I see a lot of posts about people leaving platforms. This one about leaving Reddit, this one about leaving WordPress, and a bunch of others about leaving Discord, GitHub, Codeberg, Photoshop, and more. There are also those talking about leaving the web entirely for the smallweb (Gopher, Gemini, etc).
The reasons vary. Pricing changes, AI training on everything you post, a new owner, a new policy, or just the slow feeling that things feel like they stopped being built for a person. But the posts all have the same shape. Someone spent years somewhere, it changed under them, and now they're packing up.
What strikes me is that hardly anyone is leaving for something big. They're going smaller. A personal site, a self-hosted app, a capsule nobody's going to stumble onto by accident. Less reach, more control. A few years ago that would have sounded like giving up. Now it sounds like the sensible option.
I don't think the big platforms are going anywhere. But the people who made them interesting in the first place keep quietly walking out the side door, and writing a post about it on their way out.
Which, I suppose, is what we're all doing here.