Adoption
This is a curated list of projects, services and products that, in one or many ways, fulfil the potential of Slow Internet. Slow Internet is not paid to promote or otherwise affiliated with any of these projects. Rather, they are featured as they make out excellent real-world illustrations of what the principles and examples of Slow Internet can look like in practice. If you know of a project that should be featured here, let us know, we will grow this list in the years to come and include especially noteworthy examples in our infrequent newsletter updates.
The Light Phone
The Light Phone is a phone that offers deliberate limits to what you can do with it. You can call, text individuals or groups, read and make notes. You can use it as an alarm clock, a calculator, a calendar, and a music and podcast listening device. A directions tool is underway. That’s it. This echoes the Slow Internet suggestion of moving from a default of multi-purpose devices to a more conscious curation of functionality.
Freedom
Freedom allows you to turn off the sites and apps that have gathered enough data on your strengths and weaknesses to use them against you – those where you need more than willpower to stay away and stay on track. Ideally, it shouldn't be up to the user to fight the dark patterns of addictive design, but until more websites opt for Slow Internet principles, tools like Freedom offer some breathing space.
Nomad List
There are many websites where users help each other by sharing what they know on a platform that makes the information easy to access.
Nomad List is an excellent example of exactly this. Created by Pieter Levels in 2014, it allows people working and living from different places in the world for relatively short periods of time to get a grasp of the place they are in or want to go to, whether related to living arrangements, currencies or local customs. Its combination of aggregated and official data about locations, and user-generated knowledge, makes Nomad List unique and highly valuable to its users.
Nomad List is also funded by its own users rather than venture capitalists or other investors. This helps keep their incentives aligned with their users’.
Fediverse
The Fediverse is a part of the Internet that offers alternatives to the dominant social media actors and 500 additional platforms for social life and organisation. The brilliance of the Fediverse is how it frees people from the network effect that has kept so many on faulty platforms longer than they’ve deserved in order not to lose one’s network. The Fediverse instead operates much like email: just like you can email people with another email provider than what you use yourself, you can be on any of the federated instances of these social platforms and be in contact with your friends and followers who are on the others. It’s social media without the treachery and dishonesty of trapping people in user agreements and keeping their friends hostage.
Focusmate
Focusmate is an excellent peer-to-peer way to help one another stay on track with whatever project or goal you’ve set for yourself. It can be simple things, like watering your plants, or some larger undertaking, such as building a website. The important Slow Internet aspect of Focusmate is that it’s all about asking the user to define their own goals (in life) and then aligning with those through design and features. This brings the users closer to what they came for, rather than distracted.
Pinboard
Pinboard provides “social bookmarking for introverts” and was created by Maciej Cegłowski in 2009 as an alternative to popular bookmarking platforms at the time. Pinboard charges a signup fee and initially increased this fee by a fraction of a cent with each new user as a way to limit its growth and deter spammers from signing up. Such interesting approaches to pace, a focus on privacy, speed and user value, and the founder’s long track record of engaging critically with tech discourse make Pinboard an excellent example of Slow Internet principles.
uBlock Origin
You should never be forced to see content that you don’t want to see. That includes corporate propaganda, also known as advertisements.
There are many adblockers that remove ads from your online world, but uBlock Origin goes further in that it allows users to help each other detect when influencers and creators sneak in sponsored messages, in videos and the like, and remove those too.
uBlock Origin can also shut off much of the tracking that dominant tech corporations such as Google/Alphabet and Facebook/Meta run on all their services. This means using uBlock Origin also limits how much data these companies can collect about your preferences, thoughts and behaviours.