I have “quietly left” Twitter. I’ve configured my devices in a way that I can only see Twitter if I use a specific device, and that usually takes more effort that it’s worth. That’s also how I tamed several other digital habits.
A few years ago, I used the same method to quit Facebook and its properties. It is really hard to leave these platforms completely, so I’m not deleting my account. You may even be reading this on Twitter, because I’m also not changing the tool I use to cross-post between Twitter and LinkedIn.
My Twitter ride was great. For a long time it really sucked, but then I realized how to mute words and people and things got a lot better. After purging the bad content from my timeline, I found a really cool niche of data science on Twitter, and met wonderful people who helped me a lot in my career so far: Tanya Cashorali, James David Long, Jesse Mostipak, Gabriela de Queiroz, Casey Almond and Vicki Boykis.
Vicki has several posts that changed how I think about the world. The reason why I left facebook was because of Vicki’s post about the data facebook collects. I learned to be grateful about the privilege that entitled me to leave facebook due to her post about digital noise. If you’re reading this on LinkedIn, the links to her posts will not appear, you need to see this post in my blog.
Right now, I’m trying Mastodon and it’s going super well. It took about a day for things to really catch up, but it did. Most of the people I followed on Twitter and LinkedIn already showed up. It’s glorious. If you are in Mastodon, come say hi.
Even though Twitter is a dumpster fire right now, I think it will survive. I think the specialized niches that thrived on Twitter will leave to Mastodon, where there will be less noise. I think the “pop culture” aspect of Twitter will remain. The way I’m thinking of this is: I don’t expect a Kardashian to show up on Mastodon, and I don’t expect scientists to move back to Twitter. It’s probably for the best.