You’re leaving twitter, not closing a bank account. You could do it right now if you wanted, and hell you don’t even have to formally close your account. For 90 percent of users, it’s simply making the choice to spend your time elsewhere. That’s what most of us here chose to do with reddit.

I can give a little more slack to content creators, celebrities, journalists, and politicians because they have more invested in the site, but it doesn’t disprove my statement. They are still making the decision to stick around despite their principles because they have deemed the sacrifice too great. and thus the people who follow them stick around too.

It’s not like it’s an impossible choice to make. Plenty of creators, celebrities, and journalists have permanently left twitter, and these are the people I have respect for, because they stuck to their guns. They didn’t try to justify sticking around, they took the hit in engagement, but they did the right thing.

Anyone can leave twitter if they want. Not everyone who left had a choice in the matter. Many marginalized people have left the site because it was too dangerous for them to stick around. Many of them are here and on Mastodon. Others are trying to build or salvage what they can on what is becoming an increasingly dangerous web for them.

On the other hand, why I respect many of the users here is we want to build something better than what we left behind. Many of us gave up our communities, our subreddits, and our followers to try to make something better. Whether we achieve that here on fediverse still remains to be seen, but I respect everyone of you here much more than any outspoken celebrity or leftist youtuber who doesn’t want to let go.

edit: So I had a chance to cool down a bit, and actually talked to an artist who made their livelyhood on twitter. I will say I retract some of what I said above. The truth of the matter is the situation just sucks, and there is no easy way out for a lot of people. Sure it is super bad ass of some people who are still willing to stick to their principles despite everything, but ultimately I can’t put the burden on everyone to do the same thing, especially when such sacrifices clearly hurt some people more than others.

My apologies to people who see themselves trapped there. I had no right to be so judgemental.