At the risk of sounding crazy, I de-indexed my blog myself and rely on the mailing list (which is now approaching 5000 subscribers) + reprints in several other online media to get traffic to me. On a good day, I get 5000 hits, which is quite a lot by Czech language community standards.
Together with deleting my Facebook and Twitter accounts, this removed a lot of pressure to conform to their unclear policies. Especially around 2019-21, it was completely unclear how to escape their digital guillotine which seemed to hit various people randomly.
The deliverability problem still stands, though. You cannot be completely independent nowadays. Fortunately my domain is 9 years old.
Similar here. I've removed my websites from Google so people would find that other engines can return more complete results. People can find the content using any other engine (or LLM) or links in relevant places. Using anything but the monopolist should pay off until it's no longer a monopoly, or at least not one abused to gain power in other markets like by advertising their browser product on the homepage and not allowing anyone else to advertise there (much less for free)
Together with deleting my Facebook and Twitter accounts, this removed a lot of pressure to conform to their unclear policies. Especially around 2019-21, it was completely unclear how to escape their digital guillotine which seemed to hit various people randomly.
The deliverability problem still stands, though. You cannot be completely independent nowadays. Fortunately my domain is 9 years old.