My Slow Retreat from Twitter

When I started posting on twitter, blogging and contributing to open source 4.5 years ago, I was not sure where this journey would take me.

I started my blog so that I'd have a resource to link to when someone asks me a question. I started to contribute to open source because of things I wanted to improve in the libraries I am using. And I started to post on twitter, because, honestly, it felt like a good idea.

I was passively consuming twitter for quite some time, and to me, it definitely was "the room where it happens": Where all the great minds were, sharing bleeding edge thoughts and innovations and interesting articles. When I posted my first articles, they were very well received.

I like to think that that's because I wasn't focusing on absolute beginners. There's tons of great 101 content out there, and while you will definitely get more reads on this kind of content, I just didn't enjoy writing about it. I don't have a "Getting started with React Query" article that shows you how to set it up and what you can do with it, but I have lots of articles that go deeper - things that you might want to read after you're done with the docs.

So I somehow filled a niche in the React / TypeScript / React Query world of being the person who writes a bit more advanced content, and I'm really glad that it got positive reception.

Twitter

Twitter has always been instrumental at amplifying my content, and I'm truly grateful for the reach I've gotten. I'm humbled to now have 45k followers on that platform. That's a lot of people (and bots).

Despite that, or maybe exactly because of that, I think it's time for me to move on. As many others have noticed as well, Twitter isn't what it used to be.

As your account gets larger, you're bound to be exposed to stronger emotions. I'm lucky to not have experienced this a lot, but I also actively tried to stay out of trouble. "Can I post this on twitter or will this opinion earn me a 💩-storm?" is something I continuously asked myself. Disagreeing with each other is okay - it's great actually, because it widens your horizon - IF you are truly willing to discuss, which most people are not.

At the same time, I haven't had many very successful tweets, and the ones that did well were mainly around negative emotions:

• Stop using useEffect!
• Why would you ever put a jwt token in localStorage?
• OMG Suspense is broken in React 19, what were they thinking?!

I don't want to be a negative person, and I rarely am, so I guess I'm not getting rewarded by a platform that capitalizes on those.

I also don't want to fight an algorithm. I've never done any growth hacking, and I also don't want to be forced to post on a daily basis to not get punished. I've also never put links in the second tweet - mainly because I forgot about it most of the time - and it really shows in terms of reach. I get more valuable engagement on bluesky, where I have 10% of the followers I have on twitter.

Lastly, I'm really susceptible to "doom scrolling", and this has gotten way worse lately. While I enjoy a good meme from time to time, my timeline is now filled with those "non aesthetic things" accounts that post stupid videos and memes. I constantly mark them as "irrelevant", but it doesn't seem to change a thing. Once you have clicked on one of those, the algo will give more to you.

🦋

Thinking back to why I became active on twitter in the first place - sharing my work and being around people who do the same and see what they are up to - I've realized that this place has moved over to bluesky. There's no ads, there's rarely any negativity, data is yours, and the AT protocol is a pretty nice and fresh innovation on how the web could work. I can recommend Dan's talk Web Without Walls on that.

From now on

To be clear, I will NOT be deleting my twitter account. I've seen first hand that this deletes valuable conversations and breaks links from blogposts (my own included), so I'll definitely keep it up. I will also NOT lock my account. I understand that many people still enjoy being on twitter, so I want to continue to post important updates and new things that I'm writing.

I've tried cross-posting for a while, but it's honestly too much work. Having the same discussions on two platforms is fruitless, and it has also shown me that I'm more excited to see what the resonance is on bluesky compared to twitter.

Maybe that will fade, who knows, but for now, I've decided to delete the app from my phone, and to no longer actively post things on a daily basis. I will still check in from time to time on my computer, but twitter will not be the best place to reach me anymore. If you want to tag along about my daily struggles in open source development, you can find me on bluesky 🦋.

I know one doesn't have to announce their departure - this is not what I'm doing. And no, I don't prefer an "echo chamber" - getting different opinions on any platform is a matter of who you surround yourself with, and I can get different views on a topic in both places.

That's it for today. Feel free to reach out to me on bluesky 🦋 if you have any questions, or just leave a comment below. ⬇️

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