What made you determined to leave Twitter?

I had a tweet that went viral.
I had thousands of people calling me all sorts of horrible things, threatening to do horrible things and generally being horrible. Willfull, ignorant people that tried to deliberately take things out of context, push their own agenda and create the most ridiculous straw man arguments.
And then Elon Musk took over so I had to quit.
- so it was not the 1000 duck sized jerks, but the one horse sized jerk that did it
  
  That's a perfect way of putting it.

leave? barely used it.
- How did you manege to leave that toxic sewer?
  Quite easy, i never jumped in
- Any recommendation? Twitter alternatives.
  
  Mastodon. It's not invite-only like Bluesky, it doesn't track you like Threads and it's federated like Lemmy (in fact, there's some crossover in some instances).
  
  You could try putting a metal trash can over your head and letting the neighborhood kids hit it with a stick.
  
  FireFish!

Putting blue checks at the top ruined Twitter for me. Every trending tweet gets spammed with 😂 emojis, right-wing disinformation, and transphobic hate speech. I got tired of scrolling past them just to start seeing normal commenters. Lemmy and Mastodon are better because the average user isn't a total fucking idiot with an agenda.
- Honestly this is what made me leave in the end.
  The average blue check is a fridge temp IQ troglodyte.

When Twitter cut off third party apps I switched to the Fediverse. Got a weird sense of deja vu a few months later.

The day I opened the app and it said I had to pay to continue using 2FA I immediately closed and deleted it.

I was a beta tester for twitter.
Didn’t really “get” it then, and it never really clicked with me. I hardly used it, and when musk came in I deleted my account.

I wasnt really that attached to it to begin with so when Musk took over I saw the writing on the wall. He was going to turn it into an even worse shithole than it already was and I wanted no part in tacitly supporting it. Just like I basically left Reddit when it was clear spez and the board were hellbent on sudokuing the site with their boneheaded API decision and the fallout from it.

Twitter is and always has been cancer

Honestly, it was just too busy for me to keep up with. I'd check and there were 300 Tweets from all the people I was interested in since the last time I checked.
But when Musk bought it, I deleted my account.

I barely used it to begin with. I closed my account entirely once Musk bought it. Sad chuckle when I see someone just now discover what a racist dirtbag he is.

When they upped the characters it changed the character. You can't have substantive discussion in 140, but in 280 you can be tedious trying.
- Twitter was sort of like a code-golf game when it was 140. Annoying, but it was their gimmick... it also made sense when theoretically people posted by SMS. 280 was freer but then it becomes more like any other social media... and people would just post as threads anyway, which was pretty much like a reddit or facebook post with the most confusing interface ever, and the ability to reply to or 'like' sentences individually, which is interesting but not super useful.

I barely used it and just deleted my account the second Elon was involved.
- That'd be me as well. The last Twitter post I made was what, 2014? So it was an easy delete.

I got bored of it in like 2010?
- It's was like 2013 for me. I think it was when they fudged with the time lines so that you weren't seeing things chronologically but how the algorithm wanted you to see it.
  I had a very decent account at the time too. Couple thousand followers (before the bot accounts started getting super bad) and like 30k tweets.
  I still have an account, but I literally only use to to tweet stories to one podcast.

Hardly used it anyway, and when Elon took over my feed was 99% posts by him and 1% porn accounts. So, not worth keeping it.

I still read it but I stopped posting as soon as Elon Musk bought it. I'm not creating content for free for a billionaire (derogatory) fascist. I'll tweet on Bluesky or Mastodon occasionally and still call it a tweet and if I want to say something longer I've got a blog nobody reads and if there's something I want to chat about there's Lemmy.
- This makes the most sense to me, with Reddit as well.
  Read it because there's content there worth keeping up with (local communities, school, career stuff), but only on fedi stuff.

Too much Nazi shit and other forms of bigotry really. I just stopped posting my artwork there entirely and now post on bluesky and mastodon. Sometimes I use Facebook network shit to assure family that I am alive.

I never did. I still don't understand the appeal of shouting into the abyss and hoping someone hears the echo.

The amount of time I spent on Twitter had been gradually declining for years, with all the ads and suggested shit I didn't want to see, and I don't like what Musk is planning for the platform. Then I joined Mastodon and I found it was like the early days of Twitter, without half as much toxicity.
So it was quite easy leaving Twitter in the end.

Twitter for me was always just a place to shout random ramblings to void. It didn't help that I barely followed at all what other users were saying. Always felt like I should, in fact, not just speak my mind, because in the recent years the site was really terrible at banning dipshits and the Musk takeover was a clear signal that things will never be getting better in that regard.
When Musk took over, the fact that the site started experiencing creaking at the seams when devs were laid off was a huuuuuuge red flag. My biggest IRL friend decided to leave Twitter after the Musk takeover. With nothing else to genuinely follow, I decided to GDPR-dump my past stuff and leave the site too.
I like Mastodon. It's like Twitter and Identica back in early 2010s when you could actually see random strangers posting random shit. Can see fellow shouters-in-the-void. And they're usually not dipshits.

- What alternative are you using for twitter?
  
