Twitter Account Deactivated

Yesterday I finally took the step of deactivating my account, and then reactivating it, and then this morning deactivating it again. Normally when I lose interest in a social network I just forget about it and I’m done. In this situation I didn’t forget about it though. I went a step further.

Three factors pushed me towards this decision. The first is that Musk wants to use our tweets to feed AI and I don’t want my tweets to be used that way. Logically they can’t be used, because my account is private.

That my account has been private on and off, and anonymous since 2020 or so is a comment on how the user experience on Twitter has degraded since the pandemic. When you are trolled and flamed you go private. The paradox is that by being private people no longer see your interactions with them so you’re tweeting for nothing, and that’s a second reason to dump Twitter.

The third reason for dumping Twitter is that if you use Pihole and ad blockers Twitter/X breaks. You eventually get kicked out of the site and have to log in again, but logging in fails via Google Login and Twitter login. The result is that Twitter is taking liberties to data that no other website requires. If I have to suspend Pihole for one site then that site becomes irrelevant.

And Finally

The way I used Twitter changed four years ago, after I was flamed. I was ready to give up on Twitter for a while, before Musk bought it. It had gone from being a social network filled with engagement and the desire to meet people to a complete waste of time. It’s because it was a waste of time that I tried Mastodon and the Fediverse before sliding to BlueSky and Threads. None of them have the community I’m looking for, yet.

Twitter was a unique site, at a unique time. Now I am ready to revert to using social networks.