I personally use HTML Journals for my little journal thing. It’s really, REALLY easy to just have a url point to your page.
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With all the insanity around Meta lately I sent this to my mom. She is the most standard, “I use Facebook to keep up with family and friends”, inspirational quotes on Instagram, etc person ever. She said she’ll check it out and I’ll let you know what she thinks as a very non techy person!
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Showing up to this thread three weeks late with some feedback:
If you’ve already clicked on this link, I’m going to assume you don’t need any convincing as to why you should leave conventional social media platforms.
I’m not sure this is a safe assumption.
I mean, maybe? But… not necessarily. If that’s where you want to focus, you could start with “This guide is directed at people who want to leave conventional social media platforms and don’t know where to start.”
With that said, I think having a section dedicated to Why could be valuable, as well, and I don’t think the CJ the X link is necessarily enough. That piece starts out with the words “In our critique of surveillance capitalism” – and already there you’re going to lose people, whether because they’re like “I don’t know what any of that means” or whether because they’re like “Capitalism is good though.” To assume an audience of who keeps reading past “In our critique of surveillance capitalism” is to miss out on persuading more people (which may be fine for CJ the X, but your project might want to cast a wider net).
A common theme you’ll see throughout the recommendations in this guide is that “inconvenience is good.”
I agree in spirit, but I’m sure there’s a better way to say it than that. Referring to manual curation as “inconvenience” is already ceding to the idea that automated black box recommendation algorithms are “convenient,” which I just don’t agree with at all. Automated black box recommendation algorithms are inconvenient. Automated black box recommendation algorithms are skewed by the predatory schemes and dangerous oversights of whoever designed them. Automated black box recommendation algorithms deny the users enough control to fiddle with settings as they please, and they deny us all the information we derive from connecting a recommendation to the personality and reputation of a specific actual person. I think there’s room to adopt a more assertive framing here that makes manual curation feel exciting and agentive rather than a more begrudging “eat your vegetables” kind of concession.
Replacing the algorithmic feeds? you currently use with curated feeds? is going to take some time
I didn’t notice any heads up about this feature in the prelude, so I think it would make sense to explain that people can hover their mouse over key terms for a tooltip. Speaking of which – is this feature designed only for mouse users? Is there a mobile or keyboard equivalent?
You Will Have Less Content
“Content” is marketerspeak for the things that entice people to look at their ads. You don’t have to talk like that either.
I know what this part is getting at, but again, I’m sure there’s a way to foreground the positive here. “Quality Over Quantity,” that kind of thing. Good Things Come In Small Packages. Go Sightseeeing, Not Doomscrolling.
if you find yourself wanting more to read and watch, the people and publications you’ve subscribed to will almost certainly have recommendations for other things to read and watch, and before you know it, you’ll have an enormous curated collection of artists, writers, and educators that you can share with others.
This might be overpromising.
You Will Have To Learn (Some) Things About Technology
If this guide is directed at anyone who might be daunted by the prospect of learning some things about technology, ditch the word “technology.” Make it “You Will Learn New Things.” Learning new things is doable. Learning new things is something everyone reading this has done before.
I’ve done my best to make this guide accessible to virtually anyone with the technical expertise to open a web browser
I regret to inform you that some people don’t know what a web browser is. “Anyone with the technical expertise to open a web browser” is going to sound like jargon to them. Try “anyone with enough know-how to get on the internet and search for cat pics” or “anyone who knows how to google.”
None of the solutions I will offer will be more convenient than downloading X or Instagram, creating an account, and posting away.
You don’t have to kneecap your own argument like this. Focus on what you as the guide-maker are offering here: an opportunity for folks to learn new things! Learning new things can be exciting! (I mean, you can feel however you feel about it, but you’re the one who sets the tone here, and setting a tone of “reader beware, you’re in for a scare” is going to be detrimental to your aims.)
