I (finally) kissed Twitter goodbye. What I learned from starting over on social media

I've been without Twitter for a little over two months. It was a gradual process. First, I deleted it off my phone to stop my incessant check ins. Then, when it became clear after the election that Elon Musk intends to turn the platform into his own propaganda plaything, I decided it was time to evacuate. Old habits die hard, so I told myself I would deactivate for 30 days and see how things felt (Twitter lets you reactivate within a 30-day time period).

(Note: I know Elon Musk is in the news this week. I'm not even going to dignify his abhorrent display with words but just to say: If I wasn't already off Twitter, it would've been a much more immediate process than described here. Also, it is and forever will be Twitter in my book and that's what I will refer to it as throughout this post.)

Let me say this from the outset — it felt fantastic. The 30-day deadline came and went, and I felt almost no need to return.

It's a silly little web site, but one that I found fascinatingly absurd and fun and, ultimately, a powerful communication platform over the years. I think I've shared this before, but I first learned of Twitter in a college political science class somewhere between 2007 and 2008. I sat in the 200-level political theory class as Dr. Chris Rice opined to us about how de-centralized networks would help share information and reshape the future, and how people would get instant news updates through this new social media platform with a little blue bird mascot.

"Fail Whale," the Twitter error message you would get in the golden days of the platform.

Absurd, I thought. But within two years, the age of smartphones was on the rise, and I was clamoring to get my own so that I could engage with the platform from the palm of my hand. For the record, my first smartphone was a Blackberry, which remains the best smartphone of all time.

Surprisingly, my professor turned out to be right. Twitter, along with other social media sites, became a source for breaking news in real time. People from all around the world shared updates, posted photos and recorded videos of events as they happened, giving information to the entire connected world.

The real irony is that I quit Twitter at the time when it had probably reached its optimal usefulness for me. As a digital journalist for the last two and a half years, Twitter became a primary source for me, where I could find quotes, statements or announcements from organizations, politicians, businesses and all kinds of other folks. At its best, Twitter was (is, maybe someday can be again?) a community of people sharing information, engaging in conversation and having fun.

At its worst, it's a land of trolls bloviating their takes for the sake of clicks and attention, and now a playground for the world's richest man to manipulate to his openly right-wing and Nazi-adjacent whims.

That's probably more than enough on the post-mortem. I made peace with my decision, in some ways comforted by what I'll share in my observations.

Now, I'm on Bluesky, an open and truly decentralized social network. After trying some different iterations of microblogging platforms recently, this one seemed to be at the right place at the right time.

At the risk of sounding like a salesperson, it has no algorithm and is (currently) ad-free. This means you only see content from the people you follow. Which is a revelation, right? Social media from the people you actually want to be social with? Crazy!

It has been a breath of fresh air, though it was pretty daunting at first. I was worried — what's going to happen to all these followers I have? And what about the people I'm following? Will I get the same experience, the same information, the same interesting content?

And to be honest, being on a social media platform that's not really reached a critical mass can be kind of ... boring. When I was testing the waters of other microblogging sites, it felt a lot like being one of the first people to a party and then standing around for hours trying to make conversation with people you don't know while you wait for other to show up.

“The old is dead, and I don’t know what the new is. The only way to find the new is to start different things and see if there’s something that can come out of experimentation. It’s somewhat unsettling, but it’s a hopeful thing in a way. I’ve been here before, lots of times.” -David Lynch

Thankfully, a lot of that has changed now. More people have migrated over to Bluesky, including some of my favorite follows, plus I've been able to find several new fun ones. I even had my one moment of virality with maybe the most liked post I've ever had on social media.

Best of all, it is just fun. There is more of a community feel, something that's been missing from social media for a long time. And I've been making some mental notes on starting over on social media that I'd thought I'd pass along. They are in no particular order, of course.

Get bent, algorithms!

Starting fresh on Bluesky opened my eyes to how bogged down all the major social platforms, especially Twitter, have become. Scrolling through my feeds, I see more ads and content from accounts I don't follow than the accounts I actually do follow. That's the magic of "the algorithm."

Twitter got so bad, in fact, I had friends posting content that I would never see it because it was buried or otherwise hidden.

The truth is one of the reasons for these algorithms is to keep you glued to the apps. Every time you check them or refresh the page there's new content to see. It's not people you know, and it may not even be stuff you care about it, but man is it addicting to look at it!

Moving to Bluesky has been refreshing. For now, it's just content from the people I follow and that I want to see. And because it's smaller and not driven by an algorithm, that means sometimes Bluesky can be a little, well, boring. When no one has posted anything new, then there's nothing to see. Honestly, that's great in its own way. It's harder to get sucked into the endless scrolling (it still happens, but it's not as frequent).

