A friend on Facebook asked:
Leave Twitter or stay*?
If you’re leaving, where are you going?
My response:
For myself, I’ll likely keep my account active (deleting an account doesn’t remove it from being followed, and means that username is up for grabs, which means a bad actor/spammer could grab it and start showing up in the feeds of anyone who was still following that username), but I may start scaling back my usage (even more than I already have). There are still a lot of people on there that I value following, but if the ratio starts to change, so it goes.
My personal preference (at least in an ideal world) is for my own personal website. I own it, I can put what I want on it, and I’ve had a blog running there for more than 20 years now. How frequently I post to it varies depending on how much I’m sucked into Facebook or Twitter at any given time, but I’ve never let it totally die off, and maybe this will (once again) be impetus to start babbling there again.
Of course, the down side to personal blogs is that for “most people”, they’re not as visible — you have to either go to them, or have some form of RSS newsreader set up, which isn’t difficult, but if you don’t know about that as an option, it doesn’t do any good — because they’re not being algorithmically pushed into people’s faces, so you get fewer readers. And without “like” buttons or similar functionality (which I’ve not bothered to figure out how to do on mine), if the readers you do have don’t comment, then you don’t have the gratification of feedback. I’m well aware that this is one of the things that keeps sucking me back to Facebook: I can post the same thing here and on my blog, and I have no idea if anyone ever sees my blog, but here I’ll get reactions and comments.
I also have accounts on both Mastodon and Cohost, and will every so often check back in to see what’s going on there. As always, if more people I know use those more often, I’m more likely to participate more often.