So much of the social dysfunction of Web 2.0 is driven by the way that the platforms reward “engagement,”
Yes! Lead with points like this! Don’t hide this kind of rallying cry more than halfway down the page.
for them, each meaningless battle or “discourse” flash point
Okay. Listen. I want you to imagine, hypothetically, a world where everyone on the internet suddenly decided to start using “web browser” to mean “getting into stupid fights on the internet” and started posted things like “I’m so sick of web browsers. They’re not worth it. I’m not going to use web browsers anymore” while using a web browser. Discourse means communication and I hold the meme usage in complete contempt. Please use a more applicable word instead.
However, it will get you to a point where you’ll be ready to press “delete account” when the time comes. And make no mistake — the time will come.
Unfortunately I think this may again be overpromising things. Maybe it’s something you strongly believe, but I don’t know that you can convince any one of that in the space of a few paragraphs.
If you haven’t been scared off by everything I just told you,
Consider your tone again. The expectations you’re setting here should not be scary. Scaring people isn’t what you want, is it? You’re trying to persuade people to take the next step. “If any of that sounds exciting…” “If any of that sounds interesting…” “If any of that is enough to get you curious…”
I can just barely operate a web browser.
Echoing what I said earlier – this phrasing is already a higher threshold than you think it is, because plenty of people operate web browsers without knowing that they’re called web browsers (or what web browsers even are). The other day I asked someone to look something up on Wikipedia, and she said, “Sorry, all I have is this,” while pointing at an app icon for Safari.
Select the level of tech literacy that best applies to you: […] Your answer will be saved in your web browser to help tailor the guide to your level of technical expertise.
Phrases like “tech literacy” and “technical expertise” are the kind of thing that make this guide sound more formal and technical. I know these are really basic, general phrases, but they still shape the tone, so I’m trying to flag this kind of thing to help you see it.
For testing purposes I’m going to pick the first option, but I just want to touch on this first:
I know what happens if I type “%appdata%” into Windows Explorer.
I’ve dabbled with HTML / CSS (or other programming / markup languages).
I’ve dabbled with HTML/CSS and haven’t ever done that other one before. Never had a reason to. I had to go look up what it was just now, and it’s kind of unclear what you’re getting at by making that an option here, since it doesn’t directly pertain to using or making websites. Same for the .zip file option, now that I think about it. I figure the options at this stage should directly pertain to what kind of instructions would or wouldn’t be relevant.
Here’s the deal - if you want to replace the content you get from social media with other things, there’s a few important legacy technologies it’s in your interest to get to grips with.
You can make the tone of this opening sound less adversarial and more enticing by reframing it as an offer. “To help you get started, I’m going to introduce you to the wonderful world of RSS.” “Completely new at this? No problem! I’m going to break things down into some small steps for you.” “Allow me to introduce the first tool you’ll need to start you on your journey.” Something like that.
A website distributes a file (usually at a link like
https://website.com/rss.xml) that contains the content of their “RSS feed” - essentially just a chronological list of posts on the site.
“A website makes a list of posts available in what’s called an RSS feed.”
You, the consumer, using an RSS reader? (more on that in a little), automatically retrieve the content of the site’s RSS feed
“You can follow those posts with what’s called an RSS reader.”
a lot of readers have the capability to auto-detect a website’s RSS feed even if you can’t find it manually, so a lot of the time pasting the site’s homepage URL will be enough.
Add an explanation for people who don’t know what a URL is.
You might think you hate email. You don’t.
This is another example of starting off on a note that sounds adversarial. In your ensuing sentences, I see you talk about the negative associations people may have with email, so try starting with those first as a way of extending empathy. “The email inbox is a place we may dread because…” “Even if you associate email with work and spam…” “Despite everything we may hate about email…”
You don’t “follow” people you’re interested in — you subscribe to their RSS feed, join their newsletter, or bookmark their website.
That’s just another kind of following. I’d advise against introducing new terms or distinctions when it’s not necessary, since the more you can use terms that people already know and feel familiar with, the more you can make the language of this guide feel approachable.
