Parting with Twitter
For many reasons, it’s time for me to leave X/Twitter. I haven’t been meaningfully active on the platform for a while now, using it largely to boost company announcements and otherwise trying to rebuild my social network on Mastodon and Bluesky. But now even that restricted use case feels irresponsible. We have to pick which companies and products deserve the privilege of our attention, and for me, X has not been one of those companies for a while.
I’m nostalgic for what Twitter was, and many of my friends are still only/largely on the network. I want to keep in touch with each of you. We can keep in touch via Mastodon, Bluesky, or over email. I’ll also try to blog more.
As for the account itself, I’m torn between deleting it and keeping it locked down so no one can squat the handle. I’ll iterate on what I end up doing, but plan to log out/delete it on all of my devices and avoid links to the platform except in urgent situations. I hope that with time, the number of important/urgent announcements that can only be found on X become negligible. The technology to prevent the centralized control of social networks exists, and we owe it to society to rely more on those technologies and less on other people’s property.