Goodbye, Twitter.

Here’s how you can find and follow me:

It’s difficult to express just how important and meaningful Twitter was to my life and career. I’m sad to leave it behind, but I have to now.

It was always fun when Twitter would come up in conversation with outsiders; the joke was always “it’s just a bunch of people sharing what sandwiches they’re eating for lunch.” Yuk yuk yuk. Inevitably, I’d chime in with “Yeah so I’ve made so many real-life friends and owe pretty much all of my professional success to Twitter.” They’d be surprised and curious to learn more.

It’s difficult to articulate exactly what Twitter was and what made it special. I used it as my water cooler, a place to make friends and build connections, a place to share my thoughts and writing, a place to learn, a place to keep up with the latest and greatest, a place to get recommendations, a place to drum up new business, a place to hold meaningful conversations, a place to make stupid jokes. It was this bizarre world that blended personal and professional, serious and funny, high-brow and low-brow. I truly feel like I could be my authentic self there.

I’ve made so many dear friends because of Twitter. It still blows my mind that I have friends — good friends! — from all over the world because of this website. It’s magic every time I meet a Twitter friend in real life, which continues to happen to this day.

I joined Twitter on Jan 4th, 2008. Right out of the gate, I had some really important things to say:

Over time, I learned the ropes and began connecting with fellow web designers and developers. Twitter was indispensable during the early mobile & responsive design days; it truly felt like we were figuring out things in real-time together. Blogging fed discussion on Twitter which fed blogging which fed discussion on Twitter. It was a great feedback loop, and a healthy community emerged as a result.

Over the last 17 years, I amassed over 130,000 followers, found myself on many “top designers you should follow” lists, and regularly participated in the zeitgeist and hot drama of the day. It became an extension of myself and a regular part of my day.

I can’t believe I have to give it all up, but here we are.

Holding out hope

My livelihood heavily depends on my online presence; there’s always been a direct connection between my Twitter presence and our client work at Big Medium, conferences, and work opportunities. Walking away from a following of 130,000 that I spent 15 years growing is extremely hard and painful. Scary, really! We’re doing really exciting at Big Medium and I want to be able to connect with clients who could use our help. And that’s to say nothing about all of the personal relationships I’ve built and want to maintain.

That’s why I continued holding out hope. When Ol’ Musky‘s takeover occurred I was in the midst of yet-another personal crisis, so I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to jump ship or make any hasty decisions. As time progressed and Ol’ Musky continued its disembowelment of Twitter, I continued to hold out hope that he’d get bored, would run it into the ground, and someone would swoop back in and put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Maybe that will still happen one day. But for now, it’s being actively weaponized by horrible people so I can’t be there anymore. It’s time to walk away. I respect other peoples’ decision to delete their accounts or delete all of their tweets, but I’m not going to do that. Part of me is still holding out hope, but at a more practical level my Twitter activity is heavily woven into my blog and many other publications. I want to preserve URIs.

Where to now?

Of course, Twitter isn’t the only platform around, and I participate in many others. I haven’t quite found the Twitter-like groove with any of them yet (aside from sharing on my own site), but I truly want to recapture even a flicker of the old Twitter spirit. Here’s where you can find me; feel free to reach out and say hey!

  • My website – As always, I’m going to be continuing to blog about design, development, and life. You can subscribe to my RSS feed here.
  • The Big Medium Newsletter – Me and our amazing group of collaborators share our latest and greatest thinking in our once-in-a-while newsletter. All content, no fluff.
  • Threads seems to carry the meme-y, funny spirit of Twitter, and it feels more entertaining than Mastodon.
  • Bluesky has quite a few of my friends, and people have been saying good things. I joined a while ago, and am going to jump back in.
  • Mastodon is the technical curmudgeon of the bunch. I appreciate the practical knowledge sharing, but it doesn’t seem to capture the friendly side of things
  • LinkedIn is like going out to after-work event with co-workers you don’t know all that well. You can have some decent conversations but certain topics are off limits. You can’t make fart jokes. That said, it’s a great place for sharing links and perspectives.
  • YouTube – I have a personal channel that is more music and life focused, and our Big Medium channel shares insights about design, development, design systems, AI, and more. Be sure to smash that subscribe and like button. Sigh. You get the idea though.
  • Instagram is still a regular part of my social media life. My feed is effectively all funny and music content, which turns out is significantly different than other peoples’ experience. In any case, I share moments from my life, share music, and share other funny stuff there.
  • Facebook – still there! Many people went elsewhere, but the people who have held strong on are still there. When I find myself there and am actually presented with updates from my friends, I realize that there’s still so much important stuff shared there: births, deaths, perspectives, worries, celebrations. I’m not really wanting to grow my Facebook presence; I see it is keeping a thing alive for those in my life that prefer to share there.

Whew! That’s a lot of places. I’m going to participate where I can and see if I can keep up, but over time I’ll likely to make some commitments and narrow my focus a bit.

It’s not lost on me that more than at any other point in history our relationships to each other are sculpted by the whims of a handful of commercial companies. I continue to own my own presence on my own website, and want to do some work to beef up my Indie Web self a bit.

Goodbye, Twitter

So now it’s time to say goodbye to the place that’s given me so much. Thank you for all you’ve done for me. I realize I’m talking to a ghost here, but the sentiment holds.

I’ll end this post with some of my favorite/most popular tweets, so here they are:

Work hard. Don't be an asshole. Share what you know.