How to Delete Your Twitter Account and Where to Go Next

Twitter might not be Twitter for much longer, thanks to a sudden decision to swap the iconic bird logo for Elon Musk’s long-buzzed-about X branding. While the tech mogul has discussed wanting to open an X-themed platform for a while now, it wasn’t clear that Twitter would be that platform until a surprise series of tweets (xeets?) on July 23. 

The ensuing change happened fast. Some users logged on to Twitter on July 24 to find the Twitter bird replaced by an X logo with dubious copyright (the bird still persists in some cases), plus a plan to swap the platform to a black color scheme. X.com also now redirects to Twitter for some, although others are still seeing a GoDaddy site that advertises couches.

It’s one of the more innocuous changes Musk has made to the platform, but it’s also the most direct he’s made to the site’s identity, and it’s unclear what else might follow. If the rapid shifts Musk’s leadership has brought to Twitter have you looking for clearer skies, here’s what you should know before you flee the nest, plus where you might want to fly.

How to Delete Your Twitter Account

Twitter doesn’t want to see you go, so it’s not possible to immediately delete your account from the platform. You’ll first have to go through a drawn out “deactivation” process.

To deactivate your Twitter account, click on “your account” under Twitter’s settings page, then hit “Deactivate Your Account.” This will take you to a confirmation page where you’ll need to hit “Deactivate” again and then enter your password.

Once an account is deactivated, other users won’t be able to see it and you’ll start a 30-day countdown timer. If you log in again during those 30 days, the timer will stop and your account will be reactivated. If you don’t log in again within 30 days, your account will be deleted alongside any old tweets or DMs, and others will be able to register with your old username.

But you're not quite done yet. Even after you've started the process, there are a couple of things that can get in the way of deactivating your account.

The first is that you’ll want to make sure you revoke any third-party app access to your Twitter account before deactivating, since any logins these apps make on your behalf will stop the deactivation process. To revoke third-party app access, open your Twitter Settings, then hit “Security and account access,” then “Apps and sessions.” You’ll see a list of connected apps as well as the ability to revoke their permissions.

The second is that deleting your account won’t immediately remove its information from search engines like Bing or Google. You’ll have to contact these search engines directly to do that. How to do this varies by engine, but Google can be taken care of with a simple request form.

How to Request Your Twitter Data

Before deleting your Twitter account, you can download an archive of your Twitter data, which the company says will include “information we [Twitter] believe is most relevant to you.” This includes your profile information, your tweets and DMs, media you’ve uploaded, your Twitter lists, and separate lists for accounts you follow and accounts that follow you.

To download an archive of your Twitter data, open your Twitter Settings, click on “Your Account,” and then click on “Download an archive of your data.”

It will take Twitter some time to prepare this download, but once it’s ready, you’ll get an email with a link to snag it.

What are the Best Twitter Alternatives

Threads

Meta’s Threads is the most recent Twitter competitor, and if sign-up numbers are anything to go by, it's also the biggest. It’s built on top of Instagram, meaning you’ll actually need an Instagram account to use it, but most of Twitter’s major features are already there. The service lacked a chronological timeline at launch, although it has since been added. Still missing: a trending bar and the ability to search posts by topics.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri has said that these features and more are coming, but Meta will have to be quick to implement them, as Threads is struggling to maintain user attention despite its hefty stack of initial sign-ups. It’s unclear whether you’ll have much of an audience on Threads in the months to come, but for now, integration with Instagram at least makes it easy to import followers from one service to the other.

Bluesky

Bluesky is the latest social network with key involvement from Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. While Jack is not Bluesky’s CEO, he does sit on the board and was the one to announce it to the public.

Bluesky is hard to recommend in its current form, as it is technically still in beta and is invite-only. But it has big dreams, and is starting strong with over a million installs. 

The key appeal of Bluesky is that it is decentralized, or “federated.” This means that accounts in the final version of the app won’t all be posting to the same pool, but will instead be separated out into different communities. Think of it like forums. You could theoretically set up an account on starwars.social and only post to Star Wars fans, for instance.

Right now, though, Bluesky is limited to one community–bsky.social. This means that it currently works like a more limited version of Twitter, as it has access to “tweets” and “retweets,” but not DMs. 

Signing up for Bluesky is less of a way to replace Twitter and more of a way to get your foot in the door for a potential competitor that might be important down the line. It’s worth looking into, especially because the open source AT Protocol that Bluesky is debuting could come to other apps down the line, allowing Bluesky users to easily transfer their followers and username between services as they pop up.

Mastodon

Mastodon works how Bluesky is intended to work, except that it is available now. The service popped up in October 2016 with promises of building a decentralized social network that works like Twitter, but that lets users build individual communities with their own focus topics and rules.

The result is a service that’s great for conversation but can be difficult for self promotion. Users looking to find a community of like minded people have plenty of options, which are easy to find through both official and unofficial lists, but journalists looking for sources or artists promoting their work may be limiting their audiences to people who visit whatever instances their account is on. It’s possible to follow and reply to people outside of your home instance, but the natural discoverability of your own posts will be more limited than on Twitter.

Regardless, so long as you can secure the same username across multiple instances, there’s nothing stopping you from signing up with multiple accounts across Mastodon. The service has seen significant growth as Musk implements more restrictions on Twitter, and while Threads has eclipsed it in terms of max users, it remains one of the most established Twitter alternatives.

TikTok

TikTok is most famous as a site for posting short videos, but on July 24, the social network introduced the ability to compose posts with just text. Aside from that one change, everything still works the same as normal. Text posts exist in the same pool as video posts, on the same account, and you browse through them with the same swiping motions that you use to browse videos. You can link them to tags just like you might with videos, as well as add sounds. Text posts do have the added options of stickers and custom background colors, but unlike with Instagram and Threads, they’re not on their own separate network.

This limits TikTok’s ability to function as a Twitter alternative, although features like stitches can work like quote tweets, and you can still follow accounts and access a timeline that only consists of accounts you follow. Whether text posts on TikTok take off depends on if the community embraces them, but as of now, they’re less of a reason to leave Twitter and more of a way for established TikTok creators to directly speak to their followers.

Spill

Spill is a “creator-driven” social networking app from former Twitter employees Alphonzo Terrell and DeVaris Brown. The goal is to “center marginalized groups,” and to that end, Spill has hired three strategic advisors, including former Twitter design chief Dantley Davis, #OscarsSoWhite creator April Reign, and civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson. The service has also gone out of its way to invite influential black and queer users to it, although Terrell has made it clear in a statement that while Spill was made for “content creators,” it’s “open to everyone.”

Spill’s features currently include an algorithmic feed called “Fresh Tea” and a custom feed called “My Brew.” Text, image, video, and gifs are all supported and even have some basic editing features built in, while a feature for coordinating live events called “tea party” is in the works.

Spill currently has the same limitations as Bluesky, in that it’s technically still in testing. Someone will have to send you an invite for you to join, or you can sign up for a waitlist. It’s also currently stuck on iPhone, although an Android version is planned.

According to Terrell, Spill currently has 100,000 sign-ups, which makes it one of the more niche services on this list, at least in its current form. That can be a good thing for some users, though–while Jack and Elon have famously kept a light touch on moderating their social platforms, Spill promises to crack down on “things that will detract from the platform and would not lend to creating a safe space for our users and our creators.”