I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. It’s one big mass of opinion; swirling up hate, online abuse, depressing news and analysis. Twitter is where people go to promote their shit I have no interest in. It’s another site that tries to build a profile about you to advertise on your interests.
And I hate that I love it.
Not long ago I told myself “No more Twitter”. This was soon after I discovered Mastodon – an alternative to Twitter. Mastodon is ad-free and open-source. It’s many small communities with different personalities that join to make one network.
Mastodon is by no means perfect, but has a more respectable ethos. What Mastodon doesn’t have is mass adoption. It doesn’t have my friends. Only strangers. And so, I found myself returning to Twitter.
In a bid to make my Twitter experience more enjoyable, I needed to conduct a “spring clean”. This involved;
- Making my account ‘Private’ 🔐
- Reducing Following from 450+ to 210 😬
- Reducing Followers from 1,500+ to 250 📉
After taking a look at who I was following, and who was following me, the amount of nonsense surprised me. Close to 1,000 of the accounts following me were either businesses, spam or inactive users. Another 200 more were complete strangers that I had never interacted with in my life.
It took a lot of clicking to whittle down so many users to so few. There were a few tough decisions in there too; will I offend this person if I unfollow them? This stranger looks kind, but do I want them following me? Oh, a well-known TV personality is following me! What?! Why?
Now my Twitter is ‘clean’, it feels like a fresh start.
If you’re keen to stay on social media, I recommend grabbing a cup of tea, popping on some background music, and conducting your own clean-up. It’s refreshing for your digital soul.
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