The next victim of my "digital cleanup" will be my Medium account. Even though I stopped writing original content there a while ago, I currently get a few cents a month of revenue, maybe a few dollars when I’m lucky. It’s tough to expand the readership over there. My revenue used to be enough to pay for my Partner Program annual membership, but not anymore.  All in all, the time has come to move on.

I receive more user feedback or interactions in a day here on Micro.blog than in an entire month on Twitter. On top of that, the quality is 100x higher too.

Think about that for a second.

Thank you guys!

As per my current analysis and preparation for leaving Twitter, here’s what I’m going to lose.

• Access to product announcements, most of which I track because they are part of my workflows (Examples: Glass, Unsplash, Substack, Opal, Readwise, and 90 more). This could be hard to replace, not all websites support RSS feeds.
• Access to some public services status messages like special events or some type of alerts.
• Two of my Brews on Mailbrew that are entirely based on Twitter content will need to be deleted.
• Interaction with people following me who won’t leave Twitter to go elsewhere. I rarely get replies, though. Not a big loss.
• According to [my Plausible page](https://plausible.io/numericcitizen.micro.blog), 50% of visitors coming from non-direct sources are coming from Twitter. One way to mitigate this is by enabling RSS feeds and letting people no in advance other ways to get in touch.
• Quite a few of my published articles or blog posts refer to my tweets as links or embed. They won’t show up anymore when I turnoff public access to my tweets. That's not cool.

I think it is essential to elaborate on why I will close my Twitter accounts in 2023. This is not something to do lightly. So, after much thought, here are my five main reasons.

1. I disagree with the values and views as they are expressed by its new owner: Elon Musk. Even if he resigns, it won’t matter much. Elon Musk has broken too many things since he became the owner. Twitter is a broken platform and cannot be trusted.
2. I no longer want to feed the beast (user tracking, advertising networks, algorithm-based timelines). I won’t pay to get rid of 50% of the ads or whatever Musk decides to ask for.
3. I no longer trust Twitter’s sustainability and ability to thrive in the future. Twitter has become a loser in my digital landscape. If anything, Twitter has become the other wake-up call for the toxicity of a centralized web. The time has come for decentralizing the Internet.
4. Twitter doesn’t add significant unique value to my digital life anyway. Most of what I’m getting from Twitter can be found elsewhere.
5. Before I decided to close my accounts, I wanted to focus on one of my two accounts anyway (numericcitizen) instead of apple_observer, but it doesn’t have enough traction to warrant the efforts for the change.

What are your reasons?

On Twitter, you can get notified when someone starts following you. Sounds great until it isn’t. You know, many people will start following others to get attention about their existence, hoping to get a follow back. It’s easy to know they are seeking your attention because after a few days they will unfollow you. I always despised this behaviour. For this reason, I prefer Micro.blog’s lack of notifications when someone starts to follow me. I don’t pay attention.

I could save more than a whopping 400$ annually by shutting down my Twitter accounts. Thanks to the potential removal of a few service subscriptions from my workflow and potentially unjustified without Twitter in my digital life: Buffer, Typefully, Mailbrew. 

It’s incredible how thinking about my Twitter reliance makes me realize so many things on so many levels in my content creation workflow.