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first - thanks for the feedback. this sort of style and tonal critique is the sort of thing i was most worried about. i’ve made quite a few edits in response to various critiques you made, and will probably make more in preparation for an update i plan to ship later this month. there’s a few key things i want to push back on, and perhaps it could start a conversation to help me clarify the project’s aims better.
respectfully, i think i absolutely need to “kneecap” the argument like this - though i don’t quite see it as kneecapping.
later on in your critique, you (rightly) raise the concern that i may be overpromising, and that’s a concern that i had in mind with this project since the beginning. what i don’t want people to think is that they can leave social media without changing anything about their relationship to the digital world, because if they think that, they’ll inevitably bounce off the indie web completely once they realize that (1) they’re going to have to put in way more conscious effort into curation and (2) they’re not going to have the same volume of content that they’re used to.
i did a lot of interviews with folks in preparation for this project - many of them had concrete use cases for social media that they were trying to replace, but some of them would straight up tell me “yeah i use it for brainrot purposes.” i purposely tried to designed the guide to scare the latter group away, because the guide is not going to be able to help them, nor should it be designed to do so.
within reason, i wanted the guide to have a confrontational enough tone that it was able to get people to seriously consider their relationship to social media and whether it was ever good, healthy, or productive - even before the unprecedented downward spiral it’s taken in the last few months. i don’t want people going through the whole process only to realize that their RSS reader isn’t able to numb their senses in the way that their “for you” page did, and conclude “shit, i guess i tried my best - it just didn’t work!” and then begin relaying that conclusion to their friends and family when social media comes up in conversation. i want to be honest with them - this is not going to be an automatic or effortless process, and it is going to require you to adjust a little.
i agree in theory, but the whole reason i had to come up with those abstractions in the first place is because there’s a wide variety of tools in the database, and they all require different kinds of expertise in different areas - but for practical reasons, i had to generalize all of them to exist on the same spectrum of skill. the %appdata% thing was an index for “i am not a programmer but i am a high-skill generalist computer user” - i’m aware it’s not ideal, but i don’t know what i’d use as an alternative. i’m open to suggestions.
(for the record, i do think that the zip file thing is relevant - a lot of software in the database uses .zip for distribution and / or file transfer)
i added a definition to the first web browser mention, but the simple fact is that if you don’t know what a web browser is (which i fully believe some people don’t) the guide’s recommendations aren’t going to do you much good anyway. there’s a reason i set it as the minimum level of literacy in the selector.
the unfortunate reality is that “discourse,” in actual contemporary practice, refers to stupid fights on the internet. i agree that it’s unfortunate that’s the case, and i wish it wasn’t, but in the same spirit of some of your other critiques i think it’s best to just use the term that people would immediately recognize. i don’t think it would serve the guide’s purposes to say “squabbling” instead. same thing with “content” - people know what that means, and it would only complicate things to say something else.
why? i would say that describes my experience exactly. i started with a few feeds, grew the list by adding more from recommendations from the distributors of those feeds, and now i’m almost at 200. the strategy i describe there has been the single most effective one for (meaningful) media discoverability that i have ever used in my entire life.
on both desktop and mobile, clicking the word should pull out a drawer with the word’s definition. the hover tooltip on desktop is just a bonus. let me know if that wasn’t working for you.
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Glad to hear it.
Certainly. Setting expectations about that is important. I think there’s a way to do that faithfully and accurately while phrasing it in a way that encourages interest.
I don’t think you need to put in any extra effort on that front.
What kind of instructions are included or excluded at that level?
The guide could theoretically be expanded to cover that stage – or outsource that task to links. I think it’s relevant to this kind of project since so many people think of the internet in terms of “apps,” which means limiting their social experiences online to the likes of Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. So at that stage, learning what a browser is can be an important first step toward learning how to explore more niche and independent parts of the web. I understand if that’d be going further than you’d like to take it, in which case, I think it’d be good to find an alternate resource you can redirect folks to.
