I’ve written about all the attention we’ve paid to social media platforms over the years.

I ran 1,105 miles in 2020, which took me around 200 hours. Scrolling 33 minutes daily on your phone adds up to about 200 hours a year, too.

Since May 26th, a few days after my 50th birthday, I decided to walk 10 miles a day. After a few too many months of inactiviy, I needed to get moving again. Walking this far takes me over three hours a day, so that’s three less hours of looking at my phone.

I talk about this a lot – the idea of taking the time we spend on social media and spending it on our craft. If we practiced our guitar more, wrote more poems, made more paintings, went for more walks, had more conversations, read more books – where could that lead?

Now, when I walked 10 miles that first day, nothing changed. But the hours add up, the miles add up, the movement adds up, and sometimes not in the most obvious ways. There’s no immediate prize, I just get to do it again the next day.

Walking 10 miles a day for 100 days didn’t lead to a finish line, but it reminds me of the concept of “increasing the surface area of luck.”

From James Clear (author of Atomic Habits):

“The forager who explores widely will find lots of useless terrain, but is also more likely to stumble across a bountiful berry patch than the person who stays home.

Similarly, the person who works hard, pursues opportunity, and tries more things is more likely to stumble across a lucky break than the person who waits.”

Spending three hours a day walking instead of scrolling has now led me to sign up for a “12 Hour Endurance Trail Run.” There’s a five mile trail loop, and I get to do it as many times as I can in 12 hours, with 200+ other people

It’s a new thing to go to, meet some people, have some conversations, and a whole lot of “getting out of my comfort zone” (literally and figuratively, of course). This is “surface area for luck.”

Practicing your guitar for three hours a day doesn’t guarantee you’ll play the Super Bowl Halftime show, or making pottery every day doesn’t promise a full time income, but these things can become conversation starters, or give you something interesting to talk about, maybe lead to a new friend – these things come along as a by-product of just doing a thing.

Walking 10 miles a day is not exactly aligned with the work I do in email marketing, or gathering people to talk about quitting social media, but maybe in a weird way it’s completely aligned.

Because if you want to leave social media, you need to put your time somewhere else, give your attention to something that needs your attention.

I was asked recently on a podcast “what am I running from” by seeking to escape from social media, and at the time I didn’t have a great answer, but I think I’ve come to the idea that to escape requires a destination.

We’re not seeking just how to delete an app or marketing without social media, but asking “where are we going?”

From the Technically Good newsletter, on digital sovereignty.

“Reminder that “The Cloud” is “someone else’s computer,” and if that computer happens to be under the purveyance of someone who isn’t completely rational, that could be a problem. File under: Digital sovereignty. … especially since also, someone can, in fact, just turn off your cloud, leaving you without your data.

That link leads to “Over 170,000 Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?” over at Slate, and it’s tragic:

“The small nonprofits left behind are now visibly struggling. The childhood healthcare nonprofit operator I spoke to lost about 500 gigabytes of his firm’s data … The man who runs the disability services nonprofit wrote to me that it’ll take him and his mother “hundreds of hours” to fully re-create the instructional videos and documents that went poof.”

Leaving all your data to one company is a risk, no matter how big they are (Google Drive, Airtable), or how benevolent (like Proton). Local and off-site back ups are crucial, but unfortunately not everybody knows about these practices, or how to implement them (I’m doing two calls this week on breaking up with Google).

For one, download your email list often. You just never know when a service might shut down, or you get locked out!

Once you’ve got your cloud files on your own computer, back them up somewhere off-site (I use Backblaze, but pCloud and Jottacloud looks pretty good, too).

Off-site means your files are safe if your computer breaks, or your house burns down. Yes, these services are “someone else’s computer” still, which is why we seek the best solutions we can, rather than put our trust in the giant companies who grow too big to care.

Whenever I see people being hopeful about returning to the way things were, there’s always someone saying “we can never go back,” and I think that’s hilarious.

Like, are we really going to jump to yet another social media platform? Did we all jump to Mastodon, or one of the 19 different Instagram replacements? I keep having conversations with people who are done with signing up for new services, creating new accounts.

