[duskwuff]

A simple fix would be to make an exception for accounts with >X statuses posted or >Y followers.

The inactive accounts that people are worried about losing are the ones that used to be active, or which were significant enough to make a lot of people follow them. However, the bulk of inactive accounts probably have very few (<10) statuses posted or followers, and deleting those is likely to be uncontroversial.

[tom_mellior]

A simple fix would be to pick a character that can not otherwise occur in Twitter handles, like ':'. Then move every inactive @foobar user to @inactive:2019:foobar. If a follower of the original account complains, change "inactive" to "memorialized" or whatever, possibly adjusting the year backwards.

If I choose to squat the now freed up @foobar handle and not do anything with it, next year they can move my inactive version to @inactive:2020:foobar and free up @foobar again for the next person interested in using it.

Any way they solve this, there is a danger of people using bots to mass-squat liberated names to offer them for sale. I don't see any very good way around this. Possibly to give first pick to users with long-standing accounts that share a nontrivial common substring with the liberated handle. For example, if my current Twitter name is @firstname_lastname, and I really want @firstname, I think it might make sense to prioritize me over @random_bot_204safhq23.

[lilyball]

Twitter's in a good position to detect most bots. If someone uses a bot that's good enough to evade detection, I think it's ok to let them keep the handle.

[teddyuk]

My relatives who died have fewer followers than your relatives who died so yours stay and mine go? Doesn't sound fair!

(my relatives also didnt tweet very often but when they did they were amazing)