Category: CommunityCategory: Community

I hosted two “Let’s Break Up 💔 With Gmail” calls last week, and one guest mentioned this as we were wrapping up on Friday:

“This was very helpful if for no other reason than just to know I’m not the only nut in the room.”

It’s such a relief knowing other people are facing the same challenges. That we’re not alone.

Because, at the end of the day, it’s not just about email, but also the lock-in with Google Calendar, collaborative docs, and photo management. This makes a move look harder to manage, and so then we never start.

And we landed on two big points:

1. The replacement will never feel “perfect” because Gmail feels so familiar – some of us were beta-users of Gmail back in early 2004!
2. Do we want to replace one “all in one” soultion with another? What will some of these companies look like in ten years?

A good place to start? Stop researching and just sign up for a free trial with another email provider like Fastmail or Proton (affiliate links) or Hey. Get a feel for them, because if the vibes are off, you’ll never switch over.

Start small. Switch something like your Netflix account first, then maybe a store account. There’s no need for a big announcement, to tell everybody about your move. Just update your email here and there as you migrate, and leave the critical accounts (like banking, work stuff) for later on.

From Lucy Werner of Hype Yourself, talking about how to get closer to the sorts of people you want to be working with (from one our recent Escape Pod Zoom calls).

“One of my mantras is: put yourself where you don’t belong. Yes, it’s good to have your squad of people doing similar things to empathize with, but I always like to be the only PR (person) in a room full of artists and creatives. That’s my happy space — they’re the people I want to hang out with.”

Lucy did this at a market hall, where people were “selling jeans, or candles, or perfumes, or whatever. And I just sat there with a sign, being like, 15 minutes of free PR or branding advice.”

She said she was busy all day “because we were the only service-based people sat in a market store around product sellers.”

Joi Katskee does a radio show, and on one of our calls she told us how she talked about her program at an open mic night.

I made flyers for Social Media Escape Club, and set them out at a punk rock flea market while selling some old music gear. This led to about a dozen face to face conversations with all sorts of people about wanting to get off social media.

The common theme here is none of us hoped for an algorithm to bring the right people to us, we just showed up.

So if you’ve been thinking that social media is the only way to find your people, I just gave you three examples of meeting people in the real world, one conversation at a time. Instead of chasing follower counts or engagement, find new ways to get around the people you want to work with.

And start figuring that out with other creative folks by joining one of our upcoming calls!

Someone on a recent Escape Pod Zoom call shared a perfect example of how social media isn’t a great way to organize an event.

They told us how an organization was promoting an event entirely through Facebook. Now, this person is a valued part of this community, but they’re not on social media, so they had no idea it was happening!

They only found out via text from someone else, and when they showed up, organizers and members hugged them and said, “Oh, thank goodness we didn’t know that you were going to make it!”

This is why you don’t center your community around social media, because even the people that follow you aren’t guaranteed to see every update. Consider than in 2026, a growing number of people aren’t even on social media anymore.

So get phone numbers, get an email addresses, heck, get mailing addresses; it’s time to get away from trusting the social media algorithms, and get back to connecting directly with your people.

You’re an artist, a poet, a musician, a creative person, and you’re tired of algorithms controlling who sees what. I was one of the first 3,000 to sign up for Twitter, I get it. But I’ve seen bands shout into the void for 10+ years on social media, and helped some artists get back to things like owning their website and direct connection to their audience with an email list.

Otherwise, it all becomes a digital hamster wheel that keeps us all spinning in place.

Here’s how you break out.

• Start looking at the profiles and about pages of the people you follow and see who they link to, what they like, who they follow.
• Start clicking the links in people’s newsletter and meet the people they’re gushing about.
• Tune into random live streams, hit play on podcasts you’ve never heard before.
• Join (and / or host) Zoom calls without expectations.
• Read the acknowledgements in books, and scan the credits of big video productions.

I know plenty of creative people doing these things a few times per week, and it puts dozens of wonderfully talented people onto their radar. I dare you to do the same!

Follow someone, subscribe, leave a thoughtful comment, send a DM or an email.

I’ve been doing this since at least 2023 and it’s radically shifted my creative vision, and given me hope for the future. Or you can continue letting an algorithm determine your fate, rather than trusting your gut and being intentional with who you let into your creative orbit.

On our recent “Find Your People On Substack” call we talked about finding our people, which of course led to building an audience, getting more subscribers.

But what if we think beyond mere subscribers?

We dream of reaching a big audience, but what does it mean if we’ve got no one to lean on? On our lowest days, who are the people that we can text or get on a phone call with?

We don’t just need a big subscriber count, we need good people in our corner.

Come to our FINDING YOUR PEOPLE ON SUBSTACK – SATURDAY EDITION this weekend.