How to leave Twitter

Be part of the crumbling

The latest Twitter exodus is gaining pace, so some simple words of advice as someone who tried to leave a few times and finally made it.

I wrote last year about leaving Twitter as a collective action problem and I focused on coordinated strategies for getting out.

This time it seems we might be reaching an organic tipping point when masses of people decide it’s time to go. So where should you go and how?

My favourite alternative, having tried a few options, is Blue Sky. It’s now open — you don’t need an invite — and you can sign up here.

Blue Sky has all the important functionality of Twitter but less hatred and it’s not run by a very naughty boy. And crucially there are enough great people there to make it worth staying.

Once you have a Blue Sky account you can use a browser plugin to copy your Twitter followers over. Sky Bridge works well. Here’s a link to the Firefox extension and here’s a link for Chrome. They both have simple instructions. TL;DR go to your Twitter follower page, run the extension, and you’ll see which Twitter followers are on Blue Sky. You can follow each one on Blue Sky with one click.

Once you’ve joined Blue Sky, you can also use Starter Packs to get up and running. These are themed lists of people to follow. Here’s a pack made by Jessica Studdert of UK policy people. Here are others for journalists, UK political/policy commentators, and UK local government digital people. There are thousands of others. (NB: If you’re a social media manager, you might like to create a pack for your organisation like this one from MySociety. To create a Starter Pack, click on your Blue Sky profile, click the ‘Starter Packs’ tab, and click ‘Create’. (NB: All these links will only work once you’re signed into your Blue Sky account.))

If you care about these things, one reason I like Blue Sky is that it’s part of a bigger play to make social media decentralised and interoperable. It’s built on something called the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, which is an “open foundation for the social internet.” If you want to read about the technicalities of how it works, here’s a good explanation.

The long-term vision is to build an ecosystem of social media applications all running on open protocols. It would be like email or text messages, so that you can communicate across platforms rather than each one being a walled garden. Power wouldn’t sit in the hands of one or two billionaires.

BlueSky isn’t the only option. Mastodon is great too. It has a similar vision in mind and uses a protocol called ActivityPub. Mastodon in itself is like a little galaxy of social media communities, in that when you join you choose a server. This gives Mastodon more of a community and democratic feel — more like a collection of villages and towns than one big metropolis. You can often chat easily to the people who run the server, and they tend to seek input on things like rules for moderation. Some people even chip in a few pounds to pay for server costs, with all the finances transparent.

In short, Mastodon is more different to Twitter than Blue Sky — more friendly, more collaborative, more democratic, but with a slightly higher bar to entry. The bar isn’t all that high though, and there are lots of guides on YouTube, so if you want a bigger change you can try it out here.

Another obvious step is to delete Twitter from your phone and logout on your browser. Having tried to quit a lot, I now realise that quitting Twitter and keeping the Twitter app is like quitting smoking and keeping a half-finished pack of cigarettes in the cupboard. There’s now abundant evidence that social media is addictive, which means you need to break the habit/dopamine cycle, so friction is your friend. Think of Blue Sky, or Mastodon, as your healthier vaping alternative. Make sure they’re easily to hand for when you get cravings.

Finally, use the experience of joining a new platform as a chance to adopt new norms of behaviour. Blue Sky, and even more so Mastodon, are not just Twitter alternatives. In general, people are nicer there and more thoughtful before they post things. People try not to give oxygen to attention grabbing morons. That doesn’t mean there’s no debate or difference of opinion — there’s a lot. But people are more civil, a bit closer to the way people would treat each other in person.

The cumulative effect of these norms on the user experience is stark. When I spend time on Blue Sky or Mastodon I find the quality of attention, and the mental state I’m left in, is completely different. When I go back to Twitter, which is rare now, the speed with which I’m infuriated is shocking. Once you notice this, and start realising Twitter is similar to other things with craving-and-regret cycles— smoking, bingeing— quitting gets easier.

People have written a lot over the years about the stickiness of social media and there’s obviously something to that metaphor. Thanks to network effects, the users of a social media platform aren’t like a pile of sand, so that each grain can slide easily away; there’s a glue that sticks us together.

The more I watch Twitter fail, the more I wonder if the glue is drying out. As the quality of the experience worsens, and as the atmosphere gets ever less pleasant, it’s as if Twitter is going from sticky to crumbly, as whole chunks — communities, topics, countries — break away.

So come and join in the crumbling, and see you over on Blue Sky or Mastodon, to build something new and better.

While we’re on technology-related themes, here are two earlier posts on freedom in the age of autonomous machines and what we do about a problem like Elon. You can follow me on Medium or Blue Sky or support my writing on Substack. And for some big picture reasons to feel hopeful, there’s my book, End State.