I do no longer use Twitter. As of today, I am no longer checking my Twitter feeds and I will not read or reply to any notifications or DMs. I miss Twitter, but it is not a Twitter I can visit – even if I wanted. Twitter is simply not the same as it used to be. I am sure people who have used Twitter for a long time will know what I mean.
That being said, there is no need to be nostalgic or sentimental about Twitter. I was not satisfied with Twitter prior to Elon Musk taking over. The most recent changes, including everything related to Twitter Blue, only made it easier for me to give up on Twitter.
The reason I am giving up on Twitter today is that TweetDeck is no longer working. Or, more specifically, the new version of TweetDeck is a mess (and it is no longer an option to use the legacy version). Some of the problems are best formulated in a post by Zvi Mowshowitz:
Navigation is somewhat slower and more annoying. In particular, forced threading breaks chronological order assumptions and one’s ability to use duplication to locate one’s place, and zooming in to move around twisting Twitter threads is so bad you need to jump to Twitter itself. Navigation to zoom back requires clicking in annoying places. I was unable to configure the column order without deleting them all and then creating them again, although this was quick. Column width and monitor real estate use is screwed up in subtle ways. Oh, and now its settings are linked to Twitter’s even though I want them to be different. Sheesh.
I should note that not using Twitter at all will be somewhat of an experiment. First, I have used Twitter daily for more than a decade, and I will undoubtedly visit Twitter many times just to remind myself that I would need to login if I wanted to use it. Second, as it is no longer possible to view tweets without being logged in, I will definitely miss out on a lot of great content. But I will rather miss out on content than having to contribute to a fully closed ecosystem like Twitter today.
In 2022 I wrote a post on how I limit my social media use, and in a lot of ways I see this decision as the natural next step. As I wrote back then, I do not sign up for new services, and I am not planning to use Mastodon or BlueSky or anything else that is similar to Twitter. Instead, I will continue to rely on RSS-feeds. I now “follow” ~20 people on Mastodon in NetNewsWire, in the same way I follow RSS-feeds from people on Reddit, YouTube, GitHub, etc. My aim is to only rely on RSS-feeds for my media consumption in the future. No longer using Twitter is a good step in that direction.
Thanks, Twitter. We had a good run.