Given the resent issues with the bird site, it’s been great to see so many people delete their accounts to move away. Voting with your attention is the best way to use the power at your disposal. Of course, you can use whatever site it is that you want to use, but many of the users I am seeing are just moving from one bad silo to another. Perhaps naively, I thought people would have learnt by now to demand more from their social network.

You don’t need to know the ins and out of indie websites and decentralisation to know that any private company that controls your attention is going to do the same things. They all have layers of staff to pay, infrastructure to keep running and as such need to show you as many ads as they possibly can, or charge you money to use it.

So, with disappointment, I see users making the same mistakes that photographers did when Instagram went down hill. Jumping from one silo into another one, that will always end up going the same way. Manipulating the users to maximise time on site is inevitable. Thankfully, this is the perfect opportunity to really think about your social media usage and come to terms with the fact that nothing good can ever come from the attention economy.

With that said, use whatever you want to use and if something brings you happiness, then go for it! However, investing your time into a place, wherever that may be, that has your best interests at heart should be a focus. Not jumping to the new hotness. For many people, there will not be a new place, and perhaps that is the best thing for society. Although I am enjoying using some alternatives such as Mastodon, I am thinking long and hard about my usage and don’t want to swop one bad habit for another one.