unplatform: the social media escape guide

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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Just had a look, and it looks good so far, but I’m surprised you don’t have Dreamwidth in your DB. It was created by former LiveJournal operators, if memory serves.

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Feel free to grab all the links I have collected here Blog Platforms – Manu

You’re building something way broader and these are all blog platforms but maybe are still useful content for your guide.

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this is a wonderful project!

technical notes:
having some trouble navigating the guide! the first time i tried going through it, the “next” and “previous” buttons all lead to “/guide/NaN” on every part. it worked fine after i closed the tab and opened it again, though?

hovering over one of the rss readers makes a bunch of stuff in there disappear!

this happens in the “events” and “news” section as well with the similar scrolling box.
also, the dropdowns in these boxes behave weirdly! all blank, i can only see the text when i mouse over;

i’m using firefox on my windows 10 computer & have a mishmash of browser extensions installed, though, so one of those might be causing troubles, but figured i’d note it.

content notes:

i think the tone is definitely on the cantankerous side, but not too brutal/guilt-trippy! i do think if the goal is to be persuasive then it would be good to include a lot more thorough sourcing for claims/information, but i also am someone who checks the sources on things & many people do not care about that haha. not a huge issue.

it comes off as a bit dismissive of people who rely on social media for income, but since that’s not the target audience & that audience needs a different set of resources/tools/information from somebody who just casually uses social media that is also not a huge issue.

bluesky is a big platform that has rss feed support, so you can add that to your list along with tumblr etc! it’s getting a lot of traction lately so i think that is useful for people to know.

kind of a big can of worms to open, so i understand if that’s outside the scope, but i think it would be good in the news section to direct people towards information about media bias & factchecking - it’s a pretty major thing that can improve people’s digital lives, especially with regards to following the news. i can drum up some links for you if you’d like - poynter has some great media literacy tools for a start.

a greater variety of news sources in general would be great, since a narrow news diet is not much better than a narrow social media die - i’d be happy to send some suggestions but don’t want to spam when you’re still getting stuff set up haha!

overall i think it’s a great guide and probably really useful! giving people stuff to subscribe to with rss feeds and websites they can look at is a great way to help them get started, and the complexity variable is a nice touch i think.

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some day 1 changes / responses:

first off, thanks so much for the extra recs (@starbreaker and @manuelmoreale) - when i get time in the coming weeks i’ll make sure to add them.

followups for @xixxii:

having some trouble navigating the guide! the first time i tried going through it, the “next” and “previous” buttons all lead to “/guide/NaN” on every part. it worked fine after i closed the tab and opened it again, though?

that’s because i fixed it probably as you were typing this post lmao - some kind folks in the discord also let me know about this one.

hovering over one of the rss readers makes a bunch of stuff in there disappear!

should have fixed this as well - was a bug that only showed up on windows firefox. shoutout to my gf for letting me test on her computer.

i did remove large sections today (particularly in the news and “setting expectations” section) for too much editorializing, but i’d like to know what claims in particular seemed dubious to you.

noted! added bluesky to that particular list in the RSS section (though i’m still against adding it to the recommendations database itself)

unfortunately that is probably too big a can of worms to open for this guide in particular. there are already definitely publications in the news section that i am not exactly fond of, but i tried my best to put my personal feelings about each publication aside and try to just pick ones that folks in the target audience would probably already have heard of. open to suggestions for more, though (i added 404 media and the intercept in the latest update).

