Twitter extrication

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Today was my last day using Twitter, unless something changes entirely. I have done the following, and suggest others do the same:

  • Went through all of my connected applications to make sure that everything that I was using Twitter to log into now has a username/password login; the only two things I couldn’t fix on my own were Webtoon (which I don’t care about) and Imgur (which I hardly ever use), so hopefully I can get their respective support folks to help me out
  • Disabled my ifttt Twitter autopost stuff, so this blog entry will not show up there
  • Disabled my Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter connection
  • Folded my indieweb.social account into my actual Mastodon account, since there were a bunch of people following me on one but not the other, and the only reason I had the indieweb.social one was for Twitter-crossposting purposes
  • Discovered I had literally hundreds of pending follow requests from mastodon.social, mostly spammers or thrown-away “just checking out Mastodon” posts from a year or two ago, gah
  • Posted a transitional post to my #novembeat thread which moves my remaining posts over there; however I’m not sure if this will actually work, because of how Mastodon threads work, and I might have to just start a new thread or something

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Twitter alternatives

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Because of Twitter’s impending buyout a lot of people are talking about alternatives to Twitter, including Mastodon. I could write a bunch of long rambles about this, but I already have:

Basically, my problem with Twitter isn’t that it’s centralized, but that it’s Twitter.

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Social media break

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Yesterday I decided to take a break from social media. This was for a number of reasons, but they all boil down to my increasing frustration with how interactions occur in rapid-fire quick-sharing spaces, and this has been growing for quite some time.

The microblog format significantly changes the way people interact. Every post is short and taken out of context (while everyone expects everyone else to have the full context already), which makes it impossible to have a as meaningful conversation especially when a short notion spreads far and wide. I feel that it is a big part of what’s dividing everyone in a never-ending search for clout that devolves into a shouting match.

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Birdsite

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So, my Mastodon instance of choice is having notification/sending/receiving issues again, and rather than doing what I usually do in this circumstance (temporarily switch back to mastodon.social or see what other instances I’ve been on are still around – spoiler: very few of them) I decided to just go without instant-update social networking for most of the day.

But then I still needed that little dopamine rush, and so I decided to try Twitter again (at least, more than my usual “post some stuff and maybe check my notifications” tendencies), and friends, let me tell you… Twitter is awful.

I’d forgotten just how much of a hellhole of advertising, “engagement”-optimizing, outrage-inducing chatter it is.

On the plus side, a lot of people seem to really enjoy the anti-ads I’ve been running for a few weeks (for $1 a day). I think I’ll expand that out into other subject areas.

But what’s even better is just getting unaddicted to commercial social media. Yikes.