CLOSED: [2019-09-08 Sun 13:25]
:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED: [2019-09-08 Sun 12:16]
:ID: 2019-09-08-10-years-on-twitter
:END:
:LOGBOOK:
- State "DONE"       from "NEXT"       [2019-09-08 Sun 13:25]
:END:

Ten years ago, [[id:Karl-jetzt-auch-auf-Twitter][I started using Twitter]] for micro-blogging. It was an
experiment, mainly to find out why people are using this media and see
how my opinion changes when using it. At first, I was quite sceptic.

--------------

After couple of months, [[id:Twitter-Soweit,-so-gut][I wrote my first thoughts on Twitter (German)]].
From my current experience, I do think that I grasped the main points
of this new media quite good.

Until [[id:Mein-erster-Twittergeburtstag][my first Twitter anniversary]] I have found 69 followers. And on
[[id:Mein-zweiter-Twittergeburtstag][my second Twitter anniversary]], I already had 166 followers. Twitter
was part of my daily routine. I learned to appreciate news I could not
get otherwise. However, it came with a price: more and more time I had
to spend following my time-line. In the first half of 2017 I got rid
of roughly a third of the people I was following. That eased my pain a
bit. After all: What Twitter is to somebody is still only defined by
the set of accounts that are followed.

In 2017, I decided to take a break from Twitter: [[id:2017-02-24-twitter-lent][not using Twitter for
the lent]]. To my surprise, it had not that high impact on my daily
life. I continued using Twitter afterwards with the lesson learned
that my Twitter dependence was not in an unhealthy state yet. I just
missed out some things in the meantime.

However, according to the idea that [[id:tags-decentralization][decentralization]] will be an
absolute must for the future development of the Internet and a rising
number of questionable business decisions by Twitter, I [[id:2017-11-26-Mastodon][started to use
Mastodon]] [[id:2017-12-17-Mastodon-Twitter-Xposter][in parallel]]. All my tweets are posted to Mastodon and
vice-versa with toots to Twitter.

If there would not be the inevitable effect that a new service - even
if superior to a previous one - doesn't have the same amount of users,
preventing the new one to gain popularity, I'd be using Mastodon only.
I sympathize with the concept.

After using third party apps to access Twitter I switched over to
Twitter.com in the web browser exclusively because this way I got the
latest features. However, with Twitter starting to add advertisements
and manipulating and filtering my time-line using secret and not
welcomed algorithms similar to Facebook, [[id:apps-I-am-using][I switched back to a third
party Android app]] which provide me my usual strict time-line, not
promoting or filtering any tweet.

Currently, I've got 746 followers on Twitter and 325 on Mastodon. Even
considering this imbalance on follower numbers, the subjective level
of interaction with peers seems to be the same on Mastodon and
Twitter.

Let's see, how decentralization and the Twitter lock-in-effect are
evolving in the upcoming years.

|       Date | Tweets | Following | Followers | Notes               |
|------------+--------+-----------+-----------+---------------------|
| 2009-09-08 |      0 |         0 |         0 | And it began.       |
| 2010-09-08 |      ? |        72 |        69 | first anniversary   |
| 2012-09-08 |   6542 |       125 |       253 | 3 year anniversary  |
| 2013-09-08 |   9713 |       134 |       313 | 4 year anniversary  |
| 2014-09-07 |  12831 |       150 |       363 | 5 year anniversary  |
| 2015-09-08 |  16849 |       161 |       478 | 6 year anniversary  |
| 2017-09-08 |  23932 |       128 |       641 | 8 year anniversary  |
| 2018-09-01 |  28035 |       129 |       694 | 9 year anniversary  |
| 2019-09-08 |  31222 |       133 |       746 | 10 year anniversary |