What to Do Online Instead of Social Media
“Social media,” after however many years, seems to have converged upon its final form: an endless feed of little videos made and consumed on phones that people watch for 14 hours a day. Various artificial intelligence manufacturing corporations offer such feeds with minor variations in recommendation algorithms and low-effort manual tasks designed to hijack human neurology. All “social media” applications that did not originally work like this are being redesigned to do so.
While this may well be a perfectly serviceable form of entertainment — one vastly more compelling than television to the species as a whole, in fact — it is bringing ruin to the forms of and venues for online sociality that we got used to for the past 15 years or so.
But the thing about those so-called “web 2.0” social media use cases — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, et cetera — is that they were awkwardly grafted on to what was already happening before, in “web 1.0,” if you must. That period of the internet was a sort of blindly groping discovery phase: Capital was blindly seeking enterprises that were blindly seeking the way to make money and control the entire populace using smartphones, and the first glint of gold in the hills, or squirt of oil in the fields, or whatever, was grafting ad/surveillance tech and addictive neurological exploits onto the things more determined internet-savvy people were doing before: posting stuff they made in ways people who enjoyed the same media could enjoy, thereby meeting one another and becoming friends.
This activity was known as blogging. Blogging is a gross-sounding contraction of the term web logging, and it refers to making whatever you know how to make with computers — which for most people involves at least some writing — and posting it on your personal online profile for other people to find. Before Facebook et al., everyone who did this did it on websites they owned, called blogs, and though people’s brains became so ruined by social media that they were for some reason unable to notice, most good bloggers have simply continued blogging on their own sites all the while. But back in like 2006 — which was three years after I started blogging — technocapital looked at all of us making cool stuff for each other on the internet, got jealous, and tried to figure out how to devour all that blogging by co-opting it, making it “easier” to do, exploiting human psychology to make that activity hopelessly addictive, and then … profit??
When you look at it that way, you can really see how nothing as compelling (derogatory) as the current generation of video feed social media applications could have existed until now — because we didn’t have good enough cameras, phones, and mobile internet connections to make, post, and watch videos this easily until recently — and now that we do, of course the industry has discovered that the most absorbing, reality-replacing creative medium is the most exploitable. Given that, it seems clear that, though the winners and losers are yet to shake out across the several dominant platforms converging on this identical experience, endless feeds of phone videos are here to stay as humanity’s mass medium of choice.
Unfortunately, that leaves people who enjoy other forms of human communication — besides private text messaging, I guess — in the lurch. Twitter, for example — which the most online people of my generation considered the pinnacle of corporate hijacking of blogging, a.k.a. “social media” — has been utterly devoured from the inside out by the inexorable rise of phone videos and is no longer recognizable as a “microblogging” service, right down to the service’s name. What are those of us who still like posting and consuming posts in our media of choice supposed to do?
The answer is the exact same thing we were doing before social media, which those of us with the slightest modicum of perspective on what was happening were still doing the entire time.
You see, if you live long enough on the internet, you begin to notice that things corporations try to do on it have a way of dying. Except YouTube, actually. Videos. What can I say? But we’ve covered that; videos are the most compelling thing humans have ever invented. Every other creative medium has been a failure for corporate-scale technology, and every user who has relied on corporate platforms to provide homes for their creative media and the relationships they formed while making them has been sold out, crushed, their work disappeared into the ether callously, with no regard for human life, as is the wont of corporations. For this reason, those of us who have been around the block maintain websites of our own, and we always treat content posted to corporate platforms as derivative, disposable advertisements for our own domains.
Every single day, I see a post on some social medium or another going hyper-ultra-megaviral for saying, “I miss when there were like... a bunch of websites” or similar. The people are crying out to be liberated from their corporate brain-jails, though apparently they are too locked in brain-jail to try, I dunno, going to other websites and discovering that they still exist. But look, I get that I am becoming old, and that people going hyper-ultra-megaviral for remembering that they used to visit other websites were probably little children in that era, and they may not be aware of what tools to use to actually sustain a practice of blogging and reading blogs. And as for the youths, who are presumably seeing such hyper-ultra-megaviral posts and going, “What is a website?”, I have awesome wonders and ancient wisdom to bestow upon you. Take a deep breath, my child, and prepare yourself spiritually. You are about to take your first step into a larger world.
Here are the few, simple things you need in order to participate in the wide world of websites:
1. Get an RSS Reader
RSS is a web technology that stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” and it’s true. It’s a format for website data that you can subscribe to, and when you’re subscribed, you receive posts from it. You might recognize its use case from web 2.0 as “following.”
RSS readers are the original timeline. They let you follow blogs. Whenever someone whose blog you like posts something new, you receive it. You don’t have to go visit 12 or 93 websites a day to see if anything new happened. You just get the posts delivered to you. Do you realize this profound technology has existed for 25 years?
If you have Apple devices, you can use NetNewsWire — probably the most legendary application in the field — completely for free, and it will sync the read/unread state and the posts you’ve starred to read across all your devices. For other platforms (or as an alternative for Apple people), I am told the free version of Inoreader is also excellent.
Personally, I use a Mac/iOS app called Reeder, which can be had for a small one-time fee. It can also be synced with iCloud, but I subscribe to a cloud-based RSS service called Feedbin for one simple reason: One very stupid sideshow in the post-web 2.0 reinvention of web 1.0 from first principles is the proliferation of email newsletters, which is when people send blog posts as uneditable, unreadable messages that are difficult or impossible to find on the web and end up in your spam folder instead of posting them on a blog. As you can see, this development was completely unnecessary and stupid, as RSS exists. Feedbin provides you with an email address you can use to sign up for email blogs (e.g. Substacks, although Substacks can also be read by RSS if constructed properly), so that they arrive in your RSS reader. That’s worth paying for, to me.
