There’s a fashion for spectacular flouncing away from the social network previously known as Twitter. News releases and announcements underline that this is, for many, a very public moment. Personally, I have been on the platform for 15 years. Through it, I made friends in real life and developed an interest in Nordic Noir and detective procedurals that might have shocked my MySpace self. Moving away is therefore a moment for reflection. Luckily, kicking around on the bookshelf was How to leave Twitter, by Grace Dent, written in 2011, bought, probably, in 2015 and unread until now. I dove into it last night, not expecting a technical guide, but a sense of camaraderie lost. There are plenty of people describing Bluesky as ‘Twitter as it used to be’, but I wanted to remember what it used to be. Great fun, is Dent’s answer.

I don’t recommend you read through my old feed. It includes RTs of people writing nice things about my having written nice things about them. (HT, as we used to say, to Karen Sullivan, Quentin Bates and Ewa Sherman.) These ‘boast posts’ are number one in Dent’s list of ‘Downsides of Twitter’. In fairness, though, I didn’t do the other 11 and I didn’t even know that posting to do lists was even a thing. But over a 15 year period, your curation policy is going to change. Indeed, your willingness to even admit to a curation policy will have changed, many times, during that time. Dent is pretty clear on the most authentic Twitter life being one in which your persona matches your mood, and therefore lurches confusingly between the sharp and the soft, the cynical, the melodramatic, the high- and low-brow.

But back in 2011 the place was considerably less corporate. Influencers were not a thing and talking about freebies was less regulated than it is now. (By the end, even Dent’s feed includes the odd boast post.) More interestingly, Twitter was a platform in which media misogyny could be and was challenged. In a powerful passage entitled ‘A cyber-room of one’s own’, Dent writes:

‘On Twitter I feel something that I feel very rarely in the rest of the world: that my sex is 100% equally represented. For every quick fire ‘King of Banter’ man there is an equally fast-talking woman.’

She describes a landscape in linear television where men dominate panel discussions on any subject you’d care to name, but women are ‘screen parsley stuck on the side of the plate’. Raise this as an issue, and the existence of Loose Women will be slung at you. But Twitter in 2011 was not that.

Let’s not pretend it was perfect. Dent describes misanthropes who’d fit right in today. But, largely, it was a place where barriers could be torn down.

That version of Twitter has long gone. My current feed, with its blue ticks elbowing their way to the top of the comments, is coarse, racist and misogynist and, as has been much written about, is the home of rampant mis- and disinformation. Barriers are being raised in the one and wannabe town square. Dent’s book, so not written for this purpose, has been quite cathartic. See you in the ’sky.

As for Dent herself. She obviously left Twitter over a year ago (12 years after writing her book) and the tweets during her stint on I’m a Celebrity… were posted by someone else. She follows no one but her 261,000 followers still wait hopefully for new content (or have just wandered away). On Bluesky, she has 2,500 followers. She seems to be having a great time.