How To Own Your Own Social Media

I have sixteen years of posts. Photos of my kids as babies, jokes that only made sense that week, little essays, whole eras of my life. And for most of those sixteen years, the originals lived on machines owned by companies that sell my attention to advertisers, behind an algorithm that decides which of my own friends I get to hear from.

That arrangement is so normal that it's hard to see how strange it is. You made the thing. Your friends want to see it. And a ranking system built to maximize time-on-app sits between you, renting your own memories back to you.

“Stories are… kind of a cool journal. But it doesn't behave as a journal. It behaves as an engagement machine, so that people have to stay stuck to their phones.” me, thinking out loud, March 2026

Elsewhere is my answer. It's a local-first publishing platform: your photos, videos, and writing live in a vault on your machine, publish to a site on your domain, and cross-post outward from there. The platforms get copies. You keep the source of truth. Your feed is the people you chose, at their real domains, in order.

And the part I refuse to soften, because it's the whole point:

“I would like to commit right now that we will never change this: we'll never have an algorithm. If you want to follow your friends at their real domains… you will see every one of your friends' feeds that you want to see, not based on an algorithm.” the commitment, on the record, March 2026

One more thing that matters to me: this has to work without a lifestyle change. You must be able to take back ownership of your own social media without becoming a dork. If owning your posts requires becoming a sysadmin or announcing your departure from society, it's not a way out, it's a hobby.