(translated from Catalan by Alain Gertrand)

You too will leave X, Instagram and all the other big platforms that, for now, seem like irreplaceable components of our lives. The golden age of these social networks is behind us. And yes, that means for you, too.

The 2.0 boom lasted a good ten years. During these ten years, big American and Chinese corporations made their way into our homes, our kitchens, our bodies and our hearts in such a strong fashion, that it now seems impossible that they would ever leave.

It seems impossible… but it isn’t. Now, finally, after being delayed by the recent pandemic, the final phase of their programmed obsolescence has begun. And there’s no going back. No, not for you either.

You may not believe it. But… why don’t you believe it?

It’s impossible to ignore the increasingly poor user experience, the generally dark vibes, the CEOs free-falling from proto-fascist midlife crises on steroids… So why, despite all this, have so many people like you not yet taken the step towards alternatives that are already active, functional, clean, horizontal and open?

I believe that, at the very end of the day, there are only four answers to this question:

Accumulated and non-transferable followers:

The following that you’ve progressively built on these platforms, through decades of energy and daily activity, has become a huge personal — and even professional — treasure.

Your number of followers is a marker that has transcended the reality of digital service to become a social and professional benchmark. We have collectively accepted that our value is measured, in part, by the size of our digital audience.

Blindly forsaking this clout is, for many people who work in media professions, suicide. It’s perfectly understandable that they would be reluctant to take this step. The larger the follower base, the more their digital identity is linked to their profession or social identity, and the more complicated it will be for them to migrate to a space where they’ll feel like they have to start from scratch. This is, obviously, the main reason to stick to the status quo, no matter how much the status quo sucks. Besides, this non-transferability is not a fault of the system: it’s part of the business model of these platforms.

Good old FOMO

Aside from losing followers, if you feel that most conversations and important events in your world happen on these platforms, it will be hard to feel like you aren’t keeping up, or that you’re missing out on things that could be interesting or important to you. Missing out on what’s happening, being left out, is a very scary thing — and probably more so the younger you are.

These platforms have become our main channel of interaction with reality. We have accepted their role as an intermediary between us and life. We don’t want to be cut off from the circuit, because that would immediately mean being cut off from the real world.

The addiction is pleasant

There is a more hedonistic argument in favor of consuming these platforms: owning up to self-destruction in a controlled manner. You can put it like this: “I don’t want to leave X because I like seeing what goes on there, even if it’s a load of crap.”

I truly empathize with this argument. Let’s face it, we were not put on this earth as examples of purity and perfection. We all have moments of weakness, and life is not a contest of irreproachability.

The best thing about this argument is that it recognizes the toxic component of the addiction caused by these platforms. It’s like pointing out your own addiction and saying:

“Yeah, so what?”. For me, this is simply a preliminary step before eventually starting to quit. Overcoming addiction is a very difficult and slow process, but it starts with admitting that there is an addiction in the first place.

Group dynamics

We are pressured by group dynamics into not acting out; this is a type of conformism that feeds on the interconnected fears that we all live with. Let someone else jump off the cliff, and we’ll see if it’s really dangerous or not. The cautious, conservative position of others feeds into your own, validates it, and inhibits you from doing what you would perhaps otherwise do if you were completely alone.

These four arguments seem very powerful and, for the most part, still very convincing. However, here is the news I bring you today: they do not have the capacity to stop a migration that has already begun, and that is irreversible.

The enshittification process can in no way be reverted

“Enshittification” (a concept coined by Canadian journalist and blogger Cory Doctorow) is the pattern by which private digital products and services gradually degrade in quality — and do so by design. It’s a three-stage process, which he explains as follows:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

This balance between cornered users, trapped advertisers, and shareholder pressure is unstable, and it inevitably tends toward self-destruction. As the application crumbles and its social mass begins to decline, shareholders tighten their hold on it even more, which leads management teams to squeeze even more out of users and advertisers, forcing the acceleration of this decline. There can be no reversal of the enshittification process without a radical change in the business model. And it doesn’t look like any of these platforms will end up being expropriated, or that they will forsake the market logic of their own accord. In addition, the dynamics of degradation of services encourage the emergence of attractive alternatives that are gradually maturing, and this competitive pressure even further accelerates the old platforms’ death.

So what does this mean? It means that, worst case scenario, even if you swear you won’t leave X, sooner or later X will leave you. And the same will end up happening with the rest of the big platforms in the current mainstream, no matter how far away that reality might seem. So why not get a head start, and get off the bandwagon in time?

What is being unsustainably “shittified” is our life

Journalist Ed Zitron writes:

Everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.

We are no strangers to the enshittification process. These platforms being as influential as they are, they cause shit to spread into our personal and collective lives. Our relationship with culture is shittified, our discussions are intoxicated, and the smartest and most intelligent people in our societies are held hostage by the addictive gamification of these spaces, instead of dedicating their energy to their personal projects. And, slowly but surely, the shit reaches our parliaments, our radios, our schools… and, as I said earlier, it reaches our heads and our hearts: our way of thinking, of picturing ourselves, of understanding who we are, what we want and what we wish for our futures becomes shittified too.

