For me the following 15 reasons combined were enough to stop being active on Twitter, not in order of importance.
Enough is enough. #ElonMusk is not the only reason.
I'm writing this down so that I can always link this post whenever someone asks the question "Why did you stop using Twitter?" and remind myself:
1. Annoying ads and tracking (you're the product)
2. Hate-boosting algorithms
3. Hostile users
4. Immoral, hate-breeding, immature billionaire as an owner, worse than Trump because now he can say anything without limits
5. "Free speech", I mean not free speech. Users get easily banned mentioning Musk or Mastodon
6. Features breaking down
7. New useless inaccessible "features"
8. There is a better, free and open source alternative available (#Mastodon, NOT #Spoutible or other shite centralized and toxic copycats)
9. Not ethical, not welcome towards minorities. Musk fired accessibility and human rights team and is clearly stated and tweeted many times he (=Twitter) does not care about minorities
10. Many good folks I followed already left (in fact about 700 of them based on the decrease in my follower-count)
11. Increasing amount of disinformation
12. Lack of moderation: Nazis and idiots can post freely
13. Reinstation of the banned accounts like Trump's and nazis
14. Bad influence to politics and US government
15. Ongoing shitty decisions like killing the API (no more third party apps), limiting users, crapping all over the infrastructure...
11 FREE features Twitter doesn't have, but Mastodon has:
1. Editing posts
2. Character limit from 500 up to endless amount (I have 10000)
3. Follow hashtags
4. See hashtag popularity while typing
5. Custom emojis
6. Lots of apps and interfaces (like @ivory)
7. Content warnings
8. Filter by language
9. Mute conversations you're tagged but don't want to participate in
10. Column interface (like Tweetbot) without a separate app
11. Endless amounts of fun bots (like @chadpybara), also those Twitter bots after Twitter killed their developer endpoints on February 2023.
Knowing this, why would I want to continue using Twitter? Mastodon has everything that Twitter does not. For me the 7K followers are not a reason big enough for me to spend time on a platform that is broken in every way.
It's bad even if it was only used for good things knowing what it's based on.
This post is linked to my Twitter profile.
Join now: https://mastodon.social
Find out more: https://joinmastodon.org
Edit: Changed wording, as I still have an account there, added more reasons.
Edit 2: Added 10 features Twitter doesn't have, but Mastodon has.
Edit 3: Changed join URL to mastodon.social as it's open again.
Edit 4: Added bots.