After watching the great Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, I felt the documentary did an excellent job of explaining all the problems inherent to Social media, but offered very little in the way of meaningful solutions.

On their website, they invite the viewer to their Facebook page, Instagram page, or Twitter account, which is deeply hypocritical, after thoroughly bashing those very platforms.

In addition to those, their website invites the viewer to advertise their documentary on Social Media (further irony!), or sign up for an email newsletter from a related organization, called “The Center for Humane Technology” (and they too have a Facebook page, and Twitter account).

So we’re back to Social Media again! Apparently there’s no escape from Social Media, even for these champions of escaping Social Media!

The only online “outs” they offer from Social Media is to passively subscribe to an email mailing list, or passively listen to podcasts (or read some physical, offline books, or have offline conversations). Sorry, folks, that’s not very creative, or inviting of any innovation or change. Apparently they couldn’t manage to scratch up anything like a Discourse or Mattermost server, which would invite actual back-and-forth conversation outside all the large Social Media platforms. No mention of RSS.

Here’s an unrelated article which I feel hits the nail on the head, by someone who gets RSS. This is the solution I think they should advocate.

Here is my own RSS feed link.

As to becoming a self-hosted Netizen (who has an RSS feed), I explained briefly how I did my own self-hosting in a recent Dhamma Talk seen here (as a testament to it being possible).