Without a goodbye. Like a stranger in the night, I slipped silently away.
I left Twitter. I've done this once before but for a different reason.
I left Twitter in July, 2016, sort of as a reaction to information overload. That time, I did say 'goodbye' before I deactivated my account. My departure wasn't long-lived, as less than a week later, I was back. I've been on vacations that have kept me away from the social-media site for longer than that.
Ultimately, it was FOMO and missing friends that made me resume my account.
But that was in 2016 and a lot has changed since then. There was information being shared in my feed that would make me angry. I would see posts that would promote hate and other posts that delivered misinformation, and even though I would try to block and mute people who shared these tweets, it was impossible to avoid.
And that was before Elon Musk took the platform over.
I have seen the return of people who had been suspended for spreading hate and misinformation. I've learned of people being suspended for calling out these harbingers of negativity. And it causes me anxiety.
There's a lot of anger out there.
Mastodon is not perfect. It lacks some features that I valued in Twitter. But there's a different atmosphere to this alternative platform. People seem supportive. If somebody wants to share posts (usually, that originated from Twitter) that are controversial, they tend to tag it with a content warning, meaning that if I don't want to look at it, I don't have to. The content is hidden behind a button and images are blurred.
I find that after spending a few minutes on Twitter, I am stressed or angry. So far, I haven't felt that way by reading the various feeds on Mastodon.
So I've pulled the plug on Twitter. I've dumped Musk for the Tusk, as they say.
It's going to be hard, as many of my peeps are sticking with the bird site and I'll be losing contact. There are news sources that I have yet to find at Mastodon. And there are people I follow purely for entertainment value, who I will simply lose.
But I'm prepared for that.
On Friday, I posted my final goodbyes to my Twitter followers. Today, I couldn't even share this blog post on Twitter, even if I wanted to (I realize that many of my old followers won't know about this post: hmm...). I'm gone.
I couldn't wait until the end of November, as I said I would. On Saturday, for every positive tweet that I read, there were at least two others that were angry or otherwise negative. I didn't want to scroll my feed any longer.
If you followed me on Twitter and want to keep in touch, you can find me on Mastodon (@BrownKnowser@mstdn.ca) or on Instagram. If we've been friends through Twitter and you want to stay in contact, you can reach out to me by e-mail at BrownKnowser@gmail.com.
They say that all good things must come to an end. I just hope that the connections I had made on Twitter haven't reached that point but if they have, it's been great.
Until we meet again...
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| Image: Google |
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