Personal: My Twitter Manifesto

Filed under: personal, community

This is more of a WIP than the ink being dry.

tl;dr My lingering thoughts about Twitter aka #birdsite for those on other networks.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to participate in #DeactiDay yet. I’m leaning towards it. (I opted out.) However, the platform is still too important for many marginalized and underrepresented voices. It takes a tremendous amount of privilege to participate and to pretend that this problem is easily solved by jumping over to Mastodon. Participating is a personal choice and I respect you all regardless.

Things to consider

• Sage Sharp’s excellent thread on why Mastodon comes with its own problems.
• Making Twitter Tolerable, One Glitch App At A Time lives up to the promise of “Making Twitter Tolerable.” I immediately put these Glitch add-ons to good use:
  • Disable All Retweets via turn-off-retweets
  • Return to Chronological via follow-management.
  • Keep Up With Your Followers via RSS via Twitter Followings OPML Export

Short-term

• I am @[email protected] and @[email protected].

• All of my public Mastodon Toots are published on Twitter via Moa.

• I am syncing my Twitter friends list via Mastodon’s Friends Bridge.

• I have filters setup to remove from birbsite and @twitter.com to avoid content republishing from Twitter to Mastodon. After a week or two of seeing dozens of RTs in a row, this has made my overall experience better.

• My preferred UI is Halcyon which is a Twitter UI clone which is written in PHP.
  

  Please note: Filters do not seem to work here which I find annoying and I hope this is a bug which is fixed sooner than later.
  

  If hosting your own PHP instance isn’t your thing, I have found a great host on twitter.rixx.de.

• I prefer a Twitter-like UI than Mastodon’s default TweetDeck-like experience. Thankfully, Pinafore is another web client which has a more Twitter-like feel to it.

Short to Medium-term

• I am participating in #BlockParty500 using this Block Together app+list. I am also proactively blocking advertisers who appear in my timeline.

• I am working on a Telegram Bot which will publish to Mastodon, Twitter, both, or whatever else comes out.

Why Telegram? I have been on the platform for a few months and have reconnected with friends who might otherwise not be on most social media websites. Their bot platform is great and I am a member of a few communities which aren’t possible on a platform like Twitter.

Long-term

The writing is on the wall that I don’t want to be on Twitter unless there is a management change.