I'm catching up on conversations and archiving some bookmarks today, but I plan to use fedi a lot less in the future. It just doesn't hit right anymore. A lot of the good users have slowly been leaving, and while several remain (thanks for keeping it real), the proportion of vitriol and bad taste--part of what makes mainstream social media so awful--seems to increase every day. Maybe that's just because it's an election year; but one could also think of internet communities as ecological systems that constantly undergo changes in composition.

Various people have made embarrassing blog posts in the past declaring that "the fediverse is dead". I think people typically believe the fediverse is dead simply because it no longer measures up to their expectations in terms of culture or content moderation.

Indeed, it seems to me that the fediverse has lost a certain je ne sais quoi. But I won't make the same mistake of declaring the fediverse "dead" as others have done before.

While I don't plan to leave the fediverse for good, I expect to be far less active on here, so a scaled-down version of "goodbye" is in order. Mutuals and followers: thanks for making the fediverse great, and I wish you all good fortune.