Quitter (part two)

Things have really progressed quickly since my last post on this subject. I promise not all my writing will be about this, but it might continue to be the focus for a little while longer…

Back then (all of two months ago), Bluesky was a plucky upstart with a reasonably large userbase in Japan and Brazil, but struggling for traction against the encumbent leader in the microblogging space, Twitter (something that has not changed in the interim is my determination not to use its new name). Now, following a clear landmark event in its history, the US election whereby Donald Trump regained the presidency and brought with him a certain Elon Musk, a mass “X-odus” has taken place, and Bluesky now appears to be gaining the critical mass it needs to compete with, and perhaps beat, its former parent company Twitter (aided by the latter’s total collapse into far-right mania and pornbots of course).

As such I have decided that I’ll be mostly posting there instead of Mastodon as was the original plan. But what it has really encouraged me to do is formally remove myself from Twitter by deleting my tweet history. I was shocked to discover I had made over eighteen-thousand of them in the ten years or so that I actively used the site (don’t expect that kind of output here!), but within minutes, they were all gone.

There are two main parts to this process of migrating to Bluesky (though there are some other suggestions here if you want extra credit, but don’t use the paid tweet deletion service they recommend, read on):

Take your follows with you

Firstly, we need to use your Twitter account to find at least some of the people you followed on Bluesky (you’ll be surprised how many of them are there already). Due to Musk’s decision to kill the API, many of the tools that existed to do this no longer work, but there is currently one that I know of (hat tip).

This Chrome extension will trawl through your tweeple and provide a list of Bluesky accounts that match them. It’s worth double checking before you hit “follow”, because some false positives are likely, but this is a great quick way to kickstart your Bluesky experience and fill your feed with the stuff you want.

I hesitate to recommend the use of Chrome, given how it is of course owned by Google (for now) and will track your behaviour, but you can use it for this purpose and then delete it.

Incidentally a much more time-consuming and less effective alternative is to manually, recursively trawl through lists of follows of people whose opinions you respect. This is something I have found myself doing also and found some gems that way too, but keep an eye on the time if you’re doing this late at night…

Deleting your tweets

This is something that I would encourage everyone who has decided to ease up on their Twittering activity to do, for all kinds of reasons, even if they don’t plan to take up residence on a competitor, and I’m going to give you a quick tutorial on how to do it (with credit due to Luca Hammer’s excellent guide).

1. Go to your settings and download an archive of your data. This might take a while to generate (a few days in my case, but you probably haven’t wasted as much of your life on there as I have
2. Make a cup of tea or something, live your life, and try not to think about how evil people are monetising your pithy observations right this moment, until you get an email saying it’s ready. Go and download it and unzip it.
3. Copy the raw version of Luca’s script from Github
4. Go to the erstwhile Twitter site, and open your browser’s developer tools (F12 on Windows, Cmd+shift+I on Mac), copy the full code into the console. You might have to choose the Console tab and allow pasting, following the prompts from your browser. Then press enter (as an aside, you should be very careful what you paste in here, but as far as I can tell, this is safe).
5. A blue bar will appear at the top of the page, use it to choose the tweet-headers.js file from your archive’s data folder. Press the button.
6. Make another cup of tea or something, safe in the knowledge that when you come back, your tweets will be gone, and can no longer be used to train large language models or scupper your future attempts to find gainful employment.

You can also use the script’s advanced options to unfollow everyone that you’re following, which might be something you choose to do. These data points linking you to others, and them to yet others, etc, are valuable.

Optionally, Bluesky allows you to import tweets, but really, be honest. Are they worth preserving? Pick a few favourites if you must.

It might be cathartic to say goodbye.