Dear Twitter (I know, you are X now, but I still prefer Twitter and this is my blog so I will call you what I want)
It is time. Time to say goodbye. I don’t mean a temporary break either.
We have hung around with each other since the summer of 2007 when I joined as I also learned how to be a mum. I found people there I could relate to, it was a distraction to help keep me awake in the middle of the night during feeds and it was a great space for what we now know is my ADHD brain to enjoy. Fast moving, always changing, stimulating, frustrating, much dopamine.
I have made friends there. And some enemies. A tangle with some right wing American Christian fundamentalists when I got too involved in conversations that started off with me disagreeing with a Trad Wife account that Trump was a manly man, and resulted in me being cyber stalked by someone for a while, kind of scary, I can sort of laugh at it now, but it resulted in me having to actually delete my hard worked for account with a fair following and start over and also made me much more aware of how easy it is to find someone on the internet and what information is out there about people. Lesson learned there. It also left me feeling less than enthusiastic about you and I stopped using it as a social space a couple of years ago. It also has to be said that your support was less than stellar and that left a bad taste in my mouth, when the person who was stalking me had made attempts to find my family members and other information linked to me and made threats to me and you did nothing about it. I lost interest in posting, regrowing my account or trying to build there.
When your new boss came in and took over, I wondered what would happen. We all did. Maybe we all kept hopeful, too long. The changes he started making, we all held our breath and kept hoping it would be ok. I think many of us stayed because we thought things might go back to how they were. I know there are people there who have held on and still are in the hope it can feel like the space we loved. I admire their fortitude. I want it to be the place I loved.
It isn’t. It won’t be.
The Twitter I know and loved is gone. I think we all know why, and how and who and what. I won’t go into that, you simply need to read news articles, go to other social media sites, or use your own common sense. It doesn’t feel safe, impartial, balanced or frankly, safe there anymore. I made my account private for a while and left it there, came back after a few months to find I had hundreds of follower requests. Every single one of them was a porn bot account. The new boss said he was going to do something about that, but he never has.
You also operate on the same basis as Titkok. You show us things based on if we have lingered on one post or one link rather than what we follow and want to see. Click on something out of curiosity (I learned not to do that, no matter how hard my ADHD brain told me to) and now you think that is what I want my feed to be filled with. No thanks.
I use social media for community, for friendship, for information, and for fun.
Unfortunately, you are none of those things for me. To be fair, I am not your ideal consumer either. I actually blocked your boss, his company and any affiliates, fairly fast. I am not interested in MAGA, Trump, misogny and supporting the patriarchy or the promoting of male hatred of women in the name of “free speech”. I don’t need to see the constant stream of bile that has enflamed tension and even encouraged violence. I also don’t want to be sold things constantly, and I am not paying your fees to make the space feel safer or more attuned to my needs (and from what I have heard, paying doesn’t work for that either) and I certainly don’t want to use the services your spoiled toddler of a boss thinks the world needs.
So, Twitter, now X, it really is you, not me. Or maybe it is me. Maybe I am not brave or bold enough, or open enough to “free speech” in the way your boss defines it. I am ok with that.
So, my account is deactivated. I did that before but then kept it alive by checking in every 29 days so I could keep my user name in the hopes the space had changed. But today, I clicked and I won’t be back. If someone else wants to use CatsKidsChaos there, they are more than welcome. Send some blog traffic my way.
Time to say goodbye, time to move on. Sad, really. It’s been a long time, but life carries on, and there are other spaces that are growing and whilst maybe they can’t compete, they can be an alternative.
If you followed me on Twitter and would like to follow me elsewhere, I can be found on Threads, Tiktok and Instagram.
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