The whole point of an app like twitter is everyone of note is on it, within reason.
That's the main reason why I still look at Twitter, even though I also use and prefer Mastodon. The people I'm interested in post there. 98%+ of the Twitter accounts I follow are for reasons other than politics, and none of their posts would be removed from either platform... well, except the reporting on Musk's jet wasn't removed from Mastodon*... so it's not a huge deal.
*And I'm fine with there being a rule to not provide the location of people... but if you are going to specifically mention leaving an account up as proof of your commitment to free speech, and then decide to change the rule later, you've shown that you don't have the commitment to free speech that you said you did.
Tweetbot was one of the best apps ever though. RIP. Mastodon has the same crappy social media censorship model of other apps with hall monitors waiting for someone to say the wrong thing, so it's dead in the water to me. Mastodon is a poor man’s twitter with less users for folks with a thin skin or those who wish to live life in an echo chamber.
Twitter may be more lax now when it comes to dead-naming or anti-vaccine posts, but that's hardly the whole story. Elon is less likely to fight censorship requests/demands from countries other than his own. There's evidence that he has shadow-banned accounts because of his personal grudges. He attempted to blackmail NPR into posting again (if you don't start posting again, I'll delete your account and give the
@NPR handle to someone else).
And then, the most obvious one, giving post visibility priority to people who pay Musk. Don't get me wrong—that's his prerogative—but anybody who praises Musk for bringing back "free speech" but does not criticize him for prioritizing blue checkmarks doesn't really care about getting people out of echo chambers, and doesn't believe in a meritocracy the best arguments naturally win out.
Twitter is much better than all three for getting broad information and divergent opinions.
The issue is that the most broad and divergent may not lead to the most representative view. Gab allows some posts that even Musk's Twitter won't. But it's so full of racism and antisemitism that most people don't want to use it, which leads to less diversity of views in practice, even if it isn't enforced by mandate.
Twitter also has many features for muting certain words, topics and conversations (which I use to make my experience more pleasant and a bit less political) and not too many ads. Curating your own experience is infinitely better than someone else censoring for your experience.
And unlike YouTube when you block an account on twitter it stays blocked even in search.
I appreciate that Twitter allows blocking ad accounts. But if Musk really cared about allowing me to curate my experience, he'd let me turn off prioritization of Twitter Blue accounts. He'd give me more power to mass block accounts. He'd let me ignore accounts based on their profiles (I'd block all NFT and other crypto accounts).
About every 5th tweet I see is an ad. I was using Tweetbot before Musk, so I never saw an ad. I understand that isn't sustainable, but maybe just make a no ads subscription?
www.makeuseof.com
www.macstories.net
