Tech Reclaimers Update - A Year In, Building a Social Movement Away from Big Tech

The panel marks the first year of Tech Reclaimers, a non-profit that grew out of a Fediverse community around the Hackers.Town instance. Its aim is to help people leave big tech platforms through peer-to-peer teaching rather than top-down instruction. The founders describe how the idea took shape after one of them ran a 21-day cleanse aimed at the gap between early adopters and everyone else.

Over the year the group built an online presence on Mastodon, Discord and Signal, ran in-person workshops, and produced printable guides. The speakers also described harder parts of the work, including the sudden death of a co-founder weeks after launch and the paperwork of forming a 501(c)(3). They shared stories of members teaching each other, such as a newcomer who moved from an iPhone to a Linux distribution. Current campaigns cover music and photo libraries using self-hosted tools like Jellyfin, an indie-web push called the Evergreen Web, and links with groups in Europe, the UK and the Neo-Luddite movement in New York.

Looking ahead, the group plans to take workshops into libraries, community centers and colleges, and to help friends migrate their tools together. Their advice to newcomers is to examine the social and economic forces behind a product, not only the technology.