Cold Turkey Twitter
I’ve seen quite a few articles (such as this one on LinkedIn) by academics lamenting the terminal decline of the website formerly known as Twitter, so I thought I’d add my thoughts. I come to bury Twitter, not to praise it.
I joined Twitter in 2009 or thereabouts. Over the years, I accumulated around 7300 followers. Not an enormous number by any standards, but a reasonable one. I used the platform only partly for academic matters. I found it in turns amusing and annoying. I dealt with the latter aspect largely through liberal use of the block facility. I admit I found the recreational aspect mildly addictive.
In recent times, however, Twitter (or X as we’re now supposed to call it) has turned to shit. Since Elon Musk took over, users are basically silenced unless they pay for a blue tick, the social media equivalent of buying a megaphone for use in a library. The API that allowed me to post there from WordPress was axed, which was an additional pain. Add the constant stream of promoted tweets and other ads to the deluge of unmoderated bigotry, and the result is unbearable.
I deleted my Twitter account completely at the end of August and haven’t looked back. Since I’d spent a lot of time there, a number of friends expressed scepticism that I’d manage to do it cold turkey like that, but it was no problem, and I have no withdrawal symptoms.
I now much prefer Mastodon, where I’ve had an account for about a year. I have just over a thousand followers there, just one seventh of the number I had on Twitter, but much higher levels of engagement. More importantly, it’s far more civilized. I’ve only had to block one person. WordPress has also introduced an autopost to Mastodon, so every blog post I write appears there automatically.
I have also joined BlueSky. This site is still in development and, for the time being, is by invitation only, so is rather quiet. In recent weeks, however, I’ve noticed quite a large number of astronomers arriving there, so it is an interesting place to be. I have some spare invites, actually…
Just say no to Twitter. It’s not worth it.
In the Dark 
October 9, 2023 at 10:02 pm
Yes, X is a far inferior descendant of pre- Musk Twitter. It may indeed be in terminal decline.
However, my experience of X is still, sadly, superior to that of Mastodon. To use numbers of followers as a measure of a productive experience, as done above, I have over a thousand followers on X, 13 on Mastodon, and 3 followers on Bluesky.
X seems to me still to have far more corporate accounts of institutions, societies and organisations than Mastodon or Bluesky. Perhaps these will set up accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky over the coming months. Time will tell.
The method I adopted for engaging with Twitter was mostly based around private lists, with one for each of many subjects I am interested in. I look at posts from sets of accounts on each subject. There seems to be no equivalent to private lists on either Mastodon or Bluesky.
October 10, 2023 at 3:57 pm
With Lists you also avoid most of the nasty tweets in the general feed. You can also select a feature that only shows tweets from people you follow, which also removes most of the awful tweets….at least if you don’t follow those sort of people!
October 10, 2023 at 4:01 pm
I’ve never used lists on Twitter, so don’t know if there is an equivalent on the others. I have noticed that even in the last few days, BlueSky has become noticeably more active.
October 10, 2023 at 11:00 pm
Yes, I agree strongly about the advantage of not seeing general selections of posts on X. There’s a lot of rubbish, trolls and bors on the platform with posts that are just not worth the effort of reading.
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