you CAN simply leave twitter. like, this is a viable option. it's not easy and you will probably experience withdrawal for a long time but it does go away and you'll genuinely feel a lot better.
source: guy who left twitter over a year ago and is feelin great (me)
can confirm, i pretty much left twitter two years ago and its been way better for my mental health and just having more time to do things i like.
Life gets better when you left twitter(source, I left twitter on 2020 and my life got better since)
Any recommendations for indie follower growth without it? Cohost is great and I hope it takes off properly but it's still tiny nonetheless.
it depends on what you're selling! i don't think it's wise at this point to treat cohost like a marketing platform, because you won't get good results by doing that (it's a new+small website, posts don't have a ton of reach, and your followers were likely already buying your stuff through other venues)
twitter never had a huge impact on audience/sales for me because my core audience came from itch.io where i had been posting my games for years. i did a big writeup about it last december, but the tl;dr is, people on twitter aren't there to look for indie games to buy--they are there to scroll twitter. people who clicked my links from twitter were already on itch.io and already interested in buying my games--they just happened to use twitter as a news source, because that's where i was reliably posting news.
so i guess my advice is to go to wherever people who would enjoy your certain niche hang out, and share your stuff there. people buying my games on steam didn't come from twitter--they came from seeing someone play it on twitch/youtube, or just straight up from steam recommendations (the same way my itch.io audience came from itch.io's search+recommendations).
participate in a community! participate in LOTS of communities! it takes time, but it took time for your tweets to gain reach too. i think the only current answer for a chance at instant success would be tiktok, since that is what the platform was specifically designed for. but i don't think i would personally recommend anyone use tiktok lol (i'm not on there... too scary.)
anyway, i hope this was helpful in some way. wish you luck!
