The definitive guide for escaping social media (and joining the indie web.)

While “log off” and “touch grass” are perfectly acceptable reactions to the current digital landscape, the fact remains that there's presumably some reason you were using social media in the first place. Maybe it was for sharing art, or reading news, or getting notified about events - in any case, if you still want to do those things without engaging with the Web 2.0 hellscape, the indie web is the way to do it.
Over the last few years, you've probably heard defeatist truisms thrown around like “there's only five websites now” or “the Internet is dead.” I'm here to tell you that those “truisms” are false, and the proof of their falseness lies in the indie web.

Source: Unplatformarchived / Noted: 2025 February 19 / Discuss: On Dreamwidth

I really like this idea and have posted several things about expanding your use of the web beyond the big 5 websites over the years (including Finding the Old Internet way back in 2019).

A sort of related series of thoughts:

  1. Social media incentives its creators to stay on the apps by giving them inflated ad revenue money (and/or venture capital fund money)
  2. Social media discourages linking to outside the system by penalizing posts with exterior links
  3. Even small creators can make a decent amount of money on some apps so they're more likely to use those apps and to NOT use other apps, or even bother hosting their own website
  4. Users of the apps mostly don't follow them off-app anyway because they too are disincentivized to leave (external links open in-app and not even on the phone's browser)
  5. Creators don't want to bother making a personal website because nobody will go there (compared to views on their SM pages)
  6. This hurts the interweb ecosystem because it keeps all the creators AND USERS on the big platforms

I do think there's room for people who make money on the internet to disconnect from SM but it's predicated on them having their own space, people being able to FIND that space, and then monetizing it in a way that makes up for the loss from the SM income. Which is very difficult because of many reasons, not least because people can't navigate through things even like basic search results (partly from user error, partly from antagonistic corporate practices that push up ads and sponsored results) to find what they want.

But anyway! Start a website! Put your stuff on it! Give people a way to contact you and then link out to other websites.