This decade of increasingly efficient, addictive and sophisticated digital consumption has made us do some very strange things.

I don’t know about you, but when I look back, I think it’ll be painful to remember the 2015-2025 decade of my life as one spent mainly with my head bowed over a screen, scrolling endlessly. The average Catalan life expectancy is 83.16 years. Ten years is 12% of that. Twenty is almost 1/4th of it. I ask myself: am I ready to waste it away like this?

This infinite scrolling fad perhaps made sense when we thought it was something new, fresh, democratic and hope-inducing. But now, we know that it was all a lie. We find ourselves scrolling on increasingly dark platforms, dominated by people whose perversion is increasingly explicit, with increasingly addictive behaviors, feeding forces that do not work for the wellbeing of humanity, but instead are willing to throw it away in order to fatten up not their pockets, not their power — but their ego.

Peer pressure will change sides

It doesn’t really matter if you’re not willing to leave, because it would hurt too much to lose 50,000 followers, or 12,000 likes, or because FOMO has gotten the best of you. Those who have the least to lose will be the first to make the move. But this change will affect you too, slowly. This social mass will, little by little, become influential… and will end up dismembering these social markers that mean so much to you. Accounts with 150,000 followers will notice that part of their audience has left, and that the remaining numbers have become nothing more than indicators of a distant past.

These increasingly meaningless numbers are, in essence, the great accelerator of the platform’s self-destruction. Attempts to mask the loss of social mass will be futile, no matter how much effort is put into faking numbers through highly-sophisticated bots. The mechanisms of influence in the real world will break, one after the other. Things will start to fail until, eventually, the system shuts down.

New platforms empower us

Some may think: and then what? If we leave one platform for another similar one, won’t the shit-cycle just repeat itself? Will we go back to bowing our heads and scrolling? Thankfully, this won’t be the case. The internet of the future has built antibodies, it’s a more federated internet, a less vertical one. An internet that cannot be hijacked with such ridiculous ease.

Fedivers, as well as other horizontal alternatives currently being established, are aiming to avoid enshittification, as they reject the incentives of hypermonetization and allow users to better control their experience and gain real agency over their audience and activity. If any elements appear that threaten to degrade the conversation, there are many mechanisms in place to fix this quickly and collectively, without paying the price of hijacking a private network.

The most interesting thing about this migration is that it’s causing an awakening.

Inhabiting more horizontal spaces, with less pressure and less tension from algorithms and tools that encourage permanent hypertensive toxicity, causes a kind of sensitisation.

A reminder that you can experience the internet (and life as a whole) in a different way. And this reminder is like lifting your head up: it’s extraordinarily powerful.

The empowerment that comes with participating in a federated network, in which we protect each other and decide together whether we like what we are experiencing or not

— this experience pushes and accelerates the process of abandoning the old-school networks. When you free yourself from some things in life, it becomes very difficult to willingly continue being a slave to others. Liberation is a virus.

Leaving was utopian when there were no other possible alternatives

In 2025, leaving a social network is not a revolutionary utopian idea; it simply means changing providers. Before the pandemic, the dilemma was to be or not to be. You were either online, or you practiced digital fasting. This is no longer the case. We have viable, functional, horizontal and sustainable alternatives at our disposal. And they are increasingly powerful, they are richer, and they feed into each other.

Bluesky and Mastodon are the most obvious alternatives to date, simply because X is the  network that has reached the most advanced stage of this enshittification process. The people at Bluesky are already preparing an alternative for Instagram. Spotify is surrounded by powerful competing proposals that are less exploitative of artists, and who are ready to overtake them. Fediverse is unfolding slowly, sometimes clumsily, sometimes with flaws… but the social mass is growing every day, and it is this social mass that helps to improve and perfect these services.

You are still on time

It’s inevitable. Some will go sooner, others later, but we will all migrate towards these new and improved places. The best thing you can do is to get a head start, as much as you’re able to, and get to the forefront of this migration, taking it as an inevitable form of selfcare.

Those of you with the most to lose will be the last to go, but sooner or later you will be more or less forced to take that plunge. The more those of us with little to lose dare to jump, the easier it will be for those with the most to lose to follow.

Some may think: “Okay, but leaving X and not Instagram is being a hypocrite.” That’s not true. Everything happens on its own time. The enshittification process and the alternatives don’t all happen in parallel. The reality is that a large migration from X will promote and accelerate the following migrations, but not all of them can happen at the same time.

If you feel that you’re already convinced, rejoice! An intense migration of those of us who are most motivated will help break the chains. It will counteract the four reasons for staying in the status quo that we reviewed at the beginning of this article: with a large migration, we can recover part of the voice and reach that we had to leave behind, the FOMO gradually changes sides, and we find the opportunity to reencounter a less toxic and less addictive pleasure; and group pressure, rather than instigating paralysis, begins to instigate change.

No need to rush, you just need to change your perspective a little. The debate isn’t about whether or not to quit X, but rather about when to do it.

Make no mistake about it. We will all leave this already-collapsing online world. And the good news is that on the other side of this change lie only good things. Finally, an internet of our own.