By Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
Twitter was once a convenient way to get your memes, world news, and pop culture hot takes all in one place. However, being an active Twitter user also required sifting through a daily deluge of toxic characters, including QAnon, white supremacists, bots, and deepfakes. The Elon Musk circus that has been steadily crushing the formerly popular social network may have you strongly considering the advantages of bailing. And there are a bunch of new social networks vying for the role of Twitter substitute, such as Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. (More on that later.)
Hear me out on this: you don’t actually have to use Twitter. You can just delete your account.
Don’t worry: it doesn’t have to be permanent. If you find yourself feeling empty…