So this happened faster than I expected: I actually deleted the Twitter app off my phone this week. Not deactivated, not "taking a break," just gone. I've been threatening to do this since roughly 2022 and never followed through, mostly out of laziness and a weird sunk-cost thing about a follower count I built up over a decade. But the last two weeks finally pushed me over.
You've probably seen the numbers by now, Bluesky picked up something like a million new sign-ups in just a few days after the election, and it's still climbing. I got there a little later than the first wave, maybe four or five days ago, and the thing that struck me wasn't the growth chart, it was how normal it already felt. No invite code needed anymore (remember hoarding those like Costco samples back in the spring?), no janky onboarding, just a regular sign-up flow and suddenly I'm looking at a timeline that's chronological by default. I'd forgotten what that even looks like. My brain kept expecting an algorithm to intervene and it just... didn't.
The custom feeds are the part I didn't expect to like this much. On Twitter I had years of muted words and blocked accounts just to keep my main timeline from turning into a shouting match. On Bluesky I spent maybe twenty minutes one night building a little feed of just tech blogs and indie devs, and now that's basically my homepage. It's a small thing but it's the first time in ages a social app has felt like my space instead of a space I'm renting attention in.
Also, can we talk about "starter packs" for a second? Somebody made one called something like "people who still update personal blogs" and I got added to it by a person I've never met, and it sent me like 40 new followers in an afternoon, all of whom apparently also run some dusty little Wordpress or Jekyll site nobody reads. That's more fun than any algorithmic recommendation Twitter ever gave me. I found three blogs from that list I'm now subscribed to in my feed reader, which, if you're wondering, still exists and still works fine, thanks for asking.
I'm not going to pretend this is some grand new era though. It's a smaller pond, obviously, my posts get maybe a tenth of the engagement they used to, and there's a very real chance a chunk of these million-plus new users bounce back to Twitter (or wherever) in a month once the post-election spike wears off. I've watched enough "Twitter killers" come and go on this blog since 2011 to not get too romantic about it. Remember App.net? I paid actual money for that one. Remember Ello, for about six weeks in 2014? I do, because I wrote a post about it that I'm slightly embarrassed by now.
The one actual complaint I have is the naming. "Skeets." I get that it's a joke, I get that "tweet" was silly too when it started, but there's something about typing "I posted a skeet" into a text box that makes me feel about ninety years old. I've decided I'm just going to say "post" like a normal person and pretend I never saw the other word.
Anyway. I'm not deleting my Twitter account, just the app, mostly because there are still a couple of group chats and DMs I don't want to lose access to and because thirteen years of old jokes and dumb screenshots feels like a weird thing to nuke over one bad month for the company. But the daily habit is broken now, and that's the part that actually matters. I check Bluesky over coffee in the morning instead, for maybe ten minutes, and then I close it and go do something else, which is not something I could say about the other app in a long time.
If you're on there, the handle's the same as always. Come find me, or don't, either way I'll be over there ignoring the timeline anxiety I spent a decade building up somewhere else.