On Friday, I finally decided to pull the plug on Twitter.
I've been telling myself for years that I needed to stay on Twitter because it's where my network lived, and it's where the tech ecosystem lived and breathed for as long as I've worked in it (since 2008).
But for the past year or so (and particularly since January), my news feed has been little more to me than a trigger for anxiety, anger, and the feeling like I'll never be good enough / fast enough / smart enough / rich enough to thrive in the tech industry.
So on Friday night I decided to see just exactly how much value Twitter has been providing me lately. The answer? Very little.
Despite nearly 5,000 followers, I was hard-pressed to find a single Tweet that generated more than 100 views, let along meaningful engagement.
Despite following 3,738 people, I noticed that my own engagement habits have narrowed to a mere 2.27% of that reach. Since January of this year, I only liked posts or engaged meaningfully with 85 people.
That was actually a relief for me to see. It's hard to think about how to migrate a network of thousands. But 85? Totally manageable on my own.
Now that I feel empowered with access to make my own software with AI no-code tools, I decided to see if I could solve for my Twitter personality problem by building my own "narrowverse" of friends and people I still wanted to hear from, without the echochamber of an entire social network getting in the way.
Here's what I did:
How I repurposed the 85 people I really cared about on Twitter to find their content in other places.
Curation by customization. First, I made a list of those 85 accounts and asked ChatGPT to search the Internet for the blogs, websites, or newsletters associated with those users. Unsurprisingly, about half of them already run their own blogs, and nearly everyone had a linked personal website from their twitter bio.
A customized read-only experience. Next, I created an entirely new email address and subscribed just to those blogs. This felt like an easy way to curate an inbox without any outside noise. (What's also nice about a custom inbox for RSS feeds only is that I can easily port over the content into other places later.)
A personalized RSS feed. Finally, I asked Replit to help me create a new custom read-only daily digest of the most recent blog posts from those people. We built a new DIY web view of these blogs that I can refresh as I like, and an easy way to add new blogs.
Notably, I also tried to get Cursor, Lovable, and Replit to also build for me a custom dashboard of just the most recent tweets from the 85 people who I was leaving behind. But we quickly ran into Twitter scraping issues and blew quickly through Twitter's free tier of its developer API.
The paid tier for the API that I'd need to build a simple scraper would cost me $200/month, which is an absolutely outrageous price for indie developers and builders. So now I've got one more thing to be mad at Twitter about.
Of course there are a lot of other things to be missed about leaving a social network like Twitter. You lose some sense of a feeling of friendship and camaraderie. I still remember the first time I intentionally met a Twitter friend IRL ("in real life") back in 2009. We scheduled a coffee meetup via DM, and my whole office thought I was nuts for going to meet an "internet stranger." But it was a really lovely moment of connection and community, one of many Twitter-based coffee friendships in the decade to come.
Of course we've come a long way since then. I haven't felt those good vibes of "internet strangers turning real" on Twitter in a long time. So I don't think I'll miss it, particularly since I'm now spending more time on Farcaster, which is an onchain social network that still feels a bit more like a cozy corner of builders on the Internet. Think: Discord forum vibes with way better UI and channel-specific conversations on topics that fit any niche (I'm a big contributor in the gardening and new-york channels).
While it's sad to sad to say goodbye to an old habit, it's nice to free yourself up for a new mindset, particularly now that we all have more tools available to design our own home pages, inboxes, and curation experiences on the Internet.
Over 600 subscribers
On Friday I finally fled the coop (Twitter) for the last time when I realized that i was only meaningfully engaging with 2% of my follower base Seems like a good day to go all in on @farcaster https://hardmodefirst.xyz/fleeing-the-coop-leaving-twitter-and-building-a-diy-narrowverse
gm! Great post! Twitter was once a global town hall, it no longer serves that purpose. Legacy social media is broken, time to pivot. Here now but who knows what’s next? I tend to remind my close Gen X friends that we did this already when MySpace got inundated with spammers mostly trying to sell their music at the time. At least here there’s a different learning experience.
very close to doing the same. how'd you find your engagement numbers on twitter?
I just counted lol started by making a list of the people who i wanted to make sure to keep closeby, just by scanning my feed and reading through likes when i realized it was the same people over and over again, i knew it was time to just pull the list and pop off
[RFF] - Scan my twitter account and identify the top 50-100 accounts with which i interact, follow them on farcaster