Well, I guess it was inevitable really. Once Elon Musk had taken over Twitter, gutted all the teams that kept it running and forced his radical agenda on everyone that remained, the writing was on the wall. Today, after 15 years, I left Twitter.

Twitter was my social network of choice, I started out in 2009 like everyone did, oversharing inane minutia about my day to day life that no one cared about. However, over time, I matured into posting inane, poorly-formed political opinions that no one cared about.

Eventually, once I had started studying Computer Science I really found my niche and starting building a network of interesting people doing interesting things. I got my internship at Twitter itself by talking to people on the site, I learned vital context for my PhD and built up a network of Data Engineers that helped me better understand our customer’s needs at Red Hat.

But all that changed after Musk took over, people started leaving and content started getting weird and sometime downright disturbing. After the Presidential election a Rubicon seemed to have been crossed, I had been read-only since Musk took over but now I didn’t even want to have my passive interaction counted. What’s more, my network seemed to move on-mass to bluesky in the space of a week or so after the election.

So I requested my data, archived a whole era of my online life and moved to bluesky (@tomcooper.dev). It feels much cleaner, like Twitter 10 years back. It won’t last, but I am enjoying it while it does.

I like Mastodon too, but the data engineering server I was part of shut down and I lost all my contacts (my fault as I didn’t back them up/transfer them in time). I might look at using Masto.host to create my own, but for now you can find me on bluesky.