Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

I deleted my Twitter account

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Short link: https://b.jlel.se/s/e7
⚠️ This entry is already over one year old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions may have changed. When I wrote this post, I was only 20 years old!

I finally did what I thought about a few months ago: I finally deleted my Twitter account (or rather deactivated it, it will be deleted if I do not log in for another 30 days).

I am done with Twitter. I realized that I often only open Twitter when I want to be distracted or procrastinate. I typed “twitter.com” in the address bar of my browser, just to scroll a little and then close the tab again. A waste of time. Sometimes I still want to do that, but now I can’t because I have deactivated my account. It’s probably true that scrolling is the new smoking. Since I get my news through other channels (like RSS feeds) anyway, I didn’t even find anything interesting on Twitter anymore, so Twitter had no value for me anymore.

I’m sorry for people who used to follow me only via Twitter, but I often shared links to my blog and tweeted that I will probably delete my account soon (this finally happened). If they wanted to, they would have had the possibility to follow me via the Fediverse or various feeds.

For the few accounts that are still worth following and cannot be followed in any other way, I now use the alternative Twitter frontend Nitter. Nitter also provides RSS feeds and this allows me to view new tweets between all other news in my feed reader. And the Nitter interface is so much faster and lightweight than Twitter.

I am so grateful that I discovered the IndieWeb. Owning my content and posting my thoughts on my own site instead of a silo like Twitter gives me real freedom. I can decide how my thoughts are displayed (I like to make them available to everyone without advertising), I can edit them and they stay available for as long as I want.

Bye Twitter!

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Jan-Lukas Else
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