Good bye, birdies!

There’s no website I wasted more time with than Twitter. For more than 10 years I’ve checked it probably a hundred times. Every single day.

Did it feel like an addiction? Yes. But I was too hesitant to delete it. It felt like the marketing foundation for my greatest hobby (and job): building stuff. I’ve met so many nice people there and it was just too much fun. Nope, no way I could have deleted it.

I always complained about Twitter, though. I couldn’t understand why they have thousands of employees while the product doesn’t change at all. Actually, since 2021 or so, they really did change a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, that made it worse for me.

It felt like the algorithm took over. Some of my posts were suprisingly successful, some of them were barely seen. My timeline was cluttered with people I barely know. I probably wasted even more time scrolling through the now endless timeline, while also feeling it doesn’t give me anything anymore.

Consuming the content felt like eating fast food, writing felt like gambling.

In 2022 I’ve gone through a lot of ups and downs. Burn out, ough. Become a dad (again), yay. Lose friends, ough. Meet a ton of new people, yay. Break up with my work, ough. Enjoy new hobbies, yay.

Those times are the times you learn the most, though. One of the numerous lessons I’ve learned: I want to own my online me. I don’t want to fill the content buckets, feed the algorithm and grow an audience on whatever platform. No, thanks.

In July I started to overhaul my website. I don’t have any ambitions to make it big, or to do whatever with it. I just want to maintain it like a garden. And I want to own it. That’s all.