It must have been somewhen 2009 that I had my first account with Twitter, Inc. I was not really sure what to do about it. How can you have a serious conversation or share useful information when you are limited to just 140 characters? Somehow this service still felt relevant.

Over the years, it became increasingly valuable. It enabled me to follow amazing people, to read enriching discussions, and to benefit a lot from the shared knowledge, opinions, and all the useful pointers to stunning resources on the Internet. Not only for me personally, but also on a professional level. At some point in time, I came to the conclusion to close all other social media handles – namely orkut, StudiVZ, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing – as compared to Twitter, the output was close to zero and I wanted to focus on what became helpful to me.

Yet, my own contribution to the dialogue remained little. I tweeted about new additions to my online presences, took part in a few conversations, and mostly re-tweeted quite some stuff that I either considered worth getting the required attention or which I just appreciated to being pointed at.

All the time I did not feel that comfortable of the fact that I am the actual product, as its service remained free of charge. Is a “Like” already way too personal, so they’d be able to precisely profile me?

I highly value everything that the Twitter staff has done to make the platform the way it came to be … was.

Now is time to move on. The Fediverse is in every dimension much more close to what I was originally looking for. And I have found my way to get there.

So long, Twitter – Inc. and its community … thanks for the amazing ride, you definitely made history!