You can pretty easily understand the t syntax here - commands like list create are pretty self-explanatory. You can make lists in most regular Twitter apps, but to do it at the command line it's simple: type in t list create following-`date "+%Y-%m-%d"` to make a list named after the current date, so you can easily remember this was a list of who you were following as of today. If you want to back up all of your followers, you only need to make a list and then populate it. Actually unfollow everybody and start over.Īs it turns out, each of these steps is pretty easy.Archive all of the people I was following into a spreadsheet, so I could sort through them and filter for geography or how many followers they have or whether they were verified or not - basically any criteria that might be interesting when deciding who to follow (or not follow).Copy all the people I was following to a Twitter list, so I could still access them in my Twitter apps on all my devices, and I could still see my old timeline at any point if I wanted to.These took a little longer for me because I was following over 5,000 people on Twitter, but if you're following a more reasonable number, none of these steps should take more than a few minutes to complete. (Note: I got some errors while updating and authenticating making these edits to one of the ruby libraries that t depends on fixed the issue immediately.) The PlanĪt that point, I wanted to follow a few simple steps. It's written in Ruby (a language I basically can read but not really write) so it's easy enough to get running if you follow the few simple setup steps.Īs Erik mentions in that documentation, you'll then need to set up a new Twitter app on your account, and get the credentials that will let the t tool perform actions on your Twitter account. They abandoned it after a while, so Erik Berlin created a new command-line tool for power users of Twitter, simply called "t". Years ago, Twitter used to have a command-line interface for performing bulk or automated actions on an account. Okay, this part is gonna get slightly geeky, if you're not a coder, but I thought I'd explain the process in case anyone wants to repeat it. Definitely use this if you don't want to do a bunch of tech stuff! Update: Julius Tarng made an enormously popular, and really charming, Glitch app called Tokimeki Unfollow that helps you clean up your timeline, and makes it easy to unfollow any accounts that don't bring you joy. But I decided to assume that the people I'm connected to know that me unfollowing everyone isn't personal, but really just a response to the overwhelming noise of having more than 5000 accounts sharing info with me on a single network. Now, these kinds of decisions are oddly fraught a lot of people see their following relationships on social media as a form of status, not merely an indication of where information is flowing between people. Keeping in mind that spirit of doing necessary maintenance, I recently did something I'd thought about doing for years: I unfollowed everyone on Twitter. But even aside from those concerns, our social networks are not things we generally think of as requiring maintenance or upkeep, even though we routinely do regular updates on all the other aspects of our digital lives. At this point, there's nothing novel about noticing that social media is often toxic and stressful.
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