I mostly stopped using Twitter, now X, in the fall of 2023, after Elon Musk instituted changes to verification and the algorithm to make the site less useful to me. I had been on the service for 17 years and had more than 35,000 follower at one point. Of the X alternatives, I currently use BlueSky, Mastodon and Threads, although I will probably start phasing out my presence on the latter.

After the recent election, I see a lot of people now quitting X and deactivating their accounts, because of Musk’s support for Trump and the site’s descent into low-quality posts, white supremacy, porn and other problems. That said, I am not going to delete my account, partly because from time to time I want to see something that is only available here but mostly because I do not want someone to pick up the username “palafo” and impersonate me to get up to mischief (as Yashar Ali explains in the excerpt below). But I am using the service Tweetdelete to eradicate all of my old tweets, likes etc. from the service. I don’t need anyone dredging them up out of context or using them to train AI and so on.