[conspire] Twitter successors

[Akkana Peck]

Nick Moffitt writes:
> 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.

Ah, that explains something. I've seen so many people say things like "Twitter is a cesspool of toxic opinions", and I always wondered, if you're seeing things like that a lot, why are you following toxic people? Back when I used Twitter (before they killed the API that bitlbee used), what I saw on Twitter was science news, Linux and computer industry news, a little bit of top world headlines from major newspapers, a smattering of helpful advice regarding Python or other technical subjects, because that's who I was following. I almost never used the website interface, and bitlbee showed me only tweets from people I followed. I never saw toxic tweets; if I had, it's very easy to unfollow a toxic account.

Using a default interface, and not exploring other options, even while complaining that what that interface gives you is toxic, just seems weird to me. But maybe a lot of people never question defaults.

But I'm liking Mastodon better anyway, where I get the science and tech news plus a community of people trading beautiful photos. On Twitter most of the images, if I bothered to check them, were screenshots, memes, or obligatory "this newspaper insists on every tweet including an image, so here's a vaguely related stock photo to go with this article".

        ...Akkana        @akkana at fosstodon.org