Some weeks ago, in an impulse of purifying simplification, we closed all of our social media accounts. As you can imagine, the Event globally went unnoticed in each of these communities, the fault of an already very busy news feed and, to be honest, a total absence of viral potential of this information.

However, some followers still reacted. Asking us why we were no longer on these networks and how to follow us from now on. As the question continues to be asked to us regularly, here is the why and the how.

The myth of social networks

Social networks are those computer platforms available via the Internet that offer to bring users together to allow them to communicate. Yes, we can already do all this with the basic Internet and these social networks justify and legitimize their existence by the following myth:

You cannot be in relation without going through our platform.

The Myth

In a sense, that’s true. Anonymous visitors will be invited to register to benefit from published generated content by the community. And conversely, their members will only see what is already there (links to the outside being devalued or even prohibited). To be in relation with these wonderful communities, you have to be present there, and publish lots of content.

After more than 15 years of use and observations of these networks, we have drawn up an assessment. Personal therefore subjective but which answers the question of why…

• Linkedin. A fancy dress ball, a bestiary of cryptozoology, to the point of nausea.
• Facebook. Between the mother of the gifted children, the xenophobic uncle and the conspiratorial cousin, family celebrations are already not funny in real life.
• Instagram. Remember those endless afternoons when Grandpa shows off slides from his latest trip? It’s the same here but with younger people.
• Twitter. All the bars in the world, sharing the same room. Lots of noise to remake the world between alcoholics and coffee is $8.
• TikTok. A nightclub where it sways in noise and smoke. There are those who show themselves, and those who watch. Take care of your glass, you don’t know what have been put in it.

We could list them all but the conclusion is always the same: these places are toxic. In any case not made for us.

Back to basics

Even if the fashion is currently web 3.0 and its distributed content, the web has been distributed for 30 years (it was designed like that from the start). So rather than betting on an nth new technology that will flop after consuming as much electricity as a country, we chose the fundamentals.

RSS feed

For those who want to read us without getting involved.

Every time we publish a new article, we add it to our RSS feed. What is this ? A simple file (in XML format if you want to know) which, unsurprisingly, contains the list of the latest articles.

Just fill in the link to this file in your feed aggregator (or sometimes called feed readers) so that it will consult it regularly and informs you if there is something new here. You will find a list of these readers on Framalibre (personally, we use Thunderbird).

• RSS in french
• RSS in english

Unsubscribing is super easy, just delete our feed from your reader.

Mailing List

For those who want more news and the possibility of participating (they can also read us without participate).

RSS feeds being a little limited in terms of interactions, we also offer you an information email where we publish our news regularly (no more than once a week). As this letter is in fact a mailing list, you can also reply to it to enrich the reflections.

Concretely, just send an email to the list (no need to put an object or content there, the robot will not read it) and you will receive, perhaps in your spam, a confirmation email that you just need to reply to (same, no content needed, just “reply”).

• Mailing list in french,
• Mailing list in english.

To unsubscribe, just send an email to this address: arsouyes-en-unsubscribe@arsouyes.org (or arsouyes-fr-unsubscribe@arsouyes.org for the french version, no subject or body needed) and the robot will send you a confirmation email (watch your spam) to which you just need to answer. This is reminded at the end of each message sent by the list.

And if you find these manipulations too complicated, write to us and we will take care of it for you.

And after

In truth, we do very well without “social networks” on which we only went out of habit. By restricting ourselves to RSS and emails, we have rediscovered the simple pleasure of strolling through cyberspace without pressure and the authenticity of the exchanges with the authors we meet there.