Get Off Social Media, Embrace The Web
July 27, 2025
Lots of people right now feel inundated by information. In our digital age, it's like everything is flying at us all at once, and we're always just trying to sip from this super-powered firehouse of information. This is largely the fault of social media. Some people today, especially those of us in our 20s, are looking for an escape from this. People are trying to get away from social media, but we don't want to stop connecting with our friends. We all know that the internet is a great thing! We just want to get away from some of the ills presented by the usage of social media (which is just one of many ways to use the internet).
Many people will have many different strategies for doing this, but in this blog, I'll be presenting a kind of guide for how to use the World Wide Web as a replacement technology -- a new (old) way to stay online, without having to conform to the limiting format of a centralized service like Facebook or Instagram.
Why The Web?
The point of the internet is to facilitate the mass spread of information, without necessarily always needing to go through traditional publishers or gatekeepers. Anyone with an idea can spread it. But when all of that information goes through the bottleneck of a small collection of major platforms -- platforms that can control what is and isn't allowed -- doesn't it seem that we've lost the point of it all?
And even if you're not going at it for publishing subversive ideas or something like that, the web is still better than our existing social media platforms. The web is an open format. The web is less conducive to mindless consumption. The web encourages more intentional use. Every post you see is because you clicked a link and went there. Content exploration is also easier. You get recommended things online by people who share links to them. Those links post to external sites, not just more content hosted on the same service. There's no monolithic algorithms over-analyzing your decisions and coming up with recommendations that show up on your "feed". You have to explore. This already weeds out a lot of the more negative elements of social media, since it requires you to put thought into what you do.
It leads to less negativity from people in the comments, and less anxiety created by impulsive scrolling.
But all of this requires there to be a community on the web. A community of people who put their things on the web instead of social media, and who offer out links to interesting things they found recently.
So let's begin, how do we get on the web, and what can we do once we're there?
Getting on the web
The easiest method for getting on the web is to just sign up for a blog. You don't really have to make it function like a traditional blog though. Blogs are just websites that don't require you to learn HTML in order to create. You don't need to be writing entire articles and essays on here. You can just use it as an easy way to have a webpage and make social posts about yourself.
On Instagram, perhaps you might have posted a dozen pictures you took when you went to an event, with a one or two sentence long caption underneath. You could do the same thing here. Post your images, and include some text at the bottom (read ahead for how to embed your images if your blog provider doesn't host them for you). But you're also free to expand from this if you like. You're no longer creating something for a bored, apathetic audience with a low attention-span, who will ultimately be looking at your post through an algorithmic feed of junk. On the web, the people looking at your posts are likely to have longer attention-spans. If you wanted to write a whole paragraph or two about your experience, you'd be free to do so, without feeling as though people will scroll past and not read what you're trying to express.
Basically, you can use a blog, or the web in general, as a way to post the same type of thing you would normally post on social media. The benefit, however, is that you don't have to cater to the low-attention span that social media creates in people while they're using it. When you're on your computer browsing the web, you're often willing to spend more time looking at a single post than you would be if you were scrolling your phone while bored in line, for instance.
So, let's get into the more specific guide of how to actually do it.
The Guide
The Blog
First thing's first, you need to sign up for a blog service. There's a lot of options out there of course. Honestly, if you wanted, you could even just run a blog by making your own website, but doing all that isn't necessary. My personal recommendation is to sign up with Bear Blog. They're great. It's a small, independent blogging service. They're simple, but offer plenty of customization. And the whole thing is entirely free. There's a paid tier that unlocks some extra stuff, but all of the core features you expect from a blog are available without needing to pay for anything.
https://bearblog.dev/
Anyways, you're going to sign up with something. If you'd prefer a bigger name, you can use something like Substack, Medium, Blogger, or anything else. All these services offer more less the same thing -- a place online that belongs to you.
You might also go ahead and pick a theme for your blog, or even make a custom one yourself, but that's not strictly necessary, it's just nice is all. Some blogging services have a few pre-built themes you can just click and apply to your page, which makes things a lot easier.
Hosting Images
At a certain point, you might get the idea that you want to post some images. This is where we'll need to invoke the use of another service, since most blogs limit the amount of images that they'll host for you. We'll want to find a service that hosts images that can be referenced with a permalink to the image file. The best option I'm aware of for this is Imgur, although alternatives definitely exist. We can make an account on Imgur, upload our images, then right click "open image in new tab" and copy the image URL.
https://imgur.com/
This URL is what we will use to embed it into our blog post. This way, the reader can see the image without having to click on any link. If you're using a service that uses a markdown format, you can embed an image like so:
Where you replace 'image URL' with the URL that you copied, and ideally also fill in an actual description as well.
If you're using a visual editor for your blog, you'll have to dig around for yourself for any image embed buttons.
Examples
Okay, so you've seen the guide, but now you wanna see what the final product should look like in action. I've included two examples. The first is a blog designed by me. You can notice how I'm not trying to be professional or sound like an essayist or anything. I'm just writing like as if this were Twitter or Mastodon or something. There's no reason to try to be super polished about things unless that's what you wanna do. You have to think about this in the same way you would think about social media. Do you feel the need for everything on Instagram to be high fidelity content? If not, why should you feel any differently about a blog where you more less post the same type of stuff.
The second example was done by my friend Trezha, who worked on this idea with me of how the web can be used as a better way to connect online.
"Post-Roadtrip Thoughts" (by me)
https://riverpunk.bearblog.dev/post-roadtrip-thoughts/
"I went to a Concert" (by Trezha):
https://myfirst.bearblog.dev/i-went-to-a-concert/
Closing
The web is an amazing tool that allows for personal creative expression, and enables us to share those expressions with our friends. It's a tool that should connect us together. I find that social media doesn't always promote meaningful connection, and a lot of people my age seem to agree with me. We feel that there are better potential ways to connect with one another than just through the walled garden of social media.
I hope you'll consider creating a space for yourself on the free and open web, as opposed to the locked up platforms of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or otherwise. You don't have to leave your social media accounts if you get on the web, you can have both if you like. I just feel that society would be better off if more people felt free to create and post things on the web, and so that content could become linked together. We would develop longer attention spans, the things we post would become more meaningful (even if the content itself didn't change much), and people would be free to view it without needing to sign up through an authoritarian tech platform that values money over people.
This article, as well as mine and Trezha's example posts, were made as part of our team's submission for the CS Girlies Hackathon.