Just quit. Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over for Facebook almost a decade ago:

1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; then

2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; next

3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then

4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally

5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.

It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account.

But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been years since I've cared to log into Facebook. Feels more like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox, now, than anything compelling.)

This is how I did it. You don't realize how addicted you are until you want to stop. It's gross.

Never install those apps in the first place. They exist to complete your dossier with real-time information.

Sure they are, like the 10 times they were before this.

The pettiness of all of this is pretty hilarious.

Yeah a crazy billionaire, owner of a massive social network, trying to influence the future far right dictatorship of the USA is sooo fun

And then they see that the alternatives are ghost town or have other problems, they later return to twitter.

It's pretty annoying that so many scientists and good engineers are still almost exclusively on X. I would move to a ghost town if just those people would move.

But it's a network effect.

You would move if these 10 people moved.

But each of those 10 people would only move if some 10 other people moved.

And so on, such that there can only be one X-clone.

I think the bigger factor is politicians and government agencies. It is near impossible to find their actual public statements (for politicians) or updates (for agencies) elsewhere on the web.

I'm not seeing this on bluesky, but definitely for mastodon.

I have an old Bluesky account from the private invite era. I think maybe ~20% of the people I followed still post on a monthly basis nowadays. The retention crisis is pretty bad on most sites.

Except it is not a ghost town..

Massive amount of Brazilians moved there while Twitter was banned in Brazil, many stayed because the moderation tools actually work.. In fact in Brazil due the Twitter ban many newspapers and companies created and are maintaining a presence in both Bluesky and Threads as well..

Then there was a influx of people in Europe after the block changes in Twitter..

Now Trump election sent another batch of people..

Bluesky was the 2 most downloaded app in the both app stores, way ahead of twitter..

If they have not achieved the critical mass needed to replace twitter they are very close..

Sure, some people are still staying behind due their "fake" follower count, what they don't realize is that most of those followers are now abandoned accounts.. But they like seen a big number on their screen, while in Bluesky they would need to start from scratch..

Sound more like a lateral move. One sea of opinions vs another.

Bluesky is a way healthier option. It doesn't have an "algorithm " that pushes unwanted controversial topics into your timeline for "engagement". It's who you follow and their reposts, and that's it. Breath of fresh air to be honest.

Just use the ”following” tab instead of the ”for you” tab, and you get that on X.

Bluesky actually does have an algorithmic timeline (the ‘Discover’) thing, but it does seem a lot less… horrendous than the current Twitter one. I finally got around to deleting my disused Twitter account last week (it would’ve been 18 years old in March!) and glanced at the timeline before I hit the button. Quite frankly I don’t know how anyone uses that.

Since the environmental regulations are about to be somewhat gutted in the US, would not the best way to fight for the environment be to just limit the purchasing conspicuous goods and services! Maybe it's time to do as they tried to do some 60 years ago and become less materialistic.

Just purchase less cars and electronics and other things unless they completely wear out or just purchase used and not the new that's polluting the planet. But I'm also all for avoiding the agricultural products of the Red Districts in favor of some backyard gardens in the Blue Districts instead. But why anyone "Progressive" wants to use X after MUSK took over is beyond me and folks need to stop buying the products/services of the billionaires and purchase more from alternative channels.

Boycotts can have some effects where Politicians are so bought and paid for and so that appears logical to just purchase less of the items that are not really needed unless one is replacing some product that's worn out. But used laptops and other non new products are an option to help the environment when the Politicians are so corrupted!

In stead of shouting How Dare You just shut your wallets instead and no need to suffer the environmental regulations being gutted as the production of the major polluting products slows down in the face of falling demand!

Young people don't use twitter, they might not even know what it is. Only older people who basically want the news or like to argue.

Unless they are sports ball fans.

And this time - they're definitely leaving. Not like the first time when people tried Mastodon, or the original Bluesky private invite migration, or when Threads became available to the public, or when Nostr was popular, or when people decided they wanted to write Medium and Substack essays instead of Tweets, or even when Bluesky went public access.

Nope, it's all different now. Those people that didn't somehow stop using Twitter when the timeline switched to crypto and then again to extremist politics have absolutely grown a spine now. They're tired of using the first-party Twitter client and not having any API access, they're tired of consuming ads constantly, and they're desperate for the peace and quiet of a social media that isn't dominated by celebrity identities and pissing contests.

As someone that has never made a Twitter or X account in my life, nothing is funnier to me than the Stockholm Syndrome of that site's users, who refuse to leave it no matter how unusable the experience becomes, because they follow 2 people they consider important. It was funny when people licked Dorsey's shit-encrusted boot the first time around, and it's even funnier watching those same users claim they don't support extremist politics but do fund it with their ad revenue.

Hear me out. Try, just once, imagining those people who want to leave but can't like you might imagine an alcoholic who wants to stop drinking but can't. Or a teen who wants to stop binge eating and purging but can't. Addictions come in all shapes and sizes, and this attention/information addiction is new enough to where many don't have a defense mechanism for it. Likely most of us will develop strategies to maintain healthy habits and, indeed, some of us have. Some never will.

It's not ridicule that people with addiction need. It's help.

America can't help itself. We can't outlaw cigarettes with a direct deterministic study linking it to cancer, we couldn't unhook ourselves from cable news even when the internet threatened to make it obsolete. It's the same people exploiting the same vulnerable idiots from 20 years ago, with a new coat of paint and a few fresh staff members.

I can't help these people besides socially pressuring them in a reciprocal manner to how social media pressures them. I don't just scorn their usage of Twitter, I outright do not acknowledge their existence insofar as it pertains to members-only media platforms. If the image of their digital soul being owned by an online corporation does not motivate them to find healthier means of self-expression, they are a slave to regressive machinations I cannot change.

Yup, this time we are leaving for good...we MEAN it