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Shout out to @joshwcomeau.com's principles. He closed his 135K Twitter account, despite it being a major marketing tool for his content and courses. He spent his final days informing his followers about the election before closing it and moving here. Protest isn't always convenient.

While I can appreciate that he no longer uses his account on 𝕏, it is still not closed but remains active.

There's something to say about keeping handle, so others won't be able to run it.

Though truly leaving the platform is to truly leave it, including the handle.

I think it depends on what we mean by "leave". In my view, it’s about activity. I’ve logged out of Twitter on all of my devices and don’t spend any time there, so I think it’s fair to say I’ve left Twitter. I, as a person, am never there any more, therefore I've left.

But yeah, I’ve also been thinking about what the best way to leave is. For now the account remains active because I want people to be able to find me here, but I'm thinking I’ll make the account private. That way it prevents the handle from being taken, but truly removes my content from it.

Oh, actually, private accounts still have a visible bio! Which is sufficient for me to include a link here. Done 😄

It's obviously up to you to decide but with your account being private, the URLs of all your past tweets must be inaccessible now. I guess you probably have spread a lot here and there, for example, your blog.

Yeah, so I considered this, but part of my goal is to discourage people from using Twitter, and having content still available on Twitter works against that goal. Though I should go through and make sure I’m not linking to any tweets (mine or otherwise) on my blog!