I enjoyed this post by Newport about the Indie web. I’m on Mastodon more and more and Twitter less and less. I left Facebook behind long ago and haven’t looked back.
Instagram, is a bit more problematic because I genuinely enjoy it, but it’s also owned by Facebook who is a bane on society.
Newport’s right as he says:
Despite its advantages, however, I suspect that the IndieWeb will not succeed in replacing existing social-media platforms at their current scale. For one thing, the IndieWeb lacks the carefully engineered addictiveness that helped fuel the rise of services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This addictiveness has kept people returning to their devices even when they know there are better uses for their time; remove the addiction, and you might lose the users.
In so many ways the Indie Web feels like what the whole web felt when I first got involved in it.
I miss that place still.