Leaving the Birdsite

I’m keeping my account open… I’ll even log in every now and again to keep the account appearing active because I don’t want my username to vanish. But I think that my activity on Twitter is now at and end.

Many words (more eloquent that what I’ll write) have been written talking about what’s been happening in the Twitterland over the last months, and realistically the last few years. At best it’s been expressed as ‘not a nice place to be’, through to it’s a pretty dangerous place to be. I resonate with them all.

I’ve been on the edge of stepping away for a while, gone are the days of regular posting on Twitter, or even scrolling through it. The thing that has been the final nail has been the blocking of third party apps to Twitter over the last week^[1]. Third party apps were the way that I have always engaged with Twitter, from the early days of downloading something that ran on Adobe Air, through players that have been with us for the long term such as Tweetbot or Twitterfic. All of these tools are now dead without notice or warning.

It was a nice run of things, but now it’s time to move on. I’m over on Mastodon these days. Remembering the early days of Twitter, where I learnt a lot from really interesting people who were sharing blog posts with clever tricks, made new friends, and posted pictures of cats. All the third party clients are there, and they are growing nicely.

I’ve also used this as an opportunity to prune out the Twitter Card code that I’ve been putting onto various websites for years now. I don’t think we need that any more.