Just a little pro tip, muting words on Twitter will not prevent them from appearing in the “What’s happening” sidebar. A little public service announcement for you today.

@kimberlyhirsh Back before I dropped Twitter one of my last ditch efforts was changing my location to Japan so all of Twitter’s insertions became illegible to me. The things we do for peace of mind. 😂

@Cheri Yeah, I did the same thing, instead I chose Afghanistan.

@kimberlyhirsh This is why I use third-party clients with a lot of regular-expression filters. Also, if you’re on a Mac, Twitterrific comes with a plugin that’ll remove the side panel with the trending topics.

@skoobz I'm not on a Mac but that's a brilliant plugin.

@skoobz @kimberlyhirsh regular expressions as muted words, or something else? Tell me more!

I recently re-setup Drafts to post to Twitter so I can post work-related stuff through the day without having to log-into the noise. Yes, it means my tweets are functioning as externalities: costs others have to bear by reading while exempting me from reading theirs, but I’m ok with that.

@lukemperez Here’s Twitterrific’s documentation on regex filters.

@lukemperez If I could do that without itching to check for likes and replies, it might work for me. But I'm not there yet.

@skoobz Brilliant! I skimmed, thought "this might tempt me from Tweetbot" but it looks like it can as well. I love Twitteriffic. Used to have a regular rotation on my phone. Thanks.

@kimberlyhirsh Neither am I. We're both in academe, so I get the love-hate-sneed of Twitter. It's really just a professional chat service for the discipline at this point.

I started reading Four Thousand Weeks yesterday, after seeing it raved about by what seems like at least a dozen people since the New Year. Great concept in an early chapter about how we need to replace FOMO with the Joy of Missing Out. I have (and it seems like you and a lot of us on Micro.Blog) have been cultivating that without knowing it.

That's a round about way of saying I get the need to completely log-off. I've done it. When you're ready to go back (if ever), I think the tools that let you use them on your terms is the key to avoid back in the position wherein they are a mental and emotional drain.

@lukemperez Yes, I mostly use Twitter as a virtual watercooler.

@skoobz Amazing. Found a 10 year old tutorial (!) with a few common suggestions. It's so much quieter now. Many, many thanks.

@lukemperez No problem. It really makes a difference.

@lmika Are you spamming the Taliban?

@odd It's probably more likely that they are spamming me. Fortunately I don't understand Arabic. 😄

@lmika I think they mostly use Pashto or Dari (Farsi), but may read Arabic because of the Quran. Anyway good thing you left Twitter (proper)!