Want to quit X in 2025? Here's how to do it the right way with Cyd

Is cutting down on toxic social media one of your New Year's resolutions? In this post, I'll explain all of the current features of Cyd – both free and paid – and how you can use it to quit X for good while preserving your username.

Why not just delete your X account?

If you want to leave X, deleting your account is a good option, but it has a few downsides.

To delete your X account, the first step is to deactivate it, which starts a 30 day timer. This will immediately prevent anyone from accessing your X profile or any of your tweets. If you don't sign back in for 30 days, X says it will then permanently delete your account.

At this point, your old username will be up for grabs, leaving you vulnerable to someone else impersonating you there. And if you're migrating your social media activity somewhere else, like Bluesky, your old X followers won't have any easy way to find where you're hanging out now.

Instead of deleting your account, I recommend that you keep it but just delete all of your tweets, unfollow everyone, update your bio with a short message telling your followers where you went, and (optionally) lock your account. Here's how.

Step 1: Install Cyd

Cyd is a free app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Download it here. When you open it for the first time, you will be prompted to login to an X account.

Inside Cyd, you can add as many X accounts as you want. You can add more by clicking the + icon in the bottom left. At the moment, Cyd only supports X, but other platforms are coming soon.

Step 2: Add an X account and sign in using Cyd's embedded browser

Because of enshittification, X makes it difficult and expensive for developers to work with its service. Cyd gets around this by simply controlling a web browser that's logged in as you. So to get started, login to your X account, like this:

For the purposes of this blog post, I'm using a test account that's full of AI-generated slop.

Step 2: Archive your X data

Before Cyd can delete your tweets from X, it needs to know what tweets you have. To do this, you have two options:

• Build a database from scratch: If you have fewer than 2,000 tweets or likes in your account (like my test account has), this is the simpler way to go. Cyd will simply scroll through your data to build its database. If you have more data than that though, X won't show it all to you. In that case, you should import an X archive.
• Import X archive: If you have more than 2,000 tweets or likes, importing your data from an X archive is the way to go. Cyd will help you request your archive, and then you have to wait at least a day, sometimes more, for X to create your archive. When it's done, you can download the archive as a ZIP file and import it into X.

Cyd supports saving HTML versions of all of your tweets (sort of like your own personal Internet Archive). It also supports saving all your direct messages in more detail than the official X archive. And it can save all your bookmarks (which you need to do first if you want Cyd to delete them for you).

Build a database from scratch

Since my test account doesn't have all that much data in it, I'm going to build a database from scratch. Here's what it looks like:

As you can see, Cyd scrolls through your data to build its local database from scratch. When it's done, it saves a browsable version of your archive in your Documents folder, locally on your computer, which I'll show more below.

Import X archive

If you have more data in your account, here's what it looks like to import your data from an X archive:

The official X archive is missing some data you might want. So after importing the archive, Cyd can optionally save HTML versions of each tweet, save your bookmarks, and save your DMs.

Your local Cyd database

Once you've either built your database from scratch or imported it from an X archive, you can browse it by clicking Browse Archive in the Cyd window. You can also view the raw data – your data – by clicking Open Folder.

Here's what your browsable local archive looks like:

If you chose to save HTML versions of each tweet, you can view them by clicking the "archived" link next to the tweet. For example, here's a local HTML archive of a tweet, stored in a single file in my Documents folder:

Step 3: Delete your data

Now that you have a local database of your X data, Cyd can delete your tweets, retweets, likes, bookmarks, direct messages, and unfollow everyone. Some of this functionality is free and some of it requires a cheap premium plan.

If you don't want to spend money, deleting all your tweets and retweets is free! You don't even have to create a Cyd account to do it.

Here's a video of Cyd dutifully deleting my AI slop:

Premium features

In Cyd, saving your data and deleting all your tweets and retweets is free. For many people, this is enough.

Buying a premium plan for $36/year unlocks the rest of the deletion features. This is $3/month, or less than half the price of a blue checkmark on X!

What if you're not quite ready to delete all of your tweets? What about your bangers that went viral? With a premium account, you can choose to only delete old tweets, but to keep ones that meet a retweet or like threshold of your choosing. For example, you can delete everything older than 30 days unless it got at least 100 likes.

With a premium account, you can also delete your likes, bookmarks, and DMs (which are all private). And you can also automatically unfollow everyone, leaving your X account truly empty.

To get started with premium features, just choose the options you want when you start deleting your data, and you'll be prompted to create a Cyd account and sign up for a premium plan.

Step 4: Finish closing down your account

Finally, manually login to your X account and update your profile. I suggest that you make it clear that you're no longer using X. Add links to your Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, or other accounts. I set my location to: "X? 👎".

If you'd like to lock your account, open X and go to Settings and privacy > Privacy and safety > Audience, media and tagging, and check the box next to Protect your posts.

Happy New Year, and have fun clawing back your data from Big Tech!