How to Unfollow Everyone on Twitter
If you’re still a heavy Twitter user and have been gaining followers for years before your timeline has turned into an unreadable mess, you may be fantasizing about burning it all down. “It” means both the entire sinful world and your Twitter feed. We can help with the second. Here are four ways to unfollow everyone on Twitter and start from scratch – or free yourself now and forever and live happily on Instagram.
First, keep your followers
The extremely online man Anil Dash recently unfollowed over 5,000 Twitter accounts . Before he did, he copied his followers onto Twitter. This meant that if he regretted his experiment, he could still see his old timeline by opening that list on any Twitter app. It is also useful if you are subscribed to several small accounts and are afraid of losing them randomly. (You can also review your subscriptions and just jot down which ones you definitely want to come back to later.)
Please note that if you unsubscribe from private accounts, you will not be able to subscribe to them without their permission. This may cause your friends with personal accounts to crash.
Dash also exported his followers to a spreadsheet so he can choose who to follow later. You can do the same by following the instructions in his post.
Unsubscribe manually
The easiest way to unsubscribe from everyone is to open your profile in a browser, click the “subscriptions” counter to download all the profiles you follow, and start clicking the “subscribe” button next to each one. It’s exhausting. If you are subscribed to more than a couple of hundred accounts, try one of the other methods below.
Use a command line tool
To actually unsubscribe, Dash used a command line tool called t , which takes some work to get up and running. (You need to install Ruby first .) His post has instructions on how to install the tool and unsubscribe for everyone.
This approach is tricky, so only use it if you follow more than a couple hundred people. If you’ve subscribed to a thousand accounts, figuring out the process will still be faster than hitting every unsubscribe button.
Use a subscription manager
If the command line is too technical or you prefer to choose who to unsubscribe from, use ManageFlitter . This site can sort your followers by frequency of tweets, number of followers, length of their subscription, or other factors. It can’t unsubscribe from everyone at once, but its interface makes it easy to click through the list.
To unsubscribe from more than fifty people a day, you will have to pay $ 12 a month. But compare that to the time you’ll save by not reading bad tweets.
Use a Chrome extension, but be careful
None of the Chrome extensions we tested could actually unsubscribe from people en masse. Twitter Unfollow, which we recommended in 2016, now doesn’t work and doesn’t show the unsubscribe button.
Twitter Unfollow All, which just toggles any follow / unsubscribe button, started following everyone in the Who to Follow field. And when that crate was automatically replenished with new users, the extension continued to follow them like a runaway AI. It was terrible. But for this guy it worked . Try hiding the Who to Follow field with the Hide Twitter Guff extension. Only then can Twitter Unfollow All run under strict control.
You can unsubscribe everyone to clean up and start over, or you can unsubscribe to force Twitter to shut down without deleting your account or losing all the precious #content you’ve put into the world. Then you can use Twitter to talk, but not listen as God intended.