The Local-First Manifesto: Reject All Social Media and Reclaim Reality
Enough. We say no to the endless scroll. No to the digital puppeteers. No to any social media—centralized or decentralized—that steals our time, steals our minds, and steals our souls. This is a call to arms for a Local-First Movement: a rebellion against the digital empire that colonizes our lives and destroys what makes us human.
Social media is a poison. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or the slick new decentralized playgrounds like Nostr and Pubky, the result is the same: fragmentation, distraction, hollow connection. These networks profit by enslaving your attention, trading your privacy like currency, and reducing your life to data points on a screen.
We refuse to be slaves to feeds, likes, reposts, and zaps. The algorithms do not serve you. They serve themselves — and the unseen masters behind the screens. Every notification is a chain. Every swipe deepens the prison. The “decentralized” label is a lie if it still drags you into digital noise and chaos.
We stand for locality. For the face-to-face conversation, the neighbor’s wave, the shared work of a community bound by place, not pixels. The Local-First Movement is about choosing real human presence over virtual simulation. We reject the manufactured connections of social media and reclaim our time, our focus, our space.
We fight for our minds and spirits. Social media is a machine designed to numb your will and cloud your thoughts. It breeds comparison, envy, and vanity — cultural poisons that erode our roots and cloud our vision. We take back the power to think deeply, to pray silently, to live authentically.
We defend our privacy and sovereignty. No network, no matter how decentralized, should have access to the details of your life. Your data is not a commodity. Your identity is not a product. We reject the permanent digital trails and invisible surveillance embedded in every platform.
This is a movement of resistance, of choice, of freedom. We declare our homes, neighborhoods, and local communities as our true networks. We build our worlds outside the screens. We choose flesh over pixels, presence over distraction, reality over simulation.