Tokimeki Unfollow is a Marie Kondo inspired Twitter plugin made by Julius Tarng. If you’ve not been on Netflix, there’s a show by Marie Kondo, an organizing guru who has been promoting cleaning up homes by removing items that don’t spark joy to make our living spaces more neater. Her mantra can also be applied online to do a little spring cleaning digital spaces too from cleaning up your email inbox to unfollowing social media accounts that don’t spark joy.
What’s the app about?
Tokimeki is a Japanese word and when translated means “ to spark joy” and this tool wants to do exactly that. Tokimeki Unfollow is Twitter plugin created in Glitch that lets you tidy up your Twitter feed by unfollowing accounts that don’t spark joy on your timeline. The tool is open source so you can customize to your liking such as adding keyboard shortcuts
How does it work?
Tokimeki Unfollow goes through each of the accounts you follow one by one which you can choose how it selects said accounts either to start from your oldest or newest follows or in a random order. You are also allowed to check their bio ob the profiles but the app highly recommends not ticking that checkbox. This is clever as you’re now forced to think about the tweets the account posts instead of what their profile says to give you unbiased judgement.
When you begin selecting accounts, their recent tweets will show up and the Tokimeki Unfollow tool will ask you if the tweets still spark joy or feel important to you. If they do, you can select next. If they don’t, you simply unfollow them. The tool will ask you to thank the person for the tweets you’ve enjoyed before ( you don’t have to, save yourself the awkward conversations) There’s also an option to add that account to a private or public list to follow them back when social anxiety kicks in and you want to see what they’ve been up to.
So everyone was joking about Konmari-ing their Twitter, but I went ahead and made a tool for that:
Say hello to ✨ Tokimeki Unfollow ✨!
Hang out with virtual me and go thru your follows one by one. Do their tweets spark joy? If not, hit [Unfollow]!https://t.co/mrIK14vXum pic.twitter.com/DsPLmdE6Ol
— julius tarng cyber inspector (@tarngerine) February 4, 2019
Is it any good?
Weirdly, yes. My timeline is always chaotic as I followed close to 6000 accounts and this tool came in handy to declutter my timeline and get to see tweets from important people. It’s easy to unfollow celeb accounts or movie or tv show accounts I followed when I joined Twitter 7 years ago. The real challenge is how to go about your friend’s accounts which have long been inactive or ones that spammed my feed with content that I didn’t deem important to me.
I’m still not close to my goal of following less than 4000 people who spark joy on my timeline but so far the progress is worth applauding, right. It is time-consuming going through each of your accounts in one go but luckily the app saves your progress so you can continue this journey of purging your socially obligated follows.
Julius Tarng, the creator of this god-sent tool hasn’t even gone through half of his 1000 follows but as Marie Kondo says, it’s not meant to be a race. I’ve relegated some time of my weekend schedule to at least finish my goal.
There are definitely better tools out there that can assist to you declutter your feed but the Tokimeki Unfollow helped me with the reflecting process and being mindful about who I interact with on this chaotic platform.
I also noticed that my following habits changed over time as I now stopped following news outlets or organizations but rather the people who work there or specific follows when they’re at events or when a topic of interest starts trending on Twitter and then forget to unfollow them long after said topic hype ended.
Do you follow accounts on Twitter because you genuinely like what they have to say or because you feel obligated to listen?
Unfollowing some of these accounts has helped me clean up the clutter. After unfollowing acquaintances, their inane opinions will not be grabbing my attention each time I open Twitter.
Try it out here.
