Merge pull request #969 from alexwlchan/deleting-twitter

New post: "I deleted all my tweets"

src/_drafts/i-deleted-all-my-tweets.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: I deleted all my tweets
+summary: I used TweetDeleter to delete about 35,000 tweets, and cut my remaining ties to the site formerly known as Twitter.
+tags:
+  - twitter
+---
+
+I had a complicated relationship with Twitter (now X).
+
+I wasted a lot of time there, got into some embarrassing arguments, and wrote things I now regret.
+But it's also where I met friends and partners, started my career in cultural heritage, and began my queer awakening.
+Maybe one day I'll write a longer article about what Twitter meant to me.
+
+I haven't been active on Twitter for several years, and I finally decided to remove all my old tweets.
+I used [TweetDeleter.com](https://tweetdeleter.com/) to get rid of them.
+I'll post one final tweet linking to this article and telling my followers where else to find me on the web, but after that I'm done with Twitter.
+
+## Why?
+
+I felt like I was getting very little benefit to leaving my old tweets up, but I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable about it.
+
+*   I don't think many people were reading them and getting something useful out of it.
+*   I kept getting notifications from people who'd found an old tweet, and wanted to start an argument or hurl abuse in my direction.
+    I can do without that.
+*   My tweets are an increasingly outdated representation of how I think and feel.
+    I haven't tweeted in over two years, so anything I've learnt in that time isn't represented there.
+    They felt like a liability; something that could be used to criticise me for a view I no longer hold.
+
+I already purged my tweets once -- at some point, I deleted all my tweets from before 2017, because they had a lot of personal stuff I no longer wanted to be publicly available.
+Absolutely nobody noticed or cared when I did that, and I think this time will be much the same.
+
+A lot of people deleted their Twitter/X accounts in November because of a Terms of Service update that would allow X to use their posts to train AI models.
+While I understand the concern, that wasn't a big motivation for me.
+Anything that's publicly available on the web has already been used for AI training, including my writing and my tweets.
+I can't fix that.
+
+I considered deleting my entire account, but I wanted to leave it up as a signpost to where I'm writing and posting now.
+I don't think there's much risk in having an account that just says "no longer here, go over there".
+
+## How?
+
+I had about 35,000 tweets.
+
+I experimented with a few DIY automations for deleting lots of tweets, but I couldn't get anything working quickly.
+Instead, I decided to pay $7.99 for one month of [TweetDeleter.com's Unlimited plan](https://tweetdeleter.com/pricing).
+A couple of friends had already used the site to delete their old tweets, and I didn't want to spend much time on this.
+
+I had to upload a copy of my Twitter archive so they knew what to delete, and then it took about a week to delete everything.
+
+Interestingly, X says that I still have 407 posts, but you can't see any on my profile:
+
+{%
+  picture
+  filename="remaining_tweets.png"
+  width="372"
+  alt="Screenshot of my profile on X, showing “407 posts”."
+  class="screenshot"
+%}
+
+I think these are probably retweets of posts that are no longer accessible to me -- the original poster has either blocked me, or made their account private.
+I don't think I can do anything about these "ghost posts", and I'm not too worried about them.
+
+## What's next?
+
+I'm going to post a link to this article on Twitter, and then log out for the last time.
+
+I haven't found a good replacement -- although I have accounts on [Mastodon](https://social.alexwlchan.net/@alex) and [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/alexwlchan.bsky.social), neither of them feel like the best days I had on Twitter.
+It took a long time to create that circle of friends, and I don't have the energy to try to replicate that on a new service.
+
+I joined Twitter in August 2009 and a lot of good things came out of it, but after fifteen years, it feels like that era of my life is over.