I permanently deleted Twitter on 21 June 2022.

Now, to my amusement, I read the blogs of people in my networks or articles about what’s happening on Twitter, I see the mad scramble as they go through the same questions I had gone through those months ago.

There’s a mad scramble to save or archive their tweets and then to seek out an alternative to Twitter.

Enter Mastodon.

….Until they destroy Mastodon too.

…Or until they realise that Mastodon doesn’t ‘work’ the same as Twitter because it doesn’t feed the same behaviours we were used to on Twitter.

…Then they question, why even have a “Twitter-like” account?

Watch people move over to LinkedIn now (or just focus on LinkedIn – which also has it’s own oddities and bizarre behaviours). But that’s not a solution either.

I’m sitting back and watching all these odd behaviours of people and recalling the times people were moving off Facebook, off Vine, off Instagram, off Medium etc. Humans are odd creatures. We tend to follow what the crowd is doing thinking that the next best thing is best for us. So we find the next thing – then that goes balls up too – and we’re onto the next thing.

Just look at what is happening with the Substack cult conversations online.

Is anyone actually talking about removing anything more than Twitter?

How about stopping ALL your social media?

What would happen IF the crowds left Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat and others?

What would happen if there was a mass deletion of these apps from our lives?

The more these apps are integrated into our lives, the more companies will integrate them into their working and recruiting processes.

It then makes it MORE DIFFICULT TO LEAVE THEM because we start to think – or give excuses – that we NEED them.

We don’t need them.

The platform capitalists need us. Not the other way around.

So we need to do something drastic that comes as a surprise to them and their VCs and shareholders.

Get off them.

We start to look at ways to take charge of our own information.

Of course, I have no answers on how to do this because I’m currently trying to figure it out for myself too.

If it’s one thing that I’m seeing a lot clearer now that I’m not using social media is how embedded they are into our lives, into our family and friendship sphere and into our work. It is difficult it is to extricate yourself from them because then you extricate yourself from “the system” – so you’re forever destined to be a slave to them.

Even if you say that you just have “an account even though I never use it”.

Why even have it then? Delete it. Be courageous – get rid of it.

Why is deleting an account that we don’t use often that big a deal?

They’ve built us all into a system of their making. We are not in control. We are the product and now it’s a great detriment to our society and our behaviours towards each other.

The platforms have created the conditions to feed us a constant loop of the worst in human nature – and it’ll only get worse. Metaverse anyone?

We need drastic actions to right things again for a bit.

Overcome your personal fear to getting off social media. This is another option that is available to you.