I pretend to be my cat, and I only engage with other people who are also pretending to be their cats.

I got to know things much before they come on main stream. Besides that I directed my complains to the correct person/entity since they have an account.

I follow a small number of people, browse the Followed feed in chronological order, and never miss a tweet from someone i follow.

I do not browse For You (algorithmic reccomendations), i do not keep up with drama, and i used uBlock to delete the Trending section from my sceen. I don’t get a lot of notifications, but if i did i’d have to get used to ignoring them.

This is the way. Twitter is inherently mediocre, but it is made interesting by the people on it, so if you follow the rules above you can have a pretty good time.

I only used to have it for work. Altmetrics were largely driven by tweets unless any ‘real’ media took an interest. However, I mostly ended up using it to echo anti-Ryanair & anti-Tory views. Made leaving it quite simple. Also, a lot of science moved to Mastodon.

You basically just get to argue with the worst people on the planet. Its terrible for your mental health and i wouldnt recommend it

I have an account but rarely go on the app and never post. I follow a couple of niche accounts for things like our town’s police blotter and, as I’m an aviation geek, accounts that tweet about flight emergencies in order to find out more info about them. It’s also good for breaking news I’ve found.

It was always a terrible place for discussion or debating, but I found it useful (back in the day) as a kind of personalised news feed for topics I’m interested in and following people I’m interested in hearing from.

I used it as a newsfeed (for the broadest possible meaaning of “news”) with informed commentary attached. Most of the organisations, publications, writers and researchers I’m interested in were on there or would be injected into the feed by someone else.

Same as Reddit really. Just based on following individuals rather than topics.

I didn’t post much, apart from retweets.

I followed people who made things that I liked to get the latest news about those things. I participated a lot in group watching of trash TV, that’s what I miss most. Mastodon doesn’t have the numbers yet to do that regularly. Also, customer support for almost any company, where else can you reach someone as easily as on Twitter?

Oh and very local stuff happening right this second. A few years ago, the sirens in my area randomly went off and nobody knew wtf was going on for at least an hour. Turns out they were misfiring and nothing was going on, as we eventually learnt from an official announcement. Twitter was immensely helpful for communication in that situation, not least to see that everybody else was just as confused as I was.

I am very indifferent about twitter, only joined relatively recently because I felt like I was spamming random stuff on discord and such, so I just write there if it’s not too personal.

Also follow some people and post BTS/WIP things related to the things I make (that basically no one cares about, but I want to share).

The toki pona community is rather acattered on multiple platforms, if there were one active one I’d be on that… (probably no one would comment this, but the ma pona Discord isn’t a viable option for me currently).

I used to follow my favorite bars, restaurants, and music venues. It was my own little list of happy hours, specials, and shows. I also sometimes added local animal rescues to see when they were having pub crawl fundraiser things. I never followed individuals.

It used to be pretty fantastic for live journalism.

I mostly used to shitpost my days away, sharing jokes and memes, pausing every now and then to shout at politicians.

It wasn’t terribly healthy.

So now I use Mastodon, where I spend my days shitposting and sharing memes, but I block most journalists and any politicians that have made their way over there. And that’s healthier.

idk algorithm sometimes recommends some funny stuff

I joined because a company who ran a creative product I used ended up using it as their primary comms channel. So a scene and community formed there, because it was the only way to stay up to date.

I ended up following quite a few people from that community, and I never use the algorithm feed - all I see is posts about games, art, music etc made by the community and it’s where I share or promote my own games and other work.

I never see any other twitter garbage or drama in the course of average use. I have seen the shit thats out there, and as fucking abysmal as it is, it’s no better or worse than default/popular reddit, which I equally avoid.