Oh, hello. My last post was just over a year ago; I declared that I was taking a break from Twitter for 2018. So. How did that go?

Spoiler alert: I didn’t miss Twitter much, but I did miss you, kind reader.

I didn’t miss any news. I mostly rely on The Guardian because I can read it daily (and no more frequently), I can pay for it directly, and it has an outside-the-US perspective. Space news comes from, well, Space News, as well as TMRO.

I certainly didn’t miss the drama. My life was refreshingly free of fights over apologies for slights over comments about news. Oddly enough, those fights sometimes ended up as Guardian stories, and they sounded pointless by the time they did.

I did miss friends. Even the occasional photo from a vacation or a night out can be nice, or a quick update about a new job or a move. We had our own milestones this year, like moving into our first house, and we only shared them with the few people immediately around us. It felt like losing touch.

With that in mind, I’m goin’ back in. So what’s different now?

First, I don’t sit on a bus for 3 hours a day anymore. Twitter won’t get big blocks of my time, because I don’t have them. In 2018 I switched from obsessively scanning through Twitter to obsessively scanning through Discord (and Slack and a few subreddits), so it’s not like I’m a social media angel now. I just won’t have the opportunity, so I think it’ll be a bit safer.

Second, spending a year without 99% of Twitter reminded me that I don’t need all of it. I don’t even need most of it. My plan is to stop following a bunch of people (because it turns out no one really needs DM access to me) and stick to a few quiet corners of Twitter. Starting today I’m sifting through messages to separate out the ones that bring joy from the ones that only bring drama.

We’ll see how it goes. Until then, Happy New Year!