I was introduced to Free Software around 2019. I was curious when I saw my brother using an obscure website “DuckDuckGo” instead of Google for his searches. I naturally looked it up and the thing that got my attention was the word “filter bubble”. Unlike the other words that were used on their homepage, such as “privacy” and “safe”, “filter bubble” didn’t bring any meaning to my mind. I searched for it on YouTube and found a 9 minute Ted Talk by Eli Pariser. It was amazing. I soon gave up Google.

Then after around a year I picked up a random book from my library when I was super bored during the lockdown. It was Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, which was (of course) bought by my brother a few years ago. I soon picked up an interest in privacy and free software. I first started with deleting (or disabling) all of the Google apps on my mother’s phone. A few years later I suddenly found myself contributing translations to various free apps. A few months after that I was writing articles and removing vandalism (which was usually related to caste) on Hindi Wikipedia. Finally I got stuck on OpenStreetMap; nowadays most of contributions go there. However, I go back to my old projects once in a while.

The impact of that video by Eli Pariser in promoting my interest in Free Software cannot be overstated. It even (kind of?) nudged me towards pursuing further studies in Economics. I wonder what would have happened if I haven’t seen that video: would I have become like my friends, who seem indifferent to even the most extreme violations of privacy?

Anyway, coming back to filter bubbles: switching to things like Newpipe and DuckDuckGo definitely improved my status in terms of breaking out of my bubble. However, recently I have noticed a sort of new bubble that has been forming around me. Though there are various things that constitute this bubble, Mastodon seems to be the most visible one.

I like Mastodon, and it’s definitely an improvement over traditional microblogging websites which were controlled by corporations. However the feed that I am seeing nowadays seems to talk only about a narrow set of topics.

Currently I am following 14 out of the 20 Mastodon users from Delhi. Out of those 14, only 5 are active enough to populate my feed with their boosts. Those 5 people (namely Sahilster, Kishy, Contrapunctus, Disaster2Life, and Ravi) usually talk about and boost stuff related to their niche. So, Sahilster talks about the new sexy IPv4 address in town, Disaster2Life is keen on enbies and Delhi Transport Corporation buses with smooth metallic bodies, Ravi is worried about his visa, Contrapunctus wants to start a rebellion against our AI overlords, and Kishy is… doing something.

Now I am totally fine with reading about gender rebels and the official procedure to get a travel visa to Luxembourg. But once in a while I want to talk about something other than these topics. However this becomes very difficult on Mastodon. For starters, searching or using tags wouldn’t suffice since they would be biased towards my point of view. On the other hand, the trending page on my server en.osm.town looks like this:

Aah well that didn’t work. Maybe I should check the Live Feed instead.

Nope. The server is the real problem. I am going to mastodon.social since that is more popular…

Hmm… The first post is about mobility, and the second one is about IoT. Not bad but I would like something which is not very popular… but urgh. It’s not filtering out non-english-and-hindi stuff because I am from en.osm.town. Wait, is there a way to see the live feed of mastodon.social from en.osm.towm? DucksDucksGoes. Oh I missed that! Checks. Stares

I have sex with my wife almost every day!

Almost on Monday, almost on Tuesday, almost on Wednesday…

― DocAtCDI, mastodon.social

Breathes. Exhales.

Well, breaking out of your filter bubble wasn’t supposed to be easy. I guess I can just see some random videos on Newpi-

PS: In conclusion, 5 people are not enough to satisfy 1 young man.