unplatform: the social media escape guide

[ajazz]

hey! thanks for the submissions. a few notes:

@folkmoss

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.

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.

@folkmoss

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 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.

@folkmoss

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.

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.

@folkmoss

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.

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

@convexer

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.

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.