I was on Twitter 13 years ago, It still had 'Fail Whale' when the platform couldn't handle traffic. Those were the good days, Social media was about connecting with friends, Making new ones and not a democracy destroying tool.

If this is my last tweet, Let it be about Twitter itself.

TBH I hated every moment I had to use Twitter over the past decade.

Wow, So who forced you to use it? Why didn't you just delete it?

Good questions.

Mainly because I'm an indie and its an unwritten rule that a successful indie should have a prolific Twitter account.

But the most common strategies employed by other indies who have been 'Successful' on Twitter just didn't work for me -

Memes all day and night

Sharing memes 24*7 seems like an easy and straight forward way to gain followers.

But I'm a time-constrained person.

So I didn't want to make the cognitive investment all day in creating memes without any long-term value for anyone.

Besides, I doubt that those who follow us for silly memes would like to indulge in any meaningful discussions and So all those followers are at best useful only as some algo-signal to trend our tweets if lucky in the hopes that someone who can add value to us engages with it.

Tweeting with authority

You know,

'Learn these 10 things to become this' 🧵

'Do these 3 things to become that' 🧵

Twitter algorithms seems to be promoting those FOMO, Aspiration P*** threads like crazy.

And of-course it helps those who tweet such threads gain followers.

I didn't do that because I like to tweet threads about things I did, What worked, What didn't in hopes of indulging in discussions with others who have done something similar and me learning something new from it while adding value to other readers.

The fake authority Twitter threads was not appealing to me.

Not indulging in these strategies means hoping Twitter algorithm picks up my Tweets and it did rarely, But most of the time my tweets are just launching rockets into deep space blindly.

Then I realized that I have couple of hundred followers, Perhaps finding common interests with them can create meaningful engagements.

So I built engagefollowers.com and it worked!

I had more engagements and gained more followers after I started using engage followers than ever did before.

But still not enough when compared to 'successful indie' standards, Which means I need to constantly keep tweeting about something and keep thinking about tweeting.

While it has become clear that this platform has become a cesspool of Celebrities, Their simps, Cryptocurrency scammers, Hate and Fake news peddlers etc.

Why would I want to put my time here when I've been having meaningful discussions and better engagements over at Hacker News and Reddit.

Funnily enough I started cross-posting my tweets to Mastodon recently and I've been having more meaningful discussions there for each tweet than in the Twitter itself.

I think that largely has to do with like minded communities among other things like,

1. Feed not determined by algorithm i.e. The platform doesn't decide what you need to see.

2. Follow/ Follower Count hiding (Good way to keep that narcissism under check).

3. Profile hashtags, To know interests (The reason I had dynamic profile header in engage followers).

Among other obvious benefits of a distributed, federated network such as privacy and assurance that they wouldn't grow to a democracy destroying scale by design.

So it makes sense for me to cross-post toots from Mastodon to Twitter(If it still exists) instead of other way around.

So those 3 people who care about what I tweet can still see them.

But I sincerely ask them and you to follow me on other platforms I use.