#oneaday Day 1075: Putting it into action

After writing yesterday's post, I put a few things into practice. I didn't go so far as unfollowing everyone on Twitter, but I may have completely revolutionised the way I use the platform in a positive way.

Basically I sorted everyone I followed into a few lists: gaming, retro gaming, VTubers, friends, artists and anime bloggers. Those are the things I particularly care about, so anyone who didn't fit neatly into one of those areas from my following list is just in no-list limbo now. Then I started training myself to go straight to the "Lists" function on Twitter instead of "Home".

That looked like it might be all right — but I noticed a few flaws. Most notably, the fact that all the retweets from people I'd turned off retweets for were back with a vengeance, since Twitter's Lists function doesn't respect your settings in this regard. (It doesn't respect your muted user settings, either.) Retweets are a big part of the anxiety-inducing "noise" on Twitter, so I really wanted them gone.

I looked into it a bit further and discovered that you can use Lists in TweetDeck and turn off Retweets in them. Ideal. Not only that, but given the way TweetDeck works with customisable columns, you can completely eliminate your "home" timeline altogether and look exclusively at lists if you so desire. Even more ideal.

So I'm going to be making use of that for a while and see if that improves my general outlook on things. Signs are good so far; it was a good 20 minutes before several of those columns moved at all earlier, which is much easier to deal with than the constant "rolling" they have when retweets are active and there are lots of people all yelling at each other!

Like I say, the easy option would just be to delete Twitter, but as I mentioned yesterday, I've had enough opportunities for stories, leads and other such things come up via Twitter to make it worthwhile maintaining at least a token presence on there. So I'll stick with that for the moment — unless things happen to take a serious turn for the worse.

Thank you for bearing with me while I think through all this out loud — and perhaps it might help some of you to make better, healthier use of the platform, too!