Twitter’s real value was its “global RSS” nature. You could get short, quick updates about local news, published papers, sports events, political happenings, and more.
It made it easy to source info from your followers (or their followers) quickly. Think Ask HN but broader.
Activity on Twitter is down now, mastodon and threads aren’t cutting it. There’s more activity on LinkedIn but it’s quite phoney.
I genuinely feel that Twitter provided me with useful information from people of interest.
Why aren't mastodon and threads cutting it? They provide exactly what you claim you want.
Leads me to believe for a lot of people, the allure of Twitter isn't actually anything intentional, but just the combination of being at the right place at the right time - that feeling you got, the relationships you fostered. Just like if you were on Tumblr during its independent peak.
Lots of people I know have half-migrated to Bluesky or totally moved to Mastodon, so my feed is much emptier than it used to be.
I'm pretty optimistic about the fediverse in the medium term, certainly for many communities. But right now twitter.com is still the default for organizations large and small, and I'm not sure that changes. It's gonna be a mess.
It made it easy to source info from your followers (or their followers) quickly. Think Ask HN but broader.
Activity on Twitter is down now, mastodon and threads aren’t cutting it. There’s more activity on LinkedIn but it’s quite phoney.
I genuinely feel that Twitter provided me with useful information from people of interest.