Like many others, I had a great time on Twitter. I joined in October 2008, more than 16 years ago. I had a slow start, but eventually I produced about 22,800 tweets, equivalent to about 1,400 posts per year or about four per day. During the last decade, it was more like 10 per day. Clean, food fun and all that.
However, since a consortium led by You-Know-Who took over the platform two years ago, many of my more principled friends, colleagues, and acquaintances have left, for very good and rather obvious reasons. There were and perhaps still are other, less good reasons to stay, and so I remained, until now.
But lately, Musk’s use of the platform as a tool to promote far-right actors is getting a bit too much, even for me. And what is worse: Twitter has become quite boring.
So I will do something characteristically half-assed. I’m not deleting my account, at least not right now. I’m not committing to never tweet again. I will almost certainly like and retweet stuff, if only occasionally. But I will (for the time being), cease to tweet regularly and may even delete the app from the tablet.
This would also be an excellent opportunity to give up social media altogether, but: no. See you on Bluesky or Mastodon.
