Leaving Social Media, Gmail, etc. Are there safe options.

January 4, 2021 12:30 PM

Long and short of it, I watched "The Social Dilemma" and am getting the hell out. As of this time, I am moving to Substack to keep others informed and establishing a website where I can keep a business/personal presence. What other options are there for social media and emailing. Is SubStack a wise choice or is there better? What is available to protect the website? What am I missing?
posted by goalyeehah to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

What other options are there for social media and emailing.

I've switched to Keybase to cover my one-on-one and group messaging needs. Works well for me. End to end encrypted, cross-platform (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux), seamless support for multiple devices (all devices signed into the same account see the same conversations), no need to do security-number reset dances when other people change devices, client parts are all open source (server parts not so, unfortunately), very flexible teams architecture for group messaging and group storage management, comes with 200GB of online storage per account that can be signed and encrypted or signed and public; if public, there's web access so you can publish stuff to people who don't have a Keybase client installed. Also has an integrated crypto-currency payments system based on the Stellar protocol, which settles transactions very fast and very cheaply and doesn't need to burn electricity at whole-country scale to make it work. I like it.
posted by flabdablet at 1:27 PM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Some of the information gathered here may be of interest.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:35 PM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Discord seems to be where a lot of people are hanging out these days. It's not just for gaming. But it's not the simplest for onboarding people who aren't already on it.
posted by rikschell at 1:46 PM on January 4, 2021

Best answer: Might want to register your own domain and move your presence to it.

I’m suspicious of SubStack. It seems like early Medium. Anyway, have a look at this link https://ghost.org/vs/substack/. Or find similar things.

Instead of moving to one silo to another look for things that encourage federation, decentralised functions, openness, user control, and freedom (as in freedom of speech)

What else do you need? Better list your services and you’ll find alternatives.
posted by amar at 6:15 PM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

This list has some alternatives for "degoogling".
posted by jaden at 6:40 PM on January 4, 2021

Best answer: I am very wary of substack as well. Consider setting up a blog? There are many options for blogging platforms that have a sustainable funding source, and have been around for a while. I'd recommend Wordpress (ideally with your own domain, as amar suggests), but honestly whatever you pick should be fine. It looks like there are a couple ways to automatically email out blog posts to a mailing list, if that's an important thing, although I'm not sure which plugin is best for that.

Where do you host your email right now? It's probably worth moving to an email address on your own domain as well — you can change email providers without changing your email address if you do that. I use Fastmail, which I'm quite happy with, although there are other options.

In general, consider whether you want to keep your same circle of friends, just talking to them with different technology (hard — getting invited to things is harder if you're not on FB, etc), or whether you're happy to find other online social spaces with different sets of people. Those two goals will present very different solutions.
posted by wesleyac at 7:31 PM on January 4, 2021

Response by poster: What else do you need? Better list your services and you’ll find alternatives.

ideally the site would be a hub to promote creative projects and assets (clothing, books, photographs, writings, op-eds and essays about life fundamentals, and poetry), and to establish an anticipatory base for for my future work. (teacher, therapist and public speaker). I would also like the newsletter be less a newsletter and have more of magazine format.
posted by goalyeehah at 8:31 PM on January 4, 2021

Best answer: You might check the Indieweb project? Their basic premise seems to be that you should publish everything on your own site/domain (so you own your content and retain control over the originals) and then propagate, share, federate, or link to it with other platforms and protocols. It looks like it's still pretty technical/diy, though.
posted by sibilatorix at 8:48 AM on January 5, 2021

I use Fastmail for my email and calendar; here is a referrer link that saves you 10% off your first year. Very solid, has a mobile app and a web version but also integrates with my desktop email application, has good personal customer support if I need it. And the company contributes to the new JMAP email standard.

I just switched to Buttondown for my email newsletter. Run by one person, free for most cases but sensibly costs money at some levels, NOT funded by venture capitalists, easy to use and to integrate with other stuff, my newsletters look nice visually.

I use Mastodon for microblogging (like Twitter), as do several other MeFites.
posted by brainwane at 12:29 PM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Also, Fastmail gives you web space so you can put a simple static webpage up.
posted by brainwane at 1:19 PM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]