Lyrics: “Get It Right” – Frank Turner, 2018
I want to leave Twitter. I’m working on it. I haven’t been using it all that much anymore anyway. At the moment I have a Twitter list of about 45 people I check daily (or sometimes more than once a day to be honest). The list includes people I’m friends with or people in the public sphere, who still use Twitter to share any kind of information I might be interested in. I’m a fangirl, as you know. Sometimes I check the “following” tab on Twitter and on even rarer occasions I have a look at the “for you” tab. I admit that when I do I’m then still too often sucked into the “watching the car-crash of social media” doom scroll. And that’s such a waste of time.
For November I paid a few Euros to use a recommended “Tweetdelete” app/service to delete all the tweets, which I posted after I had already once deleted my tweets when I had planned to leave Twitter the first time after Musk two years ago. That service is still running to delete all the likes I left over the years. In the future I plan to delete tweets older than a few weeks in regular intervals, if I tweet at all. At the moment I still share links to the blog there, but I might stop doing that as well, so there won’t be many tweets left after all.
When I left Twitter the first time I signed up on Mastodon, and while I still follow quite a lot of people there – again similar selection and technique (lists) as on Twitter – I never really got into it all that much. Maybe it was too many accounts right away?
Once they were established, I signed up with “Bluesky” and “Threads” as well, but to be honest just to make sure no-one else would take over my username. After that I just let the accounts lay dormant. This morning, I put bookmarks to both of them into my “social media” browser on my tablet and my phone, because I did consider using both or either of them a bit more in the future. Phasing out of Twitter, getting into something else?
After half a day of reading messages on both I’m not too keen on either to be honest.
I don’t know… maybe my time for social networks has run its course?
Maybe I’m also just in a weird mood, because yesterday I spent almost 10 lively hours with about 50 real people in real life in one room to catch up on the last few years / decades, in which we haven’t seen each other. It was fun and cool and interesting and left me with lots and lots of thoughts on a variety of issues. Personal thoughts about myself and my life, but also thoughts about society and life and politics and everything that sparks a conversation when 50 people from a variety of backgrounds come together. Being social in the core meaning of the term, I guess.
My voice has gone a bit, because I was obviously talking so much and because all the social chatter around us made us raise our voices from time to time. I’m glad I don’t have to talk to anyone today and not all that much in the next two days as I’m going to be working from home. From Wednesday on I’ll be a travelling fangirl once more and I hope my voice will have recovered a bit till the gig on Thursday.
