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@weeble I’m going to take this section by section here

firstly, as annoying as it can be, I don’t see anything inherently wrong with “attention-whoring” or “short, fleeting posts”, the latter especially; arguably, that’s what I like about twitter compared to fedi. it Is generally shorter, faster, messier. stream of thought, which is what I want out of my social media. if I wanted to do anything different, I’d be posting on my blog instead. ‘attention whoring’ is a hard thing to ‘describe’, so to speak, because like…what are you referring to here? bait posts designed to incite arguments? sure, those suck. but what about someone trying to grow an audience, for other reasons? artists, streamers, musicians, etc? that kind of thing is borderline impossible on fedi, at least not on the scale of twitter or even bluesky.

I also disagree with your point about “that’s what forums are for”, because forums are dead, and have been for a long time. I’m not saying this is a good thing, per se (I also miss them), but I’ve used them myself and they’re just not the same as twitter. again, it’s slower (which is a pro or con depending on who you ask), but also they’re just less active. forums are also more difficult for sharing things like visual art on, compared to a service with image and video upload functionality. and wrt Tumblr, we use it! still! but even then, the community we share our art and jokes and thoughts with is bigger on twitter than it is on Tumblr. the amount of people we have to share our passion for things with is noticeably bigger on twitter!!! we have met literal lifelong friends on twitter. people we’ve met irl. we’ve met friends at irl concerts because we were mutuals on twitter. we’ve had several IRL relationships with people we’ve met on twitter. I think what twitter does better than anything else is discovery; it’s not great for hosting a more dedicated community, but it’s a very, very good gateway. (for instance, almost all of our communities for fandom and whatnot have dedicated discord servers or w/e, which are designed for actual community. but we would never have discovered them if we didn’t meet people on twitter. the discord issue is Another Thing Entirely but literally no social media site is Good for community)

and legitimately, I do not see a reason for communities not to blend together. I, as a person, do not exist within the confines of my interests. I do not want to exclusively talk about Sonic the Hedgehog, or competitive Smash Ultimate, or Mac hardware. Twitter was a very good space for being able to be truly authentic 100% of the time, because there was always someone ready to talk about that one thing. i actually dislike the concept of “themed community spaces” like subreddits, themed fedi instances, and general fandom discords for this reason.

the self-censorship point is hard to really argue, but I raise a secondary question: “there are plenty of places to talk, you just have to find the right instance.” I host my own instance. I am literally the only person using this one. if I didn’t want to use this one, where would I find one without risking constant social rejection on all of them? where would I go if I wanted to find a place to post openly and candidly about my mental health struggles? where would I go to find a community that would welcome someone so schizophrenic and traumatized? like legitimately, where would I find a new space? I certainly don’t want to just keep signing up to new, random instances, until I figure it out. especially if those instances end up degenerated or isolated from many others on the fediverse. my point here isn’t necessarily that fedi is inherently more censored, it’s that twitter is very good at letting your posts get seen by people who will like them. on fedi it’s entirely a gamble, which requires inherently playing it more safe, unless you want to risk getting hurt, dogpiled, or otherwise attacked. and bluntly, I hate playing it safe. I’m much more stream-of-thought than fedi seems to want me to be.

fedi arguably fails at anything wrt brands. this is, partly, by design, but it also becomes a problem for, again, smaller creators like game studios, artists, and streamers. for numbers’ sake, our tuber account has ~1,000 followers on twitter, and ~250 on fedi. twitter post engagement is also significantly higher. it’s a network effect, but it’s still worth noting that fedi being ‘slower’ than it’s contemporaries do work against it for that kind of thing.

I also do not think I have more control of my content on fedi than I do on twitter. I can limit audiences, sure, but I can do that on twitter too. and when I delete a post, what’s stopping a rogue instance from not listening to that? all it does is put the fate of my content at the hands of an instance admin instead of a venture capital tech company. It’s not functionally any different.