Everyone's Packing Up

A pattern has emerged of long-time users quietly abandoning major platforms - Reddit, WordPress, Discord, GitHub, Photoshop and more - and migrating toward smaller, self-controlled spaces like personal sites, self-hosted apps, or niche protocols such as Gopher and Gemini. Motivations include price hikes, platforms training AI on user content, changes in ownership or policy, and a pervasive sense that services are no longer designed around people. Rather than dramatic exits to a single new destination, most departures are modest: less reach, less chance of accidental discovery, and more control over one’s content and experience.

The argument is that this shrink-to-control move, once dismissed as surrendering influence, has become the sensible response to platform rot. The big services will persist, but the creative core that made them interesting is steadily slipping out the side door. Personal projects, explicit anti-AI signals, and curated micro-ecosystems capture the same impulse: preserve agency and craft a quieter web life. The piece is both observation and participation in that trend, noting the cumulative effect of many small departures even while the giants remain.