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@weeble I’m sorry but posts like this one are exactly what I was attempting to address. I disagree with this sentiment heavily.

twitter used to be great. it was an astoundingly good place at building community, and spaces, and finding people. it has, arguably, done more for me than fedi has in that aspect, and it still is good at that. despite everything, it has been and always will be good at that. the artists helped, but the artists were only there because a community had already grown. it became a cycle in and of itself, but I don’t remotely want to try and write off twitter as “it always sucked”, especially as someone who was on it back during it’s “heyday” (at least, imo, 2014-2016). the best aspect of this, though, was that communities would often melt together, and blend, and they weren’t these isolated social circles the same way they are on fedi, and (to a lesser extent) Bluesky. one of my favorite examples of this is watching mutuals from different “places” come together - “my Porter Robinson mutual and my Hatsune Miku mutual are talking to each other in the replies of my post about Sonic 2006” is just not an experience you can get on fedi, because fedi’s structure and systems are inherently hostile towards fandom of any kind. (individual, themed instances, i.e. vocalounge.cafe, are not a replacement for this.)

and honestly, I still think twitter is actually just straight up better than fedi in a lot of ways. self-censorship isn’t as rampant there as it is here, for instance; it is, for better and for worse, an edgier place. I have friends who would never be allowed to survive on fedi but are able to find their people on twitter, and there’s something to be said about that. (that is, of course, entirely anecdotal though, and this could be representative of me being stuck in a specific fedi bubble - but then again, it’s so difficult to break out of that specific circle, unlike twitter, which….well.)

fedi is bad at what it is trying to do. I am not going to insinuate that it is just “overall bad” (I’m here, after all), but it is explicitly bad at what it is trying to do. federation is not suitably functional for building community. it is, at most, an obstacle. fedi is excellent if your goal is to build a personal bubble, but for engaging with the world at large, it is deeply, deeply isolating. if you don’t “pick a lane”, so to speak, it’s only going to be devastatingly frustrating to work with.

twitter was a “happy accident” because of it’s loose controls on audience settings. all of your posts could be seen by anyone, and (Circles notwithstanding) there was no way to limit them outside of a private account. it made for a great, beautiful melting pot of people, which fedi is both too small and too fragmented to ever properly recreate.

I’ll end this with a link to a recent blog post by @hikari , who touched upon a lot of this already, and put much of it better than I could: https://hikari.noyu.me/blog/2024-10-02-the-algorithm-is-killing-twitter-and-its-driving-me-insane.html