Unplatform

Through my work on From The Superhighway, I was exposed to a variety of critical writing about the history of the Internet and how the world of Web 2.0 - the world of ad-supported, data harvesting social media platforms - came to be. Through this exposure, it became clear to me that there needed to be a holistic resource designed to assist the general public with taking back control over their presence on the Web from the corporate platforms of Silicon Valley. This resource manifested in January 2025 as Unplatform.

Unplatform is an interactive guidebook, online library, and recommendations database intended to help would-be social media refugees escape their respective digital prisons platforms and join the indie web. It already has over 100 links to website builders, local newsletters, educational resources, and software recommendations from across the Web and the world - and these links are all collected and organized in a filterable database that anyone can use to reconstruct their relationship with the digital world.

The reaction to Unplatform’s launch has been uniformly positive and unimaginably immense. I receive emails about the project on an almost daily basis - some contain recommendations for the database, some are asking for advice for “unplatforming” their friends and family, and some are straightforward expressions of gratitude for the project’s existence in the first place. I’m enormously honored to be able to provide regular people the digital alternatives they’ve been looking for, and I plan to continue adding to the Unplatform database and revising its guidebook for years to come.