C# is my primary language, so I’d certainly recommend it. It can be a little daunting to get into because it is a large ecosystem of tools, so you might want to watch some videos and keep things simple for a while.

For work I mostly use it for APIs for web sites, that might be a good place to start if you’re familiar with JS/TS front-end work. From there you might want to try Razor or Blazor for handling web UI work in C#. I’m not very experienced with that aspect of it, but it’s mostly been a positive experience (TBH I kind of prefer React, but I’d need to spend more time on the Razor/Blazor side to have a strong opinion).

The desktop development side in C# is kind of a mess at the moment. Maybe stick with web until you’re feeling pretty comfortable with the language.

My biggest problem is figuring out what I want to do with any coding skills

Maybe some dumb little games? If you aren’t interested in 3D gaming you can do 2D platformers, top-down Rogue-likes, or Zork-style interactive fiction (text) games (from scratch instead of with a Z-Machine).

As a self-taught developer, when I was learning I found it a lot more useful to just go code stuff, and then when I found something that seemed hard or ugly, I could go look for solutions to that kind of problem, which was much more interesting than just reading about various techniques. (Well, I was learning well before normal people had internet, so mostly I invented some shit to fix my own problem, but it got easier/faster after the internet became available).

That would probably be a good focus for a Lemmy instance if someone was looking to run a good-sized one.

That sounds like the winning side to me.

I deactivated my 15 year old Twitter account this weekend.

Then I deleted all my Reddit posts.

Then I created a new email account and I’m migrating off of Google.

I guess I should go check out Nebula or something next, and try out PeerTube.

What you are describing about Twitter wasn’t my experience with it at all. I just followed my friends, interesting people I met at events, etc. I wasn’t looking to be connected to influencers or whatever was the popular chatter of the moment, and I freely used the block feature to filter out people who posted stuff I wasn’t interested in. It worked just fine like that. Decent experience (too shallow for my preference, due to the nature of the platform, but not unpleasant).

I feel like most social media platforms are, to a large extent, what you make of them. Like my Facebook feed is pretty nice. It’s about 60% family and friends that I like, 20% interest groups (kayaking and hiking mostly), and 20% ads for stuff I’m interested in (mostly authors right now). There’s none of the toxic bullshit that a lot of people complain about.

So yeah, I agree with the ‘follow people you are interested in’ advice, but that’s not unique to Mastodon or Lemmy or whatever.