this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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I was for a long time unable to understand the appeal of the structure of Twitter/Mastodon.
Recently I have become an active Mastodon reader (reader; I have made no public posts). I realize now that it is basically an RSS reader: you follow sources (people/organizations) you are interested in and get to read those in reverse-chronological order. If you aren't an organization, celebrity, journalist, activist, politician or otherwise someone whose thoughts people in the outside world would care about, then there is no real point in ever posting anything there; people will not read it anyway because they aren't following you. This is unlike the discussion-forum structure of Reddit/Lemmy where ordinary people are meant to participate.
Yeah, I treated Twitter as a RSS platform where I could follow subject matter experts like scientists and writers and artists I liked.
I also used it to follow people and groups that weren't like me so i could learn. Like, "disability twitter" opened my eyes to some things I took for granted, because you had regular people dealing with those things just talking back and forth about it. If I shut my mouth and just listened, it opened up a whole new world.
For small-time creators making either art or science, Twitter was a good platform to get little chunks of info out to your followers. I don't know that Mastodon fills those shoes yet, but I hope it will.
It's not necessarily as one-sided as newsfeeds. Regular people can still publish and have a small audience of their own. That's why Twitter, Mastodon etc. are classified as microblogging platforms.