Everyone's Packing Up
A short reflection highlights a growing shift of users abandoning major centralized platforms for personal sites and the smallweb in search of control.
summary is enough The short blog post provides a relatable framing, but the real value is in the extensive reader discussion on digital fatigue and platform enshittification.
summary
Users are migrating away from platforms like Reddit and WordPress toward personal sites and obscure protocols. Driven by intrusive policies, monetization shifts, and AI scraping, creators are trading audience reach for digital autonomy. Commenters expand on this by citing CAPTCHA exhaustion, disillusionment with AI-driven software development, and the quiet exit from mainstream social media.
key points
- Platform migrations favor self-hosted apps, personal sites, and minor protocols over alternative tech giants.
- Primary catalysts include unwanted policy changes, AI training scraping user data, and deteriorating community quality.
- A parallel burnout exists in software engineering, where AI code generation tools have stripped away the intrinsic joy of building.
who should read it
Technologists and developers fatigued by modern web platforms and corporate social media.
discussion skeptical
consensus
Participants overwhelmingly agree that mainstream platforms are degrading through enshittification and aggressive anti-bot measures, prompting many to abandon or heavily restrict their social media usage.
pushback
A minority argue that these departure announcements are performative exaggerations, noting that platform user bases remain massive and most discontented users ultimately return.
When the light went on I pulled everything down from GH and all my private repos (80 or so) off bitbucket. I quit social media way long ago so nothing there. I refuse to let platforms train on my code. Since I could see the writing on the wall, I jumped off MacOS and installed linux on everything I own including macbooks although they have been replaced now with non apple hardware now. The few services that I have online refuse connections from data centers and sketchy user agents.
When LLMs are done killing the Internet (and they will), I wont lament it, Ill say good riddance. There was a …
It outlines a radical personal decoupling from modern tech infrastructure, including removing code from version control repositories, switching to Linux, and anticipating the collapse of the open web.
Generated by an LLM from the article and thread. Check the sources before relying on it.