Break From Big Social

• 31 July 2026
• guide

break from big social media, get back to the small web

Social media is no longer social, it acts as a way to keep us glued to our phones seeing things controlled by algorithms. If you want to delete your social media, wired had a good guide in 2025.

• How to Delete All of Your Social Media Accounts

Speaking of Wired - they, along with 404 media, are a great place to start getting coverage of current tech trends that at least asks questions of the promises made by big tech firms

• Disconnect Blog
  • entry point for the work Paris Marx, presenting a lot of critical tech coverage and podcasts
• 404 Media
  • Tech news that actually questions the PR statements from tech companies
• Wired
  • With the Post gutted and NYTimes being...the NYTimes, Wired is basically the only traditional press outlet covering tech in a critical manner.

If you want to get back to a more social and controlled by YOU way of interacting online, here are some guides and links to get you started.

• Unplatform
  • A step by step guide on how to start interacting with the indie web.
• Join the Fediverse!
  • The fediverse is a collection of websites that can all speak to each other. This is a good entry point, in addition to the information on unplatform above.
• Mastodon
  • The most popular fediverse interface (perhaps other than Ghost for blogs). Just think twitter but anyone can run a server. If you aren't ready to totally abandon social media, this might be a great middle-ground.

The old internet still lives, tucked away in corners of the web. Here are a couple of links to just give a quick taste of what you can discover. In the future there will be a full article on alternative protocols and the smaller, independent web.

• Nightfall City
  • A collection of smolweb(ugh not a fan of that term) sites framed as a city, a good place to discover what some of the alternative prototal web is like.
• SDF Public Access Unix
  • Want a super old-school unix account on a free machine? Want to host a gopher site? as the site says "a community platform for inspiring, facilitating and implementing new ideas"

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