Let me say up front that this isn’t going to be a super political post.

I was on Twitter, or X, for sixteen years—fifteen, with my current account. I deleted my first account because I felt like I’d been too sarcastic, and I didn’t want to be like that. (One funny thing about the first account was that Barack Obama followed it. Twitter was small then, and he just followed everyone back.)

I’d always been chatty on the platform. For the past year or so, I’d had over 12,000 followers. Over a couple of weeks in November, that dipped to 11,500 followers, and I became part of that migration.

Last week, I deactivated my account on Twitter…

and I became active on Bluesky. I thought I’d talk a little about my experiences on Twitter, and what I like about Bluesky now! 

The Early Days of Twitter

When I first got on Twitter, tweets were limited to 140 characters, including @names and links. I don’t think there were pictures or gifs.

There was no retweet feature. You would type “RT @name” and then retype what another person had said, but because of the character limit, it was often only part of what they said. In 2008 and 2009, hashtags were a recent invention on Twitter, and we weren’t all using them yet.

Early Twitter felt very personal. As strange as it sounds, group texts weren’t yet common back then, and among other things, early Twitter functioned as a group text for me and some of my coworkers. Several of them were much more clever than I am, making Twitter very entertaining for me.

The Past Few Years on Twitter

Like most authors and creators, I rely on social media to promote my work. I now have a book editing business, Lucky Author, to promote, too. So I had good reasons to try to ignore the fact that Twitter was becoming an increasingly miserable experience. 

The platform had settled into an overall vibe of rage. I think a well-reasoned debate is a great thing, but “debate” on Twitter consisted mostly of ad hominem attacks. Maybe that’s true on every social media platform, but it seemed to me like a lot of people were coming to Twitter just to fight. 

I can only speak about my own experience as a user, but the algorithm seemed to favor hateful and extreme political views. More than once, I was attacked over viewpoints that I didn’t even hold, and never said that I held. It all felt very unhinged.

And then there are the gross new terms and conditions.

Recently, Twitter/X updated them to allow the platform a “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display, upload, download, and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed, for any purpose.” It also allows X to use your content to train their AI.

What I Like About Bluesky So Far

Bluesky has been derided as a liberal “echo chamber.” I am moderately liberal, but although I’m sometimes politically active, I don’t like to talk about politics on social media very often. I don’t think it’s an especially effective form of political action, and I don’t enjoy it. I don’t like to read about politics constantly, either.

So far on Bluesky, it seems easier to follow positive people, avoid negativity, and just have normal conversations about life and about things that interest me. Some of this may just be because Bluesky isn’t huge yet, but the platform has structural advantages. Unlike Twitter, you can block users, and you can also hide replies to your post. That means that for hateful trolls, Bluesky isn’t as easy to use.

I’ve always felt that I spend too much time on social media, though, and one of my 2025 resolutions is going to be putting a limit on that. 

Tweets, Memories, and My Former Self

Before I deactivated my account, I spent a lot of time over the course of a couple of days to look through old tweets. I took screenshots of many that I wanted to keep.

There were a lot of great memories. Adopting one of our little dogs from the shelter. Getting on a plane to go to Iceland. Silly tweets between me and a friend who since passed away. 

Of course, tweets don’t tell the whole story, but one thing that struck me with the tweets in the early years was how lighthearted and goofy I was. My hellish five years of working in publishing, and the pandemic, both changed me a lot. Although it’s terrible to consider, my engagement on such a toxic platform might have also had an impact, not only on how I expressed myself, but also on the person I was.

I think I wrote my fun romcom novel Her Knight at the Museum in part to get back to that more lighthearted state. I always think our former selves are still in there, like clothes hanging in the back of the closet, and we can dig them out again.

Are you on Twitter, Bluesky, or any other social media platforms?

Have you had positive experiences? Negative ones? Do you spend much time on them? I’m also active on TikTok and Instagram. I’ve avoided Threads, since it seemed to me like there was a lot of fighting there, too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Thanks so much for reading, and have a wonderful week!