I used StatusNet when it was identi.ca for quite some time, specially because back then Twitter really allowed 3rd party clients and with multi-protocol clients was really easy to use both.<p>When I was using identi.ca it was pretty much about Linux, Open Source, and basically that was it. I never got the same level of interaction I can enjoy in Twitter; but that&#x27;s not a technical issue, is just that a social network needs people to interact and identi.ca back then (and I suspect GNU Social today) was not used enough to make it interesting for me.<p>I tried, because you can argue that is silly to complain about not enough people using a social network if you don&#x27;t start using it yourself; but at some point identi.ca got flooded with bots and people &quot;abusing&quot; the API instead of using the social network, and I gave up.<p>I love twitter because I can meet people based on common interests (eg, 8-bit computers), and also broadcast about my current projects (not sure who finds that interesting though).<p>To be honest, things should get really bad with Twitter for me to leave it, but then I don&#x27;t think there will be a substitute (and if there&#x27;s one, having my own infrastructure would be very low priority, in the same way I don&#x27;t host my own XMPP server).