(No shade on email newsletters that are actual letters, of course, and are thereby intended to elicit responses, which is what the medium of email is for. I have such a newsletter, to which I highly recommend you subscribe.)
2. Follow Blogs
Every website that is good provides at least one RSS feed of its blog posts that you can follow in your feed reader. For example, you will find not one but four RSS feeds for this very website in the footer, but here they are for your convenience:
In fact, you can subscribe to any specific topic on my website as its own feed. If you see a category or tag in my Writing section you wish to follow specifically — Buddhism, for example — you can simply add “?format=rss” to the end of that category or tag’s web address and add that to your feed reader (here’s my Buddhism RSS feed). Different blogging engines have different versions of this trick, and if you get really into this, they’ll become second-nature to you.
Fortunately, most RSS reader apps have tricks built in for finding the RSS feeds on any website if you just give them the basic address, or they offer browser extensions you can use to find feeds on the web page you’re currently looking at. So it’s always worth just trying a website you want to follow to see if it has feeds. Many sites in the actual news media have ruined themselves in the web 2.0 era, but many still have feeds. I follow several RSS feeds from Axios, for example, and that’s how I get much of my hard news.
As for the websites of normal people, finding those is the real adventure. Personally, the very first thing I check when I am looking at someone’s social media profile is whether they have a website, and if so, I go straight to the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed (or begrudgingly provide my Feedbin email address if all they have is a newsletter). But one of the best things about blogger culture is that bloggers are the top consumers of other blogs, so I constantly find new blogs to read from links in blogs I already read. Start with a few, and your subscriptions will grow over time.
To get you’ve started, I’ve published this exhaustive list of all the blogs I enjoy and their RSS feeds.
If you come to me via certain online scenes, you may also be interested in finding the blogs of my many associates. I have collected links to the websites of my illustrious collaborators for you in the Friends section of my Lineage page. I also include every TIGER TIME guest’s website, if they have one, as the first link in their episode notes.
3. Get Your Own Blog
Reading is only half the fun, of course. The rest is in participating yourself! For that, you’ll need a blog. There are a lot of ways to get one, and as long as it has an RSS feed, none of them is wrong per se. Of course, using a platform someone else owns is a risk, as we have seen.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, your best bet is probably WordPress, which powers like half of all websites at this point or something crazy like that. I’m not going to exhaust myself and belabor this blog post by getting into the relative merits of various website publishing technologies; this post is about why you should have a website, however you choose to have it. That said, Ash, Phil, and I are getting ready to start building websites for people, so if you want to get into it, you can email us to discuss further.
If you don’t want a whole-ass website, though, and would prefer something that simulates the social media experience, I recommend setting up a Mastodon account. A Mastodon server, or “instance,” is a website, it’s just one that resembles Twitter (but better). The difference is that there is only one Twitter, whereas there can be any number of Mastodons — as well as other applications that can interoperate with Mastodon — and everyone on any of these websites can talk to each other. If their owner threatens to sell the website to Elon Musk, though, their users can just leave and move all their relationships to another website. Isn’t that nice?
Mastodon is the largest and most familiar-looking software that connects to the fediverse, which is the universe of websites that can communicate via the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub is just like RSS — it’s a kind of data websites can create — but it’s two-way instead of one-way. It contains all the parts of a social media application, except instead of being owned and controlled by a single company, it’s an open standard, so anybody’s website can interact with anybody else’s over it. As you may have heard, perhaps on this very website, Threads, Instagram’s new Twitter clone, supports it, which I’d say more or less guarantees that it’s going to win and stick around. The future of social media is that people who still want to be on social media can be, but they will be able to communicate with those of us who have our own websites. Sound like pie in the sky? Guess what: It’s already here.
I consider @taalumot@stoat.zone — a Mastodon account — my primary social media account, so if you aren’t already following that, you should. There’s also a @tigertime@stoat.zone account. I am on Threads, but that’s really just to experience how the implementation of fediverse stuff plays out. Once it’s possible, I will be forwarding my Threads account to @taalumot@stoat.zone, and all will be right in the world. You can, though, already follow @taalumot@threads.net on the fediverse, though you should follow my stoat.zone account instead.
But here’s the thing! You don’t even have to worry about all this ActivityPub stuff if you don’t want to, because you can follow ActivityPub accounts via RSS! Yes, that’s right. If you don’t want to bother with Mastodon or similar, you can just add “.rss” to the end of a Mastodon profile URL, and you can subscribe that account’s posts in your RSS reader. You won’t be able to write back, but you’ll be able to read their posts just fine. Here’s mine if you don’t believe me. Will Threads implement this? I dunno, but I am sure the fediverse people Meta has been talking to are pushing for it.
If you’re going the Mastodon route, just be sure to choose a server you trust not to die or suck. You can even start your own; it’s super easy and cheap. The first-party server, mastodon.social, is probably safe, also, at least as a place to start. If this option appeals to you, I recommend you read my post about The Pirate Ship Model of Federated Social Media before making any moves.
Yes, I did basically sneak in “continue using social media” at the end of this post that is purportedly about what to do instead of social media, but hopefully you see what I’m getting at. “Social media” was just something that added bells and whistles on top of blogging and also tried to turn it into hell. Though it did succeed at creating hell, it had no effect whatsoever on blogging, and in the meantime, we bloggers have built some amazing stuff that makes blogging just as fun as social media was before it got turned into an unending matrix of hyperstimulating AI phone videos. If you want to keep watching those, you do you, but if you want to get back to making cool stuff and finding cool people, hopefully I have helped get you there.
