Its not the leaving of Twitter that grieves me.....

....But my darling, its when when I think of thee (Trad Irish folksong)

So, another highly public walkaway from Twitter:

Just Wednesday, Twitter, while not on purpose, removed mine, and others’ followers in some sort of mistake that took a day to fix (I’m guessing someone erased too much data in the database via a bad query on live data, and they had to restore from Tape backup to get it all back). This hit the breaking point for me - they violated the most important thing to me about Twitter, my followers (which are also those I follow and have a deep interest in), and I just can’t trust that things like this won’t keep happening in the future. They crossed the line, whether on purpose or not, and it’s time for me to take action.

(If I recall, they had devised an algorithm to delete spam followers). Anyway, unfortunately.....

after only one day I realized I could not do it cold-Turkey. I have a good number of followers on Twitter that have some interest in me (and I thank you so much for that support - it really means a lot to me), and regardless of whether I want to leave or not, abandoning Twitter would mean abandoning those followers, and I just can’t do that to all of you

Ah, the tyranny of the social network - you may be able to port yourself, but that doesn't mean you can port your followers.

I recall Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid announce he was leaving Twitter too, and he was back within a fortnight. As Terry Pratchett noted in his book Small Gods, one is defined by one's followers, and one has to be in places where they can follow you.....

An afterthought - the issue is that it's not in any of the walled garden players' interest to solve this, as the current situation increases stickiness for them - the solution must be an open standard social net, cf the GGG that Tim Berners-Lee proposed.