So Long and Thanks For All the Tweets

I joined Twitter on July 16, 2007. For the next seven or eight years starting in 2008, I posted pretty frequently and did enjoy the internet water cooler culture of following various authors, makers, scientists, and of course comedy accounts. I wrote my babbling commentary about bikes, science fiction, 3D printing, and art for my own amusement. My posting tapered off after 2016 and 2017, and although I continued to log in occasionally to look around, I hadn’t posted anything in over a year.

Today, I downloaded my data and finally deactivated my account.

Here’s a graph of my complete Twitter usage history, via Ian Johnson’s Twitter Archive viewer on Observable:

I have started accounts on a few of the new Twitter alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky, but none of them have really clicked. This has more to do with how I now allocate my time and attention than it does with the design of those sites or the state of social media today. I do post art (and bask in the algorithm) on Instagram, and sometimes I post detailed project reports on Patreon. If I were to write more anywhere, I’d prefer to focus here on my own site, starting with nerdy book lists and eventually nerdy book reviews.

Posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2025.