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ajazz this is so sick!! I absolutely love the interactivity and im definitely going to try sharing this with some of my friends ^^ thank you so much for making such a thorough guide

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not dubious, just unsourced assertions that are more convincing with sources!

a little long since there's a couple blockquotes!

the price of that convenience is both control over your digital identity, and the products of your digital labor. To be a user of these platforms is to be a digital sharecropper, creating content and viewing ads for the direct financial benefit of the richest and most powerful people in the world — in the hope that they occasionally toss you a few scraps in the form of exposure or information.

the digital sharecropper link links to another opinion piece! this makes it seem like an opinion rather than a series of measurable facts; linking an article or two about digital identity/selling of data, even if it’s just a news article about one of the 1000000 times facebook has been taken to court for privacy breaches!

i would probably link it up like this, approximately;

the price of that convenience is both control over your digital identity, and the products of your digital labor.. To be a user of these platforms is to be a digital sharecropper, creating content and viewing ads for the direct financial benefit of the richest and most powerful people in the world

something like that; i’m sure there’s more robust breakdowns of various elements. just an example!

even if “facebook is stealing your data” etc is something that “everybody knows” it is good to make it clear that your position is reasoned & grounded in reality, remind people of information that they already know (and reasons they have probably thought about leaving social media before) to put you on the same page, and reinforce that there are a lot of good reasons to leave social media which are recognized by ordinary people on a regular basis!

in my anecdotal experience from being on tumblr, people tend to believe posts that have citation links even if you click on the links and they are jokes/rickrolls/etc; the simple presence of a citation/source lends something a bit more argumentative weight lol.

So much of the social dysfunction of Web 2.0 is driven by the way that the platforms reward “engagement,” which in turn rewards rage bait. They want you to be furious at that stupid post that came on your timeline so that you spend the next hour brawling in the replies — for them, each meaningless battle or “discourse” flash point is more eyeballs on the screen, which in turn means more advertising dollars for them.

another point which is measurable fact that sounds like an opinion when unsourced! there’s been lots of things written about this since it is the main engine behind clickbait/ragebait/etc, so i think it’s a good thing to provide sources for it - it’s another instance of something people are already vaguely more or less aware of and it is useful to ground the piece.

Nobody will ever be able to lock you in a “walled garden” ever again.

here it would be helpful to link to a blog post or whatever explaining what that means like you did with “digital sharecropper”! people use the phrase “walled garden” a lot in indie web spaces and it’s not always super clear what they mean by that or why they use it so much. (i think it’s a silly phrase but that’s besides the point LOL)

With that said, it will mean that the people who find your work will be much more likely to actually care about it, because they’ll be encountering it through trusted recommendations or intentional exploration.

linking to some examples of people whose work is finding an audience without social media, people talking about finding success on the indie web, or something along those lines here would strengthen the point considerably i think! especially since this is a very significant sticking point for a lot of people on which they need convincing.

glad the tech issues are already fixed!! those were the only troubles i had!

an assortment of some news sites!

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Great guide, thank you. Just sent it to a bunch of my “fence-sitter” friends.

This is a total pot shot, but has anyone else found that monospace fonts (especially when combined with a dark theme) tend to intimidate people who don’t consider themselves super tech literate? It says something like “I am a geek and care about geeky things” rather than “I need the internet for the same things you do” which is where the guide is trying to go.

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It’s a pity that there is no elpis.ws zine there, I hope it will appear there, even though it comes out once a month :smile:

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Hi there!

I looked up the list you have going, and I think I didn’t see the following suggestions there (but I might be wrong, I have ADHD and am unmedicated lol):

  • LibraryThing: despite having an “automatic” suggestions list, they also have a “readers suggestions” featured in your home page. It’s more focused in calatoguing personal libraries and reviews, though you can add people. The social network aspect is secondary.
  • Listography: desktop-only social “network” where you don’t see who follow you or how many followers you have, you only see the list of accounts you follow. Made for, well, making lists. I also use as a way of sharing cool bookmarks.
  • StoryGraph: It’s Goodreads without Amazon’s algorithm, it has a paid version but the free one works just fine.
  • Bookshelf.town: a minimalistic, indie book tracking website where you can add your friends too.

Also, my other suggestion would be “simplifying” the text for the lay person, maybe have a specific page to direct those who “barely know how to open a browser”. The RSS section has a lot of technical words that can intimidate your average Joe.

I say this bc I think of the people around me who, to be quite frank, only access the internet via their phones. For them, bookmarking for example, is virtually impossible (over 80% of the people in my country use Android, not Apple, so Safari is kinda out of the question), and computer literacy is, well, zero.

