hey all - if you’ve been in the discord for the past few weeks you’ve might have heard me talking about working on a “social media escape” guide. that guide is done* now, and it’s called unplatform.
the site is divided into three parts:
- the guide itself, which walks the user through a little bit of political education (i.e. what’s the indie web? how do i interface with it? what is going to be different about my relationship to it compared to The Platforms, etc.) and then explains how to replace the various legitimate use-cases for social media (socializing, local events, personal expression, news) one-by-one.
- the database, which is a massive catalog of recommendations for just about any website that can help with “unplatforming” people. the guide uses subsets of this database for its various pages, but the database page itself has every single recommendation available and organizable using different filters.
- the library, which is definitely the most incomplete section at the moment. i intend to include links, articles, books, and podcasts (including one from our own @starbreaker) about the history of the web, how social media came to conquer it, and what to do about it. at present it includes literally only the articles i had in my bookmarks at the time of publishing, but in the coming weeks i plan to expand it much further.
the idea of this whole thing is simple: a friend of yours asks “how do i get off social media,” and ideally you should be able to just send them the link to unplatform with no additional context and let them go wild.
whether this is actually the case or not is what i’m trying to evaluate. i’ve been very close to the metal in regards to digital history and anthropology recently, and i’ve been off The Platforms™️ so long i worry i’ve lost perspective for the average person’s level of technical ability and historical literacy. this is why i wanted to share the guide here before i started actually giving it to my IRL friends / newsletter readers / yt subscribers.
in particular, i’m worried about several things:
- i want the guide to be brutally honest about how awful web 2.0 has become, because i think it’s really important for people to understand just how socially destructive their presence on those platforms is for them and their communities. with that said, i don’t want to guilt trip anybody to the point where they totally disengage. that’s a tough tightrope to walk, and as a gruff individual myself i worry i might err on the “brutal” side of honesty a little too much - perhaps you all can let me know if i have.
- i have tried my best to categorize the recommendations in the database by the level of tech literacy needed to interface with them. in the guide, i lay out five different levels of tech literacy based on approximate indexes of skill (“i can use a web browser”, “i know what a .zip file is”, “i know what %appdata% does”, “i have written code”, “i’m an actual programmer”). those were the most meaningful indexes i could come up with, but maybe you know of better ones.
- additionally, i tried my best to rate the complexity of each recommendation accurately, but, again, i’m way too close to the metal to know if i was successful. if you see a database entry and think “that complexity rating is totally off,” i’d like to know.
- finally, i want to be sure that the guide could meaningfully “unplatform” someone. even if it doesn’t get them to the point where they can press “delete account” on X / insta / whatever, i want every single person to walk away with at least a few significant improvements to their digital life.
sorry about the huge wall of text for the thing that’s supposed to require no additional context - i was rushing to get a complete draft done before i have to get back to doing some real work on the 27th. as always, “if i had more time i would have written a shorter letter,” but i’m glad i can finally share this with you all, and i welcome any and all feedback you have on it.