Update: I also closed my Mastodon account and moved to Bluesky. I’m leaving this up because of the discussion of why I left Twitter.
I deactivated my Twitter account campbell_kang. If you see any account on Twitter active after December 14, 2022 that claims to be mine, it’s fake. I am now on Mastodon:
https://camerondcampbell.masto.host/@cameron
I decided to leave Twitter because of concerns about where it was heading under its new owner. He has aligned himself with some of the worst people in American society and politics, and is turning Twitter into a platform to amplify their views. As far as I am concerned, anyone who stays on Twitter after what he has done, especially in the last week, is enabling him and his allies, if only by continuing to make the site attractive to advertisers.
I also have a concern that given his erratic behavior, we really don’t know what he may do with user data. The deliberate release of internal company communications to ‘reporters’ with the connivance of company leadership seems to me to be unprecedented in recent history. What is to stop data on selected users from being transferred to ‘reporters’ in similar fashion? Could lists that users have made but set to private also be leaked? Direct messages? Posts to locked accounts? What, if anything, are the boundaries now?
I mostly used Twitter to follow other academics and learn about new work. Many of the academics I followed already moved to Mastodon, and others seem to migrating. Increasingly, everything I wanted from Twitter is available there.
I find Mastodon relatively straightforward to use, and I appreciate the absence of ads, suggested follows, and likes and replies by people I follow for posts by people I don’t follow. I’ve dealt with the lack of an algorithm by organizing my follows into lists, with one primary list for the small number of people whose posts I all want to see, and then other lists for specific areas like academic disciplines that I check occasionally.
I also used Twitter to follow reporters and news organizations for breaking news, especially about the regions of the world that I am most interested in. So far, few of them have moved to Mastodon, but I added the relevant RSS feeds for their employers to Feedly, and that seems to be taking care of my needs.