About this time two years ago I posted my last tweet. It was almost exactly 10 years after I started on the platform during my 2012 council election campaign.

Unfortunately events over the past few years have meant that I don’t use Twitter anymore and have stopped posting. I did intend to leave my account up for archive purposes but even this no longer appears possible.

The last straw came a few weeks ago when Twitter announced changes to their Terms of Service. One of these is an amendment the gives Twitter the right to use any of your tweets, direct messages or other content posted on the platform to train its AI. While this was taking place to some extent already, the changes remove the current option to opt-out.

It seems that the only way to stop your content from effectively being stolen without your consent is to delete it all before the changes take place – i.e. 15 November 2024. So this is exactly what I have done.

The good news is that some awesome people on the internet have built some tools to help do the same.

I was able to do the following:

1. Get an archive of my account on Twitter under ‘Settings’ –> ‘My account’ –> ‘Download an archive of your data’
2. Used this tool to create my own archive of my tweets
3. Used this tool to delete all of my tweets on my Twitter account

This was all easy and quick to complete and my eternal thanks goes out to everyone involved in developing the tools that made this possible. Yet again this goes to show the power of FoSS.

The archive of my account is located here. It’s searchable in many different ways – arguably easier than Twitter.

I would encourage anyone in a similar position to migrate over to Mastodon where I and many others have gone.

It’s a shame to see another important website suffer this fate. But it is the logical conclusion to the steady corporatisation and deliberate destruction of many of the things that make the internet great. This is not the first and certainly won’t be the last.