You're not as popular as you think you are

I've never really killed it on social media. I've been lucky to hover around 200 or so followers on most platforms. With some concerted effort, I think I managed to get somewhere in the 460-follower range on Twitter before I deactivated.

Imagine my surprise, and perhaps depression, when I scrolled through my followers one last time to find about 100 or so were just bot accounts. Realizing a good chunk of my followers were just fake accounts made it a good deal easier to say goodbye.

This is to say that sometimes I'm too loss averse. I think many of us are, by the way. I was worried about losing my "following," such as it was. On the flip side though, there is the bold act of starting new, of finding new ways of connecting and new people to connect with.

And while it was difficult at first to muster some interaction, just two months in I'm already up to about 275 followers on Bluesky. Maybe that's my ceiling on internet popularity, but at least I came by these followers honestly and algorithm free.

Space for conversation instead of shouting matches

Leaving Twitter felt like leaving a shouting match in the end. It's so driven by hot takes, drags, roasts and otherwise using a politics of disgust to garner attention anymore.

Joining Bluesky feels like walking into a local coffee shop. People are sharing silly questions and memes to get to know each other. They are engaging in serious conversations and sharing relevant information. They're doing what social media should be about.

Imagine how welcome it was when someone posted an introduction note, pointing new users to what she called the "Mayor of Bluesky." That's life goals right there. The "mayor" has an entire thread sharing the features of the platform, including the common and not-so-common ones.

Most importantly, he shared about Bluesky's moderation, including the "nuclear block" option that users love. That might sound harsh but here is a gigantic truth nugget the major platforms are completely missing the mark on right now: Real community can't happen without boundaries and moderation. People cannot really engage in healthy dialogue and interaction unless they feel it is safe to do so. And the community those conversations happen in needs to practice healthy inclusionary as well as exclusionary boundaries.

It might sound contradictory, but what I'm trying to say is a community establishing what will and won't be the norm for its members is a very healthy and welcoming sign for me.

Positive content = positive response

Starting over was an important reminder that one point of social media is sharing about things you like. I mentioned having some trouble getting interaction in my first days on Bluesky. So, one day, quite randomly, I just thought, "Well, what do I like doing that other people seem to also like?" and my first thought went to my photography. I slapped my first photo up, a film photo I had taken from Zion National Park. And next thing I knew, it was getting shared around like crazy.

Posting photos on a microblogging site, what could go wrong?

Naturally, I posted more photos. None of them have gone any kind of "viral" after that one, but it was a good lesson: Instead of posting what might make me look clever or sophisticated or smart, instead of posting what might fit into the algorithm, I should just post about things I like.

It was then that other people who like similar things found my posts and we started building interactions from there. My favorite creativity guru, Austin Kleon, in his book "Steal Like an Artist" writes, "You don't have to be a genius, find your scenius." Meaning find people who like what you like, and your community will build from there.

It also shows to me how putting positive content out on Bluesky gets a positive response. I don't need to worry about gaming an algorithm, I don't need to fit what I post or the way I post it in order to what's popular on the platform. I can just post what I like and find my way from there.

Time for a timeline renovation

Like a home renovation, starting from scratch on social media is a chance to strip things all the way down to the studs and rebuild from the ground up. It's a chance to decide what stays and what goes. That means it's a chance for me to really curate a feed that suits me; and to limit content that might be triggering, frustrating or downright depressing and focus instead on what will be healthy, edifying and good for me.

For example, on Twitter I followed a lot of news outlets, journalists and political organizations. A lot! When I first switched over, not as many of these were on Bluesky. One of the things I learned in that vacuum was how nice it was not to have a timeline screaming at me to be enraged about what's going on in the political world.

It's impossible for me to bury my head in the sand and just tune out what's going on. It's just not me. But I do think there's a healthy level of seeing these calls to action/calls to be enraged/calls to attention to the injustice of the world. Then there's the level where it becomes so overwhelming that it's paralyzing. And that's where I was on Twitter. Now is an opportunity to recalibrate.

Starting over gave me a chance to think carefully about what kind of timeline will best suit me, and what kind of content will help me as a person.

Final thoughts

I know that one day this will all change. Nothing gold can stay, and at some point, the proprietors of Bluesky will need to turn this fun little experiment into something that generates revenue. I just hope they learn some of the lessons of the disastrous and anti-social revenue models employed by the bigger platforms. I heard someone in an NPR interview say it this way: "We've had the smartest people in the world working on how to get you to click on ad for crap you don't need." Surely, we can find a better way.

For now, I'm just enjoying the ride. And I love this little throwback to the early days of social media, when we were just posting things because we thought they were funny or important or absurd or mundane, and connecting in ways that are positive and productive. That's the way social media should be, right?