  Sleeping is a decent one

I had an account since 2009 and mainly used it to post really ridiculous phrases that I found funny, like 'turnip thieves' or 'nursing burqa'. I tried posting various other things like programming related stuff, or pics and observations from my travels, and got absolutely zero engagement. But then in 2020 I was suddenly homeless in downtown portland after a breakup RIGHT when the Floyd protests started (I was driving right by the Federal center and the Elk statue like "huh, why are there are these cop cars and what are these people doing standing in the street?" and I needed up-to-date info about wtf was going on. Twitter was the best place to find that. Reddit was hours behind, fuck facebook, and local news is like a day behind, but local reporters were posting to-the-minute updates on twitter.
Then I started using it to follow some communities I'm into, like niche games and certain autoimmune diseases, and I liked the feel of personality people had. I felt like I got to know the personality of people who posted way more than on reddit, without the bullshit of facebook or whatever. I got sick of the horror of political slimebags by growing a block list of 8,000 accounts. But then: Elron. When Elron came it became clear that he was a massive douchebag and was going to destroy the site. I didn't wait around to watch: I downloaded my archive and just deleted my account.

Once it became clear they Elron was going to smash the place into a cesspool of douchery, the decision was simple.
- how tf did my countries rail operator destroy twitter for you

Nothing, I will never leave twitter. I would have to sign up to do that and since its X now, I don't think I even could sign up for twitter.
- Your first sentence really scared me lmao

Never used it! Bwahahaha eat a dick, Twatter

I've stopped being a reader on Twitter and rarely interact with anything there, but I have a big chunk of my audience still there, so it's still part of my posting schedule.
- try to get them on mastodon
  
  getting an audience to move is about as easy as asking a fish to fly. It's much easier to just post on as many different platforms as we can.

- Oof that was certainly a day

Was on twitter because 'it was hot'. I never discovered why, I found it even more annoying then open plan office spaces, lots of unwanted noice, no content. So I left and never looked for an alternative.
Since I left, never felt fomo, just yomo. Especialky with Musk taking over xitter I'm amazed not everybody went quitter.
- I have not used a microblogging site for years, but I rediscovered it with Mastodon, which actually does have good content and isn't so full of chatter that the good content gets overwhelmed. It helps that you can subscribe to hashtags. I follow #Archaeology and get amazing and fascinating links. I rarely post, but I scroll.

I got banned because when Musk announced that Trump was unbanned, I replied to the tweet and linked the Trump account letting him know I looked forward to seeing him die in jail. I refuse to delete the tweet to remove my ban.
- Free speech absolutist!
- Based

They said that my account is locked for suspicious behaviour and I was to lazy to unlock it. Guess I wont gwt the extra entries for giveaways anymore, whatever.

I only use it for getting updates on public transport, but now apparently I made my account when I was under 13 and it's now completely locked. Despite being over a decade older they won't accept my ID to reopen and no way will I make another account.

Too many trolls making it nearly impossible to have a reasonable discussion or debate on pretty much any topic. And the lack of consistency in the application of the site's rules.

Because X gon' give it to ya and I do not consent.

I decided that I don't like it and I don't need it.
(It was after about a week of trying it out, in the public beta phase, when Twitter was really new)

Abusive moderators who monopolize big communities.This is happening a little bit here too, but at least there is no monopoly and the power of the federation allows us to navigate everywhere.

Never got that into it in the first place but the one thing that really turned me off is it felt like talking over billions of other voices who are a lot louder and more interesting.

Twitter

web version is absolutely miserable so i just follow the people of interest through nitter

When I found I used it too much, the same day I went to the web-app to write a goodbye-tweet, but Twitter denied me acces, unless I'd give it my phone number. So I left anyway.
- Phone numbers and emails have become prerequisites for joining social media nowadays.

I spent too much time on there before musk acquired it. After that, I put an app timer on to limit it to 15min a day, then down to 10. Now I go weeks at a time without opening it. The experience has changed greatly. It's a shitty buggy experience where the opinions of the dumbest people on earth are served to me with high priority. Pass.

x

I don't recall exactly when it was, but quite awhile ago I saw Twitter transitioning from a place people use internet aliases to talk about niche things into a place where official organizations like local city governments, news channels and even the fire station to put out information. As well as people using real identities including celebrities. That's when I bailed. It might have been around 2012? I don't know for sure. The same problem happened on Facebook.
Using these websites as a place to do serious things feels absurd to me. Like trying to have a discussion about politics on a neopets forum. Except it is a neopets forum that is mostly porn. At least Facebook doesn't have porn, but I don't like the idea of real identities online. Real identities are for offline in my opinion. Official organizations should use dedicated sites for their purpose. Or a self hosted mastodon instance where they don't allow sign ups if they really want this format of delivery.

Didn't really use it because the scientific and medical misinformation going around on the site was tiring to see. Then Elon Musk bought it and I could see the enshittification coming up. Put up a link to my new Mastodon account, waited like a month and then downloaded my data and deleted my account.
I'm still on Mastodon. Won't even look at Bluesky before they show they're serious about making it decentralised. And even if that happens, I'll still brace for the potential Google Talk 2: Electric Boogaloo.

i'll let you know once i 'leave'...
i actually would have to 'join' the site, first, though. and that ain't gonna happen.