If you're willing to adjust your expectations and use a smaller network, you can still enjoy social media. You just have to stop treating it as an attention-stealing exercise where you're in competition with your peers to get noticed by "the world". Platforms like Mastodon are great, as long as you don't rely on likes and reposts for dopamine.
You can continue to cling to Twitter until the corpse is cold and they've replaced the blue branding with black, if you wanted. People are both stockholm-syndromed to the app in an unhealthy way and addicted to attention-seeking in ways that X knowingly exploits for ad revenue and premium subscription tithes.
It will only get worse!
Pretending a platform as large as twitter was/is "one thing" is silly. It may have been that for you, it was not that for many.
> Platforms like Mastodon are great, as long as you don't rely on likes and reposts for dopamine.
As long as you're willing to post to no one, sure.
I agree on mastodon . Twitter is for finding new people . Mastodon is for following people you know .
Like Youtube is a Heavy Metal Anime obsessed echo chamber?
You've said more about the sliver of your personalised algorithm parameters and less about the breadth of the platform.
I do think there may be an aspect of permanent fracture. There's a reason people used to affectionately call it the hellsite. Even if Naughty ol' Mr Car were to give up on it and go to spend more time with his imaginary car tunnels, and if borderline sensible (it was never _great_) management, third party clients, etc, were restored, I'm not sure I'd go back. Frankly, at this point, mastodon suits me better anyway.
> Twitter, before Elon's takeover, was a crypto-obsessed political echo chamber.
IME, old-Twitter _was_ better at keeping the stuff you didn't want to see out of your face. I never saw crypto people but did see people making fun of crypto, for instance. I rarely if ever saw a post from Musk, and then only if someone retweeted it. After the takeover this degraded within months; I had to block Musk because it kept shoving him in my face, I started getting content from a wide variety of conspiracy theorist lunatics, shock content, extremely obvious Russian propaganda, etc.
By the time I stopped using it (November 2022 I think) the algorithmic timeline had become pretty much unusable. Some users were surprised to start seeing porn; old-twitter, of course, was full of porn, but it was very good at not showing it to you if you didn't look for it.
