My feelings go up and down, as they have for all human beings throughout history.

However, they trend down especially when I spend a lot of time on social media or news sites, including HN.

To put it another way:

Emotional state without "the internet" = varying around a general background of contentment.

Emotional state with "the internet" = varying around a general background of discontentment.

This is unrelated to current political events, which I view as an overcorrection to the state of unhealthy and extreme political correctness that we were falling into a few years ago (wokeness).

Now the pendulum is swinging the other way, towards an unhealthy and extreme focus on race and social differences, glorifying in political incorrectness (anti-woke).

It'll swing back again in a few years. Just how far it will go before then is impossible to say, but it's not something I can control and therefore shouldn't affect whether I enjoy life, since I'm lucky enough to not be directly affected, for the most part.

But if I go on the internet for hours every day and focus on it, it surely will make me feel terrible!

On the other hand, I want to stay informed and connected. Some amount of discomfort is acceptable to accomplish that. The trick is mindful use of the internet, and I'm afraid I don't always succeed there, when I have a distraction machine in my pocket all the time.

Happy Nextcloud Memories user here. It does everything that Google Photos does (the good parts). The Nextcloud server is running on Hetzner, with Wasabi block storage. There's an Android app. I can make albums, edit photos, edit metadata, view RAW files, videos, etc.

It can geotag, you can install the separate Recognize app to have a local model recognize faces, which it does quite well.

I can also, if I wish, just look at the files.

Good advice if you can do it, but this isn't possible for most people, for example if you're renting or you're in an apartment.

Firefox on Ubuntu here. I switched over the past couple of months from using Chrome on Windows.

I see exactly the same amount of security checks, as far as I can tell.