, a package, or money:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo

Other essential tools languish in neglect, artifacts of the old, good web – the elegant weapons that dominated a more civilized age. First among these? RSS readers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

I will freely stipulate that people have a good reason to hate all this stuff. "Productivity porn" is often proffered as a mix of humblebrag (a way to make other people jealous of your almighty "productivity") and denial (fiddling with your systems is a ready substitute for actually doing things). Many (most?) of the foremost self-appointed pitchmen for "lifehacking" are cringey charlatans peddling "courses" and other nonsense.

But if you keep digging, there's a solid foundation beneath all the rot. At its very best, this stuff is a way to figure out what you really want to do, and to organize your life so that the stuff you want to do is the stuff you're doing.

A lot of people get into this kind of thing thinking it'll let them do everything. No one can do everything. The best you can hope for is to make conscious decisions about which stuff you'll never get to, while leaving at least a little room for serendipity.

Like I said, I want to do a lot of stuff. My organizing tactics are as much about deciding what I won't do as they are about deciding what I will do:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-how-to-do-everything-lifehacking-considered-harmful/

Which brings me to another tool that everyone hates and I love: email. I live and die by email.

First of all, I filter all my incoming email: mail from people who are in my address book stays in my inbox; mail from people I've never heard from before goes into a mailbox called "People I don't know." When I reply to a message, Thunderbird adds the recipient to my address book, so the next time I hear from them, they'll stay in my main mailbox.

I also filter out anything containing the word "unsubscribe," sending it into a folder called "Unlikely" (but not if the message contains my name – which is how I can stay subscribed to mailing lists I don't have time to read and make sure to reply when someone mentions me).

Second of all, I have a zillion Quicktext macros that I use to reply to frequently asked questions. I have one that spits out my mailing address; another that spits out my bio; and others for politely saying no to things I don't have time for, for information about how to pay one of my invoices, etc, etc.

Third: I have a small folder of emails that I can't reply to right away (usually because I need some information from a third party), which I review every morning and answer anything that I can clear.

Finally, I save it all. I have so much saved email, which means that if you ask me about something from 20 years ago, there's a good chance I can find it – provided we organized it over email.

All of which explains why I refuse – to the extent that I can – to do anything important over instant messaging, whether that's Signal or any of the other messaging tools that come with social media, workplace software, etc.

I understand why people like instant messaging: it does not overwhelm you with the burdens of the past. It is largely ahistorical, with archives that are hard to access and search. Its norms and register are less formal than email.

And, of course, instant messaging is far superior to email in some contexts. If you're on vacation with friends, having a big group-chat where you can say, "I'm making dinner – is everyone OK with cheese?" is indispensable. Same goes for asking a friend for directions, announcing that you've arrived at someone's office, or confirming whether it's OK to substitute 2% for whole milk on a grocery run.

But if you're like me – if you've figured out how to do as many of the things that matter to you as you can possibly squeeze in, then getting an IM mid-flow is like someone walking up to a juggler who's working on a live chainsaw, a bowling ball, and a machete and tossing him a watermelon while shouting, "Hey, catch this!"

The problem is that if you are asking about something important, something that can't be instantaneously managed by the recipient, then they will have to drop everything they're doing and, at the very least, make a note to themselves to go back to your message later and deal with it. Instant messaging doesn't have an inbox with everything you've been sent. Of course, that's why people love it. But the fact that you can't see all the things other people are expecting you to answer doesn't mean that they aren't expecting it. It also doesn't mean that everything will be fine if you just ignore all those messages.

Instant messaging is a great tool for managing something that everyone is doing at the same time. It's also a nice way to keep an ambient social flow of updates from people in a rocking groupchat. But IM is fundamentally unserious. It is antithetical to the project of making a conscious decision about what you won't do, so that you do as many of the things that matter to you before you get to the end of the road.

A massive email inbox is intimidating, but switching to IMs doesn't make all the demands in the email go away. It just puts them out of sight until they either expire or explode. Far better to decide what balls you're going to drop than to have them knocked out of your hand by a fast-moving watermelon.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/16/interrupt-driven/#ping

Image: Mark James (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Email_Silk.svg

CC BY 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/deed.en

[psyducksgfx]

For anyone who wants a Discord alternative, I recommend Element. Here is the link to everything on AlternativeTo about Element and here is a link to their website. It's a little clunky, sure, but it has a lot of potential.

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Yahoo! Messenger 4.1 (2001)

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[oldinterneticons]

[amalgamasreal]

On Personal InfoSec

Been awhile since I've had one of these posts but I figure with all that's going on in the world it's time to make another one of these posts and get some stuff out there for people. A lot of the information I'm going to go over you can find here:

Ad-Free Privacy Tool/Service Recommendations - Privacy Guides

A complete list of the privacy tools, services, software, and hardware recommended by the Privacy Guides community.

