A Year of Goodbyes: Twitter
Photo by Siegfried Poepperl
In 2025, and now in 2026, I've been leaving and will continue leaving several beloved services I once enjoyed. This series will chronicle my exits and remind me why I did it. First on the list: Twitter.
A few days ago, I woke up. I went online, entered my heavily modified Twitter experience (no fluff on the sidebar, no For You page). I scrolled a bit, looked at some updates, and then went to settings and deactivated my profile. Nothing made me think it would happen, but it did.
What was strange was that I felt nothing. During my previous attempts to leave, I always felt something. Fear of missing out. Discomfort at losing my connection to people who followed me or who I followed. The anxiety of needing it for my job. But suddenly, as that old Fight Club meme goes, I felt nothing.
EVERY LOVE HAS ITS BEGINNING
My Twitter love blossomed in 2009. Back then, not many people from Bosnia and Herzegovina were on Twitter. It was an "American thing" (and it remains predominantly so). As a journalist, I immediately fell in love with it. What I really loved was the speed of communication, its immediacy, how it made us not only stay up to date but stay in touch. And its availability. Everyone could write a 100-character message (I can't remember the exact limit back then). You didn't need to be a journalist or a word meister of any sort.
Of course, it all started crumbling when the algorithm was introduced. It fundamentally changed how people communicate when they know there are hoops to jump through to stay on top.
SOMETHING WENT WRONG
It was 2016, and my first Twitter profile was followed by people from Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as bands, actors, and other artists. I communicated in English and Bosnian.
What I figured out quite fast is that the right-leaning ideology spreading across American Twitter was now arriving in Bosnia and Herzegovina. More and more people, especially those with anonymized accounts, were spreading hate, disinformation, and attacking people like me (journalists or anyone with left-oriented thinking).
As a journalist back then, I didn't want to go away. But when the threats and jokes got out of hand, I pulled the plug on my account. It was painful. After all, Twitter was a place I loved, enjoyed spending time on. It felt like I was being pushed away from the platform I was using before those who pushed me away even arrived.
It's actually a coincidence that around the same time, I made my first profile on Mastodon in 2016. I could easily be the "first Bosnian in Fediverse," as I've jokingly stated on my Mastodon account, created in 2022, but it also could really be true.
ENTER FEDIVERSE
My microblogging passion was mainly transferred to the Fediverse and Mastodon during the first great migration in 2022, when Elon Musk took over Twitter and later changed its name to X (a name I'll never use). Mastodon is so wonderful and truly aligns with my ideals of a free world, open communication, and community-based interaction.
It spoiled me and kept me active on it, despite my growing disdain for all social media and the fact that fewer people from post-Yugoslav countries are active on it. I need those people since a lot of my creative work is done in our language, which nationalists separate into Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian.
The slightly larger community of people from post-Yugoslav countries on Twitter is exactly why I stayed on the site after 2022. I wanted to keep in touch. As I said, I modified Twitter with several plugins to make it as less shitty as possible. I blocked a lot of idiots and streamlined my experience. But I couldn't really escape the facts, and one of them was that Twitter was becoming less and less useful to me as both a creator and a consumer over time.
US REASONS VS MY REALITY
A lot of my Twitter experience was lost when I discovered the wonders of RSS feeds back in 2019, when I truly started organizing my RSS reader. That essentially rendered Twitter useless for fast updates and media outlets. Since local politics here in Sarajevo rarely use Twitter and the community is smaller, I've started to feel I don't need it as much as I used to.
Many people, especially US users who are angry with Musk and the direction Twitter took after his takeover, often take hard, polarizing stances. If you're on Twitter, you're a Nazi. You need to move to Mastodon or Bluesky. The truth is more complicated than that. For some parts of the world, Twitter is the only platform that proved somewhat useful in the microblogging domain.
Of course, that usefulness is being vanquished every single day. What I find idiotic, at least, is that Twitter actively throttles links, making content creation and promotion on Twitter basically useless unless you want to comply with blackmail and post within Twitter. That's something no self-respecting creator will ever agree to.
So what really happened on the morning I decided to delete Twitter? I finally realized that the older Twitter is gone. My love for it is gone. I am not gaining anything from using it, and the community I wanted is not there. What's left are conspiracy theorists, genocide supporters, right-leaning people, trolls, and those who wish evil upon other human beings. I don't want to be part of that, and that is why I left.
But the strength of my decision doesn't stem only from the fact that I now fully realize what shithole Twitter has become; I also didn't panic after acknowledging that fact.
I did try Bluesky for a year, and I figured out that although it has its benefits, it is so American-politics-oriented and lacks any substantial local community, so I really don't need to waste time putting any effort into it. The other type of content presented there (comics, art, movies, music), I can certainly get my hands on another way. Of course, what happened to Twitter made me think about the possible enshittification of Bluesky, which WILL happen at a certain point, no matter how good or progressive it appears right now. It's just the fact of technical constraints.
NEW YEAR, SLOWER ME
My microblogging and communication fixes these days come from writing this blog and using Mastodon. I am moving toward a slower, more intentional life, and I feel it comes with age. I don't need to be on top of things anymore. I don't need to witness everything. The world is not creating content for me to devour - these days, I cherry-pick what content will make my world better, and no algorithmic machine can do it better than me.
I am grateful for my time on Twitter. Blue Bird, thanks for the fun ride, but it's time to let you go. Goodbye.
Thank you for reading. You can reach me via e-mail or My Mastodon profile.
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