A lot of good people have left or are in the process of leaving. I just deleted my account because I don't want to share a platform with the seditious ex-President, who Musk just reinstated. I'm happy that Reddit is already the global public square that Musk talks about (and to a lessor extent, Hacker News.) I'm glad the Musk apparently wants to kill the old Twitter and make something new because there was a lot of things about the old Twitter that weren't good. I'm looking at these alternatives to Twitter below.

    Post 
    https://post.news/

    Mastadon
    https://joinmastodon.org/

    Hachyderm (Mastadon)
    https://hachyderm.io

    Lurk
    https://lurk.org/

    Tribel
    https://www.tribel.com

    Bluesky (Jack Dorsey)
    https://bsky.app/

    Chat apps
    Gitter, Discord, Slack

I'll be back in a couple of years when the dust settles and Musk creates something amazing. Or not.

Running into many folks doing this. Hard to sit by and be part of suck a train wreck

Yeah, every buying or support decision you make is (in the end) political. Elon Musk uses his money to support his political agenda. If you are on Twitter or buy a Tesla you support Elon Musk financially and therefore also his political agenda. So if you do not support his views, get out. I did. It is as simple as that!

Stunning and brave

Don't delete your account - it'll only get reused by someone else and cause confusion.

In January 2016 - for the same reasons as Phil: Twitter's blind eye towards Trump - I stopped using Twitter. But I didn't delete my account, I instead ran a script to delete all the tweets I had posted leaving it blank, and also unfollowed everyone. In the description I have a link to my website. So Twitter maintains my presence but doesn't get any benefit from my usage. I also did this with Facebook to a lesser extent just leaving connections to family members who wouldn't understand my disappearance. But again, I deleted all photos and posts.

Over the past 8 years I found it useful to post once or twice before deleting them after. Twitter isn't going away (sadly) so maintaining a stub presence is useful.

Other way to keep your username but nuke all your content:

- register a new account with a different username

- change the username on your existing account to something else, thereby freeing up that username

- rename your new account's username to the username you want to keep

- delete your previous account

Result: completely empty account with the username you want, no script needed