Hey, friends.

Dropping in real quick to let you know that I deleted the Whine Seller Twitter account. (All my Twitter accounts, actually, which includes the ones for my e-commerce stores, books and even local writing group.) The only one I actually kept of the full dozen I managed was my fiction writing one because I’m teaching a ton of classes on writing and marketing under that name this year and had previously promised I’d promote those workshops earlier last year before *gestures vaguely all around* things got weird.

Because those workshops stretch through December, that account will stay up until at least the end of the year, though I might strip all the old posts out from it as soon as I find an easy way to do that. It’s also gone “announcements only” (aka I’m syndicating stuff from my blog and Buffer but not logging in anymore) so it’s nothing personal if I don’t reply to something… I’m just not there. 

In the meantime, if you want to actively chat with me, I’m on Bluesky. For now, both T. W. Seller and Hillary DePiano share the one account mostly because I’m waiting to see if that platform “sticks” before I get too invested. If I end up sticking around, I’ll split the e-commerce stuff out and make a new Whine Seller account over there too.

I’ve been pulling back from the X-platform (pun intended) for a while which speaks volumes to how it’s deteriorated. Twitter used to be my main internet hang out for nearly two decades (seriously, that feels like an exaggeration, but I joined on April 1st, 2008 like the April Fool that I am), my beloved water cooler when I worked from home and my main center of engagement and now? It’s a bad zombie movie with bots instead of the undead.

(I have never seen a platform die so fast and it’s honestly a little freaky. )

bye bye twitter

What finally made me take the leap and delete? It was something a big account I knew from Twitter had posted on Bluesky. I didn’t think to keep a screenshot so I’m paraphrasing, but the gist of what they said was, “If you’re reluctant to delete your account on Twitter because you’re afraid of losing that engagement, go look at the engagement on your last few posts. It’s NOT what it used to be.”

And, sure enough, I looked and even on my biggest account with 5000 followers, I wasn’t even getting a fraction of the engagement I used to be getting. Several posts had zero interactions! I have NEVER experienced that before! 

This realization freed me from the sunk costs fallacy and while I felt a bit of a pang for my Twitter era and all the good friends I made on the platform… I found almost everyone I knew on Twitter over on Bluesky anyway so the mourning period was short-lived.

I am super busy with teaching and writing so I’m sorry I have been a neglectful blogger but I love and cherish you all and may we all survive the current social media implosion to emerge triumphantly on whatever comes next.

Heck, maybe it’ll be MySpace!