I disagree because provoking reflection about an ad-centered internet is fundamental to the premise of the indie web. Introducing people to the indie web and what it entails is my understanding of the goal of the project, so words like this represent an opportunity to teach.
Great! Glad to hear you’ve had that experience. The reason why the statements written in second person might be overpromising is that it may not be safe to extrapolate from a sample size of one. Did you also cover this subject in interviews?
Oh, I must have written that part before I disabled my scriptblocker. Neat feature. I would suggest adding a heads up note since visually those strings look like links, so mobile users might expect them to navigate away from the page (which could act as a disincentive against clicking).
i am really not understanding what you’re trying to express here. i do not think “creators you follow have recommendations for other creators” is not a claim for which i need a thorough statistical proof. it is clearly, observably the case that this is true, in a wide variety of ways: webrings, fanlistings, substack recommendations, direct links to other sites in blog posts, organizational membership, neocities mutuals, etc.
you could walk away with a dozen or so feeds from the guide alone at this very moment, and you could walk away with many more if you were in one of the cities for which we have decent coverage. as a matter of actual fact, those sites (including, for example, 32bit.cafe) have links to other sites, which have links to other sites, and so on. i’m not seeing what part of that passage is potentially overpromising.
I think Coyote wants the guide to be more targeted at someone who is zero or five percent “bought into” unplatforming whereas ajazz has written it for someone who is already 20 or 30 percent of the way there and is starting to explore “how” and not just “whether.”
Nothing wrong, IMO, with having a target audience and sticking to it.
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I agree, and perhaps people still on “should I” need a separate guide from those who have progressed to “how do I”? There’s no reason that Coyote couldn’t write such a guide as a complement to ajazz’s work.
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there are so many manifestos for the convincing stage of leaving social media. we just need to link and share them more! maybe we can round them up in a thread or wiki page here on the forums so we can reference them and share them with others!
i’m sure more will be added on to the guide as time goes on.
as someone who’s met a lot of people getting started in this space, there isn’t something like this that’s casual and approachable in this way. and i think it’s super helpful for the person who knows they want to get off of socmed but don’t know what to do next—the “now what?” hasn’t been answered for many folks who i’ve encountered.
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It’s a slow day in the library, so I took a stab at a first draft of a “Should I leave social media?” piece for people who are aware they’re uncomfortable, but for whom the scale hasn’t really begun to tip yet: you can leave social media (if you want to)
It is a rough draft, so please feel free to send links, suggest topics I might need to cover, etc. (Yes, I will be editing the CSS later today to fix the line spacing.)
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My general rule for when it’s time to leave a platform is that if my primary interaction with a platform is to mute or block people, it’s time to delete my account.
Since I seem to cross that threshold sooner with every social media platform I try, I decided it was time to give up on social media for a while. And “a while” could turn out to be for the next 10,000 years.
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The part of that passage that’s potentially overpromising is “before you know it, you’ll have an enormous curated collection.” While I personally have an enormous curated collection, I’m also aware that “I don’t know how to find stuff” and “unfortunately I’ve run out of stuff to look at” are common narratives I encounter, and I’m considering possible explanations for that besides just lacking a starting point. For instance, different people have different interests, and some interests more than others have proportionally more coverage in the indie web space. I don’t know for sure what to expect for subjects I personally don’t share an interest in, so I wouldn’t want this assertion to become a source of disconnect between you and your readers.
That sounds like a good idea to me.
Some quick thoughts:
- I like the bullet points.
- It looks like the framing here is “quitting social media,” but then you offer suggestions for “better social media” – is the intended framing something more like “quitting bad social media”?
- I’m surprised to see the recommendation for Counter Social. I’ve heard some pretty worrisome things. But I guess I should check up on that.
- It looks like the link to The Opt Out Project isn’t working for me – might be because it’s missing the www?
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