So if you'd like to just click the link and ignore the rest of the post that's fine, I strongly recommend checking out the Privacy Guides.

Browsers:

There's a number to go with but for this post going forward I'm going to recommend Firefox. I know that the Privacy Guides lists Brave and Safari as possible options but Brave is Chrome based now and Safari has ties to Apple. Mullvad is also an option but that's for your more experienced users so I'll leave that up to them to work out.

Browser Extensions:

uBlock Origin: content blocker that blocks ads, trackers, and fingerprinting scripts. Notable for being the only ad blocker that still works on Youtube.

Privacy Badger: Content blocker that specifically blocks trackers and fingerprinting scripts. This one will catch things that uBlock doesn't catch but does not work for ads.

Facebook Container: "but I don't have facebook" you might say. Doesn't matter, Meta/Facebook still has trackers out there in EVERYTHING and this containerizes them off away from everything else.

Bitwarden: Password vaulting software, don't trust the password saving features of your browsers, this has multiple layers of security to prevent your passwords from being stolen.

ClearURLs: Allows you to copy and paste URL's without any trackers attached to them.

VPN:

Note: VPN software doesn't make you anonymous, no matter what your favorite youtuber tells you, but it does make it harder for your data to be tracked and it makes it less open for whatever network you're presently connected to.

Mozilla VPN: If you get the annual subscription it's ~$60/year and it comes with an extension that you can install into Firefox.

Proton VPN: Has easily the most amount of countries serviced, can take cash payments, and does offer port forwarding.

Email Provider:

Note: By now you've probably realized that Gmail, Outlook, and basically all of the major "free" e-mail service providers are scraping your e-mail data to use for ad data. There are more secure services that can get you away from that but if you'd like the same storage levels you have on Gmail/Outlook.com you'll need to pay.

Proton Mail: Secure, end-to-end encrypted, and fairly easy to setup and use. Offers a free option up to 1gb

Tuta: Secure, end-to-end encrypted, been around a very long time, and offers a free option up to 1gb.

Email Client:

Thunderbird if you're on Windows or Linux

Apple Mail if you're on macOS

Cloud Storage:

Proton Drive: Encrypted cloud storage from the same people as Proton Mail.

Tresorit: Encrypted cloud storage owned by the national postal service of Switzerland. Received MULTIPLE awards for their security stats.

Peergos: decentralized and open-source, allows for you to set up your own cloud storage, but will require a certain level of expertise.

Microsoft Office Replacements:

LibreOffice: free and open-source, updates regularly, and has the majority of the same functions as base level Microsoft Office.

OnlyOffice: cloud-based, free, and open source.

Chat Clients:

Note: As you've heard SMS and even WhatsApp and some other popular chat clients are basically open season right now. These are a couple of options to replace those.

Signal: Provides IM and calling securely and encrypted, has multiple layers of data hardening to prevent intrusion and exfil of data.

Molly (Android OS only): Alternative client to Signal. Routes communications through the TOR Network.

Briar: Encrypted IM client that connects to other clients through the TOR Network, can also chat via wifi or bluetooth.

Now for the last bit, I know that the majority of people are on Windows or macOS, but if you can get on Linux I would strongly recommend it. pop_OS, Ubuntu, and Mint are super easy distros to use and install. They all have very easy to follow instructions on how to install them on your PC and if you'd like to just test them out all you need is a thumb drive to boot off of to run in demo mode.

If you game through Steam their Proton emulator in compatibility mode works wonders, I'm presently playing a major studio game that released in 2024 with no Linux support on it and once I got my drivers installed it's looked great. There are some learning curves to get around, but the benefit of the Linux community is that there's always people out there willing to help.

I hope some of this information helps you and look out for yourself, it's starting to look scarier than normal out there.

[icqmuseum24]

📞💔 To our great regret, following in the footsteps of Russia’s VK Group and its quiet farewell to ICQ, Microsoft has now officially shut down Skype — a true legend of the 2000s internet era. What once defined how we connected, called, and chatted across the globe has been silenced… not by users, but by boardroom decisions.

💻 Skype wasn't just software — it was a cultural milestone. It brought faces to voices, bridged continents in seconds, and made "Skyping" a verb in dozens of languages. Its shutdown is not just sad — it's irreplaceable. Another digital monument lost to corporate fatigue.

📉 This only proves one thing: well-paid marketers and project managers have repeatedly failed to breathe new life into legacy platforms. Instead of adapting tradition to modern times, they let icons wither. And for what? Another feature-bloated app with no soul?

🌐 But we haven’t lost hope. If Winamp can rise from the ashes, why not Skype? Why not AIM? Why not ICQ? Maybe, just maybe, it won’t be Microsoft or VK who lead the resurrection — maybe it’ll be an indie developer or a bold startup that understands nostalgia can be modern.

👀 Paging Yahoo Inc. and AOL… We’re waiting.