I have been on Twitter since 2007 and parting ways was not really that difficult, but it was sad. I held on to my three letter account for quite awhile after the Musk acquisition, hoping that things will improve (yeah, really silly me for believing that this being can do that). I shifted my Twitter account (I still refuse to call it X) from active to passive, entertaining only DMs, but cross-posting from Mastodon and Micro.blog. This continued until Musk did a developer-hostile move by putting the APIs behind a paywall. That move killed third-party applications, which affected my cross-posting service. 

With cross-posting gone, my Twitter account was hanging on a thread. I started deleting my posts, cross-posts and the occasional direct posts just to keep the account alive, until I finally requested for my archive - to find out what else Twitter had on my account. Didn't take that long before I got an email with the download link to my archive.

The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back for me was the change in their Privacy Policy, which gives Twitter full surveillance access, e.g. data collection, from your biometrics data, education and work information (which can be derived from your posts or acquired somewhere else), location data, and more, and share data with their partners, I presume for profit. Twitter will collect metadata of encrypted messages, too. And that is not all, Twitter will also use your posts to train their Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI, because I refuse to call it AI).

On September 11, 2023, I pulled the trigger and finally deactivated my Twitter account. It will take a few more days to have it finally deleted (a 30-day grace period is provided, just in case you change your mind, I won't). Good-bye, Twitter. It was one heck of a ride. And yes, I now know that Twitter will never return to what it was before, so if I were you, it is time to look elsewhere. 

Recent developments from Twitter, like declining monthly average users, Musk planning to make Twitter an entirely paid service (with its CEO left hanging, with no clue about what Musk's tweeting from the toilet), threatening the US Anti-Defamation League with a lawsuit, firing their election integrity team, supporting far-right personalities, and personally attacking whoever posts, likes, retweets anything negative about him, should be enough to prove that Twitter is no more. 

You can find me on the University of the Philippines' experimental HomeTown, a Mastodon-fork, service, Social.up.edu.ph, which is open to all current employees and enrolled students. I also have a personal account on another paid service. And finally, I am also on BlueSky (@rom.bsky.social - here's a couple of invites for you, too - bsky-social-usiop-uftdt and bsky-social-vud3m-ozdfo), a more Twitter-like service.

If you can afford it, time to stop using Twitter, and stop supporting Elon Musk!