Why I Left Twitter

It’s safe to say that Twitter has changed a lot from when I first started using it. When I first started using Twitter in 2008 it felt like an amazing tool for connecting with new people. Twitter made it easy to discover and connect with other tech folks and I found a new job through connections I made on Twitter fairly quickly after I started using it.

I decided to leave Twitter in November of last year. For continuity’s sake, I decided to leave my account for a year before deleting it. It was a hard decision. This post is an attempt to make sense of how I felt and what led me to leave.

An unhealthy relationship

Twitter has not felt healthy for a long time. It’s pervaded by know-nothing politics, negativity, and misinformation at best, and outright hatred, racism, harassment, and disinformation at worst. I often found myself doom scrolling, somehow hoping to find something positive and finding nothing but doom and gloom. The more I used it, the more my mood and productivity declined.

This became most apparent after Twitter’s chaotic change in leadership. The quality of the users on the platform and the quality of the discourse declined rapidly. I encountered a lot more bots, spam, misinformation, hostility towards minorities, and just more negativity in general. Curating who I was following became harder to do and felt more like a chore. Twitter employees left en masse. People who clearly should have been banned from the platform were reinstated, only for some to be banned again.

After the 2022 acquisition, Twitter’s already broad EULA now felt like a really bad deal. When it comes down to it, you are entering into a transactional arrangement when you use a service like Twitter. You provide something (e.g. content) and the service provides something in return (e.g. features, other users, etc.). Starting in 2022, it felt like I wasn’t getting enough in return for what I was providing. Still, I continued to use it and hoped for the best.

The sledgehammer that broke the camel’s back

While the reasons that made me leave Twitter had been building since even before 2022, the thing that really caused me to pull the trigger was the U.S. November 2024 election. The celebration of the various cruelties that make up who Donald Trump is were on full display. It seemed that the very cruel, ugly, and grotesque side of humanity was rearing its head. I didn’t want to be on a service that was owned by someone who enabled and encouraged that kind of behavior.

Around the same time as the election, I was going through a personal transition and felt a strong urge to start over. But after the election, I engaged with the overflowing negativity way too much. It felt like a whirlpool sucking me in. It was exhausting. I was tired.

After a while, I realized I don’t need to be there. I don’t have to engage with either the pro-Trump or anti-Trump negativity. I could look towards the future with positivity. I had the agency to go where I wanted to be.

What it means to be social

Many of the problems with Twitter are problems with social media in general. But Twitter went above and beyond to make it a worse place to be after 2022. It felt isolating and lonely.

I don’t really want social media, but I do want to be social. Bluesky, and Mastodon aren’t nearly as popular as Twitter but maybe that’s exactly what I want. I want the experience that was Twitter in the early days. Social media that allows for genuine connections.

Things can change quickly though. Social media should be built on a more open foundation that gives users more control over their data and experience. Both Bluesky’s ATProto and Mastodon’s ActivityPub are more open and transparent APIs with ecosystems around them. We don’t have to rely on the good intentions of one company. Now feels like an opportunity to try out an alternative to Twitter and make it grow.

Don’t be a stranger

I’m on Bluesky at ianlewis.org and on Mastodon at ianlewis@hachyderm.io. If you are one of those platforms please connect with me there. I hope you’ll give either of them (or both!) a try. If not, you can still reach me at ian@ianlewis.org.

Though I left Twitter, it was a long time coming. I know some folks are still on Twitter and don’t have a presence on other platforms yet. I do miss interacting with many of them. Twitter is just not a healthy place for me to be anymore.