I was already partway there, but following on Ryan Barrett’s excellent suggestion, I spent a few minutes today and added several of my favorite Twitter lists to my feed reader. I spend less and less time in Twitter because all the notifications come to me via my own site and webmentions. I’m not unfollowing people to completely clean out the timeline just yet since there are a few people who have private accounts and I’d need to refollow or do something unique to cover them.
I do wish someone had a simple method of following the one or two people who have blocked me (I’m presuming they did so accidentally or I’ve been rolled up in a larger block list and they weren’t aware.) I was half-hoping that some API and list workarounds would work, but I’m stuck with creating another account and following separately or manually revisiting their feeds at scheduled intervals. I don’t need to interact with them so much as I have to read their excellent work. If anyone has ideas to fix this, I’m open to suggestions.
A few days ago, I unfollowed everyone on Twitter, added them all to a list, and I now read that list instead. It’s shockingly better. Only their own tweets and retweets, in order. No ads, no “liked by,” no “people you may know,” no engagement hacking crap. It’s glorious.
Even better, when I inevitably end up in the home timeline anyway, it only has my own tweets and ads, nothing interesting. No dopamine outrage bullshit cycle to get caught up in.
Shh, don’t tell, I’m afraid some low level product manager at Twitter will discover this and “fix” lists like they “fixed” the home timeline a while back.
There are a couple drawbacks. I lost a few people I followed whose accounts are protected; I need to find and re-follow them. Also this evidently makes it harder for people to DM me, somehow. Not sure how, I don’t use Twitter DM much.
Still. Glorious.
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