And sure, is this cognitive bias? YES. My job is talking to people who dislike social media, who want to get away, who seek a different path – heck yes, I am biased.

On the other hand, are you thumbs up with Musk / Zuckerberg / Mosseri? Are you ready to invest your time, effort and energy into the same old same old?

Are we content to keep following 3000 people? Reading 30 new articles every hour? Watching 5 hours of video per day, 13 seconds at a time?

Or are you ready to buy DVDs and CDs and magazines again? Talk to your neighbors? Seek community?

I know which direction I’m heading.

If you ever feel like sending a weekly newsletter to your subscribers is too much, Brick has sent me seven emails in 12 days.

​Maybe you’re curious about leaving Google – Gmail, Workspace, Google Search, Photos, Drive.

​There’s plenty of videos to watch and articles to read on the subject, but it might be helpful to talk to people who’ve actually left some of those Google Products!

​I left Google Workspace years ago and use Fastmail and Proton. Other people on the call have various stories and new tools that they use.

​This isn’t a webinar and there’s no pitch. It’s a group of people who’ve been down this path (or are just starting to think about it) trading real experiences.

Monday, August 31 at 9:00 AM → https://luma.com/wh4686yh

Thursday, September 3 at 2:00 PM EDT → https://luma.com/1q9brs2t

One hot summer I ran a 5K race. Afterwards, leaning against a railing and sweating buckets, a man approached.

“Good race?”

“Hah,” I panted, “yeah, a little hot.”

“Have you heard the good new of Jesus Christ?”

Now, this conversation goes differently with someone I’ve known for 20 years on a back porch after a nice dinner and beverage. That’s because of trust, something the person who approached me after that race didn’t earn.

We’ve spent so much time building trust on social media platforms, with stories, photos of our pets, our travels, our bookshelves, our weekend adventures, and then when it comes to our website, it’s just “are you ready to convert?”

The trust can’t stop on our websites, it has to get bigger. More stories, pet, travels, whatever… if we’re doing all that on social media platforms to impress strangers, what does it say when our website is just a static business card?

This from “I almost killed my podcast,” by Becky Isjwara. Becky does a podcast called Small Creator Big World with Bhav Sharma.

Every community is shaped by the people running it. The alternative was to shut ours down entirely because I felt so icked out by what it had become. That would have meant running away from the problem rather than deciding what we actually wanted this space to be.

I’m sorry to the entrepreneurs we disappointed by not becoming the community of your dreams. There are many brilliant communities out there built for you.

There’s a weird space for everyone. We’re committed to keeping ours our kind of weird.

I post this on Social Media Escape Club (also a weird space – see our upcoming gatherings here) because getting away from social media requires a destination. Simply deleting a social media app is one thing, but figuring out what to do next can be difficult.

Becky’s Small Creator Big World started out as one thing, then through some well intentioned advice, became something else which didn’t sit well with Becky.

But this is a journey so many of us need to go on, even for Becky who isn’t “escaping social media!” The challenge in “what should I do?” is protecting your vibes from the (as mentioned before) well intentioned advice.

Grow. Streamline. Niche. Double down. Most of the time that sort of advice comes from a good place – the people we trust and admire just want us to do well! But deep down we have to honor ourselves, and the vibes we seek, the peace we want in our bones when doing the work we wanna do.

Comedian Anthony Jeselnik on the fragile nature of digital media.

What do you think about our Netflix specials? Things we’ve done — there’s no physical media anymore. That can all go away, and you’re left with nothing. And that’s wild to me: a corporation… who knows what you get canceled for, can just be like, “All your work is gone.” It’s gone, as if it never existed. There’s nothing. Nothing.

This is why I’m so big on having a website, and maintaining some sort of digital archive of your work. I wish I had learned this a decade ago, as most all of my early blog work and Skull Toaster metal trivia are wiped out by unpaid hosting bills, or hasitly deleting social media profiles.

Download and back up your work. Request your files and images and videos from the social media platforms. Tuck them away on an external HD and make sure that’s back up, too (I use Backblaze).