One day, I signed out of Facebook and just never signed back in. This was an easy choice to make. Sure, the owners, advertising, and tracking all concerned me… but it was more than that. The entire community had become toxic. Even with a limited number of connections, FB would constantly push hateful and often bigoted opinions to top. It thrives on interaction and nothing breeds interaction more than depression and hate. So, on that fateful day, I just walked away.

Twitter on the other hand was much more painful to leave. For over 14 years, I have used the platform to connect with people and have meaningful conversations that I honestly enjoyed. Some general examples include:

• Meeting new, cool people on twitter, who later became friends IRL.
• Getting instant, real-time feedback on work issues and during presentation preparation.
• Keeping a micro journal of my child’s growth over 11 years. And being able to scroll back through the photos.
• And, oh yea – being immediately called out and given the opportunity to apologize when I said something inappropriate.

Even with all that, it was the right time to leave. Despite assurances to the contrary, Elon has quickly taken over and tanked the platform. I don’t need to get into it here. There are numerous articles detailing the rapid and unpredictable changes. In many ways it looks like he is intentionally tanking the company.

Instead, here are the steps to leaving the platform behind:

1. Download and delete your content

Under “settings > account > deactivate your account” is a link to “download your Twitter data“. This may take a few days, so get it started ASAP. Once it is ready, it will give you a mini website will all of your content.

The cool thing about this format is that you can reupload it anywhere. I have posted mine at twit.nagmay.com.

Just be sure to remove any content you don’t want others to see. All the content is stored in plain-text JSON files and can be blanked out easily. I removed a huge amount of personal data that included: contact info, direct messages, ads that they tried to show me that I never noticed…

Once you have a full backup, all the content can be removed from Twitter. I used TweetDelete to remove the 14 years of content.

2. Join me on Mastodon

There are a lot of good options out there, btu this seemed like the right place for me. In many ways, it feels like the early days of twitter before it attracted all the advertising and hate.

I set up an account at mastodon.social/@nagmay but you can follow me from any instance.

Or you can simply search mastodon for @gabriel@nagmay.com
(check out the article from Maarten Balliauw on how to set this alias up)

3. Say goodbye

Let people know that you are leaving and where to find you. Extra credit if you keep it to less than 140 characters :)

4. Disconnect all your apps

To use twitter on your phone, you may have connected an app. There were also various sites that required a connection to use (including TweetDelete above). Be sure to go into your settings and remove all of these connections.

5. Log out

Log out on the web and delete any Twitter apps from your phone.