TL;DR - I’m pretty much done with Twitter (here-in named the “birdshite” 🦤💩).

Let’s be honest - Twitter wasn’t exactly ideal for a pretty long time. The sheer amount of ads that were pushed into the feed even long before Space Karen bought the birdshite wasn’t great. I had already blocked thousands of accounts that were pushing promoted tweets into my feed, and had to fight the UI that would constantly try and move me back to the never-ending algorithmic feed that all these advert-centric businesses so love as it eeks out some percentage more time where you eyeballs are glued to their content.

Wile E Coyote realising that he’s about to fall off a cliff

Third-party clients always had an air of Wile E Coyote about them - they were off a cliff but hadn’t realised that gravity was going to kick in any second now. This is no slight against all the awesome developers of third-party birdshite clients - but it always felt like the birdshite were two steps away from yanking the ground from under the developers feet. The Talk Show podcast had a great dive into this that I recommend about Twitterific’s journey in this regard, worth a listen.

But the real kicker is just the fragmentation and loss of community on there. The birdshite was for a long time my view into the games industry. Hell I can probably say with all honesty that my career so far is a direct result of my ability to reach a community of fellow bit-twiddlers, mathooligans, and compiler tinkerers. Who would know a wee plonker like myself who lives as remote as I do in the Isle of Skye without some sort of social place that people like me could coinhabit and share ideas.

With the fragmentation of the community on the birdshite something has been broken there. Even with all the will in the world I do not think there is a way to kintsugi the birdshite back into what it was. Space Karen made a bunch of people jump ship. Third-party clients being banned has made the ship sink. I logged into the birdshite and within five clicks around I got asked to join the subscription service twice. They ‘forgot’ that I didn’t want the algorithmic feed once already. At most every five tweets there is an ad. It’s hellish.

Like a lot of people from my community I’ve landed on Mastodon. It’s quieter, more peaceful, and more pleasant. Not everyone has made it over there, and that obviously makes me sad for the loss of insight and interaction with my friends lives. But Mastodon gives me what I got from the birdshite all those years ago without all the garbage fires that now pollute the place.

So you can find me at https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@neilhenning, where I’ll be posting the usual mix of dog photos, coding funtimes, and the occassional link out to my blog.

I won’t be deleting my birdshite account - not for any loyalty or desire to return, but the advice from people leaving is that if you leave someone or some bot will hoover up your account handle and likely impersonate you. So I’ll just let the account lie in limbo.