[conspire] Twitter successors

[Nick Moffitt]

On 10Mar2024 12:42am (+0000), The Doctor wrote:
> I have an observation about the behavior of birbsite prior to bailing on it
> about two years back: It was extremely uncommon to see posts from anyone I
> deliberately followed there.  Loading Twitter on an average day, just about
> everything I saw was not from someone I followed but was pushed into my feed
> by their engagement algorithm from accounts I did not.  This resulted in
> absolutely nothing good for one's mental health, and a great deal of stuff
> not worth a fried IC.  I was able to work around it for a time by building a
> bot that polled the (still active) accounts of the folks I wanted to follow
> and mailing me periodic digests, but once Musk took control even that became
> useless.

There were a lot of us using "Tweetdeck", which was a third-party tab-based interface that got bought out and folded into Twitter Proper some years ago.  Felon Muskrat just destroyed it in the past few months, I heard.

The great thing was that you had a column for the people you followed, one for your notifications, one for each list you'd curated, one for each hashtag you followed, etc.  You could hook multiple accounts up to one dashboard, and manage the whole lot effectively.  It's a model available in Mastodon, and executed beautifully in phanpy, which I recommend for fediverse interactions within a Web browser (I use fedilab under LineageOS on mobile).

But this meant that almost no one actually created the column for "show me what I would have seen on the twitter front page", because why would you?  You had people you followed in reverse-chronological-order and that was what you asked for.  And this meant you slowly lost touch with what most folks were seeing, because they thought "twitter" was "an app" on their phones, and didn't bother investigating better interfaces.

This started to become really frustrating during the Trump administration, because people would be shown your tweet, and reply to you as though you had addressed them directly.  You'd get all sorts of pile-ons from people who were basically selected because they'd react the strongest to what you said.  And if you were safe in your normally-structured tweetdeck world, it would seem absurd.  I'm not talking to you; why are you bothering me?