> Twitter 15 years ago was a home of weirdos and journalists mostly. There's a reason it needed changes to take off.
Journalists ignored Twitter until the mainstream was on it. It was definitely full of a community of weirdos. I was there.
I was an early adopter of Twitter and the "no algorithms, no engagement metrics" Twitter was something I missed and was part of why I left Twitter around about 2016. It is something that I like that Mastodon provides a somewhat clean slate on.
Twitter was about ephemeral day to day life. I still remember Twitter was never more useful to me than those early days during conferences/conventions when you'd turn on SMS notifications (!) of a friend or two to help coordinate meetups and meals and use the rest of the feed flying by for a general zeitgeist of exciting things around the next corner to maybe give you a direction to head. If you missed a Tweet when it flew by it was probably too late to see the thing it was talking about and content "discoverability" didn't matter, no one cared.
I know that's not what Twitter has been in a while. I feel it fair to say that when a lot of the algorithm stuff came into play, especially with its toxic engagement-maximizing, but also with its toxic drive-by miscontextualizations, that stopped feeling like a useful Twitter to me.
I'm not going to stop instances from exploring some of that stuff on Mastodon, but I also am going to use rights to silence and block them and otherwise defederate with them at my discretion for how useful I think they are to the overall community. I think the community is just fine without the algorithms and the everything ever tooted is always searchable and scrapable for ever and ever and always relevant for miscontextualization later. I preferred Twitter without those things, those things were stuff that started me rethinking my relationship with Twitter and eventually lost me to Mastodon because I wanted to escape that.
Journalists ignored Twitter until the mainstream was on it. It was definitely full of a community of weirdos. I was there.
I was an early adopter of Twitter and the "no algorithms, no engagement metrics" Twitter was something I missed and was part of why I left Twitter around about 2016. It is something that I like that Mastodon provides a somewhat clean slate on.
Twitter was about ephemeral day to day life. I still remember Twitter was never more useful to me than those early days during conferences/conventions when you'd turn on SMS notifications (!) of a friend or two to help coordinate meetups and meals and use the rest of the feed flying by for a general zeitgeist of exciting things around the next corner to maybe give you a direction to head. If you missed a Tweet when it flew by it was probably too late to see the thing it was talking about and content "discoverability" didn't matter, no one cared.
I know that's not what Twitter has been in a while. I feel it fair to say that when a lot of the algorithm stuff came into play, especially with its toxic engagement-maximizing, but also with its toxic drive-by miscontextualizations, that stopped feeling like a useful Twitter to me.
I'm not going to stop instances from exploring some of that stuff on Mastodon, but I also am going to use rights to silence and block them and otherwise defederate with them at my discretion for how useful I think they are to the overall community. I think the community is just fine without the algorithms and the everything ever tooted is always searchable and scrapable for ever and ever and always relevant for miscontextualization later. I preferred Twitter without those things, those things were stuff that started me rethinking my relationship with Twitter and eventually lost me to Mastodon because I wanted to escape that.