Nitish Pahwa, in a Slate piece densely packed with receipts:

Now that Trump is headed back to the White House, with X’s Elon Musk in tow, there is not even a pretense of hope on that platform for anyone who voted against Trump. It’s better late than never, but it’s well and truly time to cut X loose.

Maybe it seemed, once, that a spirited internal resistance could effectively limit Musk's damage and preserve some of the prior spirit of the microblogging platform that writers, public agencies, and other creative types had come to depend upon. I honestly cannot tell you what exactly was my justification for maintaining a Twitter/X presence, even as I explored other social media outfits and publicly acknowledged that Musk's regime was repelling masses of tweeters, boosting easily debunkable disinformation, shedding all of X's remaining utility for journalists, bullying transgender users, spreading straight-up white-supremacist rhetoric, and influencing CEOs in every other field to become as domineering and unapologetic as Musk is, whatever the backlash.

I refuse to fuel Musk’s algorithms with my content and attention. I started winding down my participation in October 2022 (after first trying to do so in 2018). I had several “professional obligations” on it at the time that made it impossible for me to fully disengage, but once those obligations no longer existed, I stopped posting on X/Twitter, and only read it when someone links to something over there.

(I then bleach my eyeballs, because yeeech.)

The only people still in the Nazi bar either are Nazis, like Nazis, or enjoy debating Nazis; or who—despite all the Nazi insignia, salutes, and propaganda surrounding them—still don’t believe they’re in a Nazi bar. Perhaps they’re busy nursing their carefully curated follow list in a back corner, and haven’t realized how many of their not-Nazi friends already left or are grabbing their coats. Or their friends are waiting on them to rise and head for the door so they can follow.

Or, perhaps, they don’t know better bars exist.

Today, the three meaningful alternatives to X/Twitter are Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon. I chose Mastodon, because it’s because it’s not owned by any (billionaire) individual, and it’s where most of my (generally geeky) people are. It’s big advantage is it’s decentralized: there are multiple servers talking to each other rather than one single, central server. A benefit of this is you can join a server based on topic or affinity (e.g. technology, journalism, or activism). The biggest downside? It’s decentralized, which requires you to choose a server (in the way you choose an email provider) with no easy way of comparing them, and the getting started process can be arduous for many non-techie folks.

More and more people are moving from X/Twitter, some 700,000 in a week to Bluesky alone, according to Jay Peters at The Verge:

Bluesky gained more than 700,000 new users in the last week and now has more than 14.5 million users total, Bluesky COO Rose Wang confirmed to The Verge. The “majority” of the new users on the decentralized social network are from the US, Wang says. The app is currently the number two free social networking app in the US App Store, only trailing Meta’s Threads.

That’s the second large influx recently:

The independent platform has seen a lot of growth in recent weeks — on October 24th, Bluesky announced it had 13 million users. After X’s recent announcement that it would let blocked users still see posts from the person that blocked them, for example, Bluesky said it added 500,000 new users in one day.

Many friends are happy on BlueSky. Some prefer Meta/Facebook’s Threads (though I’m not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg any more than I am of Elon Musk). I have accounts on both, mainly as a hedge, in case someone I really care about is active on one of them.

The Verge offers more specific advice on how to leave X/Twitter, including taking your account private, downloading your content, and eventually deactivating your account completely.

Regardless of which new social network you choose, it’s important to start the process now. The best time to leave a Nazi bar is the day it becomes one. The next best time is today.