Years ago, when I taught in-person classes about the social web and related topics, I remember always mentioning how important it is for someone who wants to have an online presence to build it around their own website and blog. I used to say, You always want to control your center on the internet. Who knows if Twitter and similar platforms will always be as predominant as they are now?
I believed that, and I have always maintained my website regardless of how much I was actively updating it. But to be honest, I never foresaw how much Twitter would turn into a dump. Nonetheless, it seemed a reasonable point to make, knowing other big platforms had gone astray in the past.
However, this is not about Twitter; it is about the limitations of any Twitter-like platform and how they are bad. As Coyote says on Twitterlike is a bad shape (I highly encourage you to read the entire blog post):
Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn’t just a matter of who’s in charge; it’s a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.
I touched on the same topic in Corporate-Owned Social Media and the Fediverse (2022). The scope and depth of my text were nothing like the one I’m recommending now, though. I think Coyote explains very well what is driving me to reclaim the blog and move away (except for maybe some last gasps here and there) from Twitter-like territories.