I left Twitter last year and purged a decade's worth of tweets, and didn't replace it with Bluesky or anything else. I'd never enjoyed Twitter, and to be honest leaving it felt like a weight lifting from my shoulders. I remember hearing secondhand about some drama on Bluesky, and just feeling an overwhelming sense of relief that I didn't have an account and had no way of finding out any specific details — which confirmed my opinion that I was right not to rush onto a shiny new platform.

Instagram and Facebook never sparked that kind of feeling — the former is mainly a place where I follow pretty photography, lifestyle and cooking accounts, the latter is where I stay in touch with friends and family (I'm an immigrant so all my family is overseas, and for various reasons the overwhelming majority of my friends live in other cities or countries). However, without aggressive curation, both sites can become very overwhelmingly stressful, particularly at difficult political moments. Hence abandoning both of them until December.

In general, after I completed my PhD and stopped being a university student, I just ceased to have any offline social connections, other than work colleagues and friendly acquaintances, and I never really noticed this until I temporarily cut myself off from all my online social connections so dramatically.