For Those Sticking Around Twitter

So you’re sticking around on twitter.

Maybe you like watching things burn, or you enjoy the experience. Perhaps you’re a journalist! Or one of the many content creators who are uncertain of what platform has the same level of “anyone can see your stuff” with combined interactions.

Whatever the reason may be, you also don’t want to give Elon Musk money. Sure, Twitter may fall, but presuming he doesn’t just shut it all down, it’ll take time. Time that other folks can use to build their own replica.

That or it’s the end of social media, I don’t know, I’m just a game dev.

Now of course there’s things like not clicking on ads, and not buying Twitter Blue. Good steps, albeit tricky ones given all these claims about forcing people to pay money to become verified.

But those aren’t the only ways twitter makes money. The other major aspect is data mining. The short of it is twitter gathers info on who you are, where you’re located, maybe even track some of the sites you visit, then sell that data to advertisers. That’s the trade off to use twitter for most people. They get a town square and the ability to read creepy DMs, and twitter gets to sell their data.

What sites like twitter don’t want to tell you is that there’s ways around that. Surprisingly simple ways!

Your first step is to download Mozilla Firefox. The reason being, Chrome is changing how they build their browser. These changes are going to result in making various extensions unusable. These extensions happen to be the ones Google doesn’t want you to know about. Funny how that works.

Also Firefox tends to use fewer resources, and now automatically comes with the “Facebook Container” extension which keeps Facebook from finding out what else you do online. (Facebook hates this one so much, that in the past and perhaps even now, they keep people from mentioning over Messenger.)

Plus you can download cute themes like this animated Kodama theme I found!

They even rattle!

Firefox now downloaded, there’s three extensions you’re going to want, and I’ll be certain to link to them! Before I begin, I want to add that the more extensions you have, the more resources firefox will need. Something to keep an eye on!

I’ll be direct linking, but if you ever want to check your settings or explore more extensions, then click on the button with three bars in the top right, like what you see in the above screenshot, then click on “Add Ons and Themes”.

So the first one, is Ublock. Move over adblock plus, this is the adblocker you want. The devs did their best to keep CPU usage at a low, and it even blocks youtube ads! (Though if you find that unethical, you can also tell it to ignore youtube!) Additionally, the devs have improved on its usage by adding in tracker, coin mining, and pop up blocking as well!

Now to be honest, you could probably stop there, but there’s another extension that’ll make your experience better, and not give Musk money.

Block Twitter Promoted is for folks who hate the algorithm. It hides promoted content, aka twitter ads, hides recommendations on who to follow, and even keeps your twitter feed on latest tweets instead of top tweets! With those, you won’t even see those corporate ads pop up, and you’ll have a harder time falling for anger inducing trends.

Settings like these are why it’s good to check in on your extensions!

Do be certain to go into the options for this one though, as only hide promoted content is the default. (I forgot to do this btw, no one’s perfect.)

For further privacy protection, there’s also Ghostery which functions similarly to Ublock, and the Duck Duck Go Privacy Essentials extension which is for folks who want to protect their search data!

I also recommend “DoucheBlock for Twitter” which automatically blocks anyone with specific keywords in their twitter bio. May be useful for folks though it does get false positive so I recommend keeping it set to check with you before blocking someone.

Unfortunately none of these will work on twitter’s mobile app, and I’m uncertain how well they’ll work via Firefox’s mobile app, but you can certainly switch over to using twitter via firefox’s mobile app instead of through twitter’s app which will still collect data via your phone.

Hopefully these extensions will be helpful, and if y’all appreciated this blog post & want to help me out, feel free to tip me over at Ko-Fi!