I know a guide like this can just go so far, and I think the job you are doing in quite amazing, but it’s this kind of disparate access that bums me out when we talk about letting go of social media platforms.

Anyways, I’d also like to volunteer to translate the guide to Brazilian Portuguese down the road, if you think that’d be interesting for the project. Well, maybe do a localized translation, bc some stuff really doesn’t apply to our reality and/or only works for English speakers.

Toodles!

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@folkmoss, aren’t there bookmarking apps for Android? Has Instapaper gone to Hell, for example?

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Oh wow! Instapaper still exists! I’m really out of the loop, jfc ;_;

FeedFlow nice app - i use it )

hey! thanks for the submissions. a few notes:

didn’t add this one because it has this baffling gmail-only requirement? i have never seen anything like this before, but the last thing i’d want the guide to do is increase gmail usage

i did add all the other book site suggestions. i literally got a question IRL about goodreads alternatives yesterday, so you came in clutch with these.

i do want to be sensitive to international concerns - but as far as i’m aware every mainstream mobile browser supports bookmarks on all platforms. just in case, i added additional links to bookmark guides for the ios and android versions of chrome, firefox, and safari. if there are other considerations there that i’m missing, please let me know.

it might, but i can’t tell exactly what you’re talking about because i’m simply too webdev-brained. are you talking about the text of the guide itself or the database entries? for the entries, i tried to tailor the descriptions to the complexity level of every individual entry (and folks who selected the lowest literacy level shouldn’t be able to see anything more complex than level 1), but if there’s some that still seem too advanced, let me know. i wrote a <Buzzword> component that lets me easily attach definitions to difficult technical terms, so if there’s a specific word you had in mind i could have it fixed up fast.

i may take you up on this in the coming months!

you’re probably right about this - i’ll be honest, i didn’t really consider the design of the site beyond “i want it to match from the superhighway.”

as it stands i don’t have the time to do a full redesign (it’d have to be more than fonts, probably) - but if your fence-sitter friends are turned off by the look of things, please let me know.

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posted this on our bsky!

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I was telling my boyfriend about this and he had me send the link over! He’s not a huge social media user anyway, mostly facebook and reddit, but I think it’s a really easy and visually appealing place to start for people who are unfamiliar with all this. I’m definitely interested in seeing how this develops in the future.

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I love this project and already have some ppl in mind who may like it :eyes:

I’d love to translate it to swedish! Maybe not the most useful considering most swedes who use the internet are somewhat good at english, but hey, maybe it’d help someone!

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I just looked through the site, and I like it a lot so far!!! Absolutely going to be adding this one to my Hoard.

I only really have two notes:

  1. The bigger thing, I do think it could benefit from a light mode whenever you have time to code that in. I had to turn off all the lights in my room to be able to read the page and I know I’m not the only one with funny vision quirks like that.
  2. This is a complete nitpick, just something I noticed. Neocities doesn’t have RSS feeds in the same way as you’ve presented them in the guide. The built-in RSS feed cannot be customized by users and only informs people of when a site was updated (and which pages too, I beleive). If you want a RSS feed for a blog, like what you talk about here, then you have to make it manually. Again, a nitpick, and splitting hairs. But worth mentioning IMO.

I do want to reiterate that this is really good so far. I can’t wait to see how it keeps improving over the coming months :>

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you’re right about this - i’ll add that as an issue on the github.

i’m aware of this dynamic, and I went back and forth about whether i should count that. what i decided was that a lot of neocities websites are not “blogs” per se, but they’re more like interactive digital galleries that folks might want updates on even if there isn’t explicitly a new “post.” a lot of people i follow on there don’t “post” at all, but they move stuff around in such a way that i might wanna check out the site again if they change something. maybe i’ll add a clarifying note to the database entry

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my journal does not have a database, and I create the RSS manually for it myself, I just write the file name, date, and the last date of publication