[tradesmanhelix]

I recently "quit" Twitter myself. I say "quit" because if you actually delete/remove/whatever your account, your handle may then become available for others to use. To avoid that, I used a combo of scripts/services to remove all of my Twitter data (tweets, likes, follows, etc.) and scrubbed my bio, profile pics, etc. I also set a reminder to log in every 6 months to avoid being purged and have my handle become available that way.

I'm using https://fraidyc.at/ in Firefox to follow any Twitter accounts I still care about and it works great, even better than Twitter honestly as all tweets are now chronological and I can segment accounts based on how often I care to view their updates, tag them to organize them, etc. Next, I need to move all my YouTube subscriptions to Fraidycat or similar, but, other than that, I'm done with modern social media (deleted Facebook in 2016). YMMV, but the less I use modern social media the more my quality of life and mental well-being have improved.

I say "modern" since social media has really been around since email and it's really only the more recent incarnations that have gotten so toxic. Communities like HN and some sub-Reddits are actually still quite enjoyable.

[grioghar]

Thank you for that. I am going to investigate this further. I didn’t think there was a functioning way of doing this.

I’d really like to find something similar for Instagram. I want to consume that without creating an account, but haven’t figure out how.

[tradesmanhelix]

You bet :)

And FYI, per its website, Fraidycat says it does support Instagram, although I can't vouch for the experience as it's not a platform I use.

[kyle-rb]

fyi they never actually implemented that "purge inactive accounts" thing. I remember people bringing up the issue of dead people's accounts being deleted/taken over, but idk if that was why they shelved it.

[Kye]

That was something different. Deactivated accounts do get deleted and their names made available after 30 days just like it warns you when you deactivate.

[tradesmanhelix]

That's good to know, thanks. Although, I will probably still log in periodically, just in case they ever do decide to implement that policy.