You’re just not a fan of the micro blogging format. I myself have never had a personal twitter account but tried mastodon a while back. I eventually stopped using it because I had nothing much to post and I didn’t like the short form style for having a conversation, especially if there are multiple people commenting. I much prefer forum style discussion because of nested threads (lemmy, reddit, etc.).

Also, microblogging has a personal element in that it kinda matters who is posting, vs forums like lemmy which are more about the topic posted rather than the person who posted it.

Sounds like you understand it pretty well. And dislike it.

That’s it. You didn’t miss a thing.

I’ve never been a Twitter/microblog user, but here’s how I gather it worked, presented in the order in which it was developed.

Do you ever think “oh, that’s a funny/interesting thought I had”, but there’s no one around to tell? Or not enough people and you think it had more potential than that? Microblog. Unlike a forum, you just dump in out into the void as-is. It’s a broadcast. Like if every account was a personal /r/showerthoughts.

From there we make it so I can subscribe to my friends. Now when they post their funny thoughts, or even just being like “I feel like tacos tonight, anyone in SF down?” I’ll get their post. Now it’s kinda like open group texting. Except I don’t choose who sees my random thoughts, they self-select. I just broadcast things out there and whoever might be interested might be interested.

That was basically all that microblogs were, at the beginning. A stream of non-topic’d stuff I said, and you can follow me if you want to hear more like it.

But sometimes I’m surrounded by strangers, like at a conference. At these points I want to know what random people I don’t follow are all saying about FooCamp. Search already exists so I can see all tweets with the word “cat” in it, but I can’t find a way to fit FooCamp organically into every post, so hashtags get invented as a social convention to say “that was my message, but here are some other keywords for search purposes”. Later they got linkified and so people started putting them inline, but originally they were just at the end and just for extra categorization.

So now the tool does two things. I can just broadcast out any thought I have without having to care about where to put it, etc. It all goes on my feed and anyone who has chosen to care about me will see it. And I choose who I care to receive broadcasts from because they’re cool, and it doesn’t matter what they’re talking about. But also I can tag a particular message with some categories, and that will allow strangers to see my messages if they happen to be looking for messages in that category, but obviously a single message can be in multiple categories.

Then later famous people and governments showed up, and people followed them because they love go hear what famous people talk about. But if you don’t follow them, then you don’t hear from them.

That’s basically it! So it’s kinda like the opposite of a reddit/lemmy/forum/usenet model. Rather than topics that have content posted by people, it’s people who post content that sometimes has a topic. Like a large group-chat (among friends or colleagues) where you’re not really sure who is in the chat, but you don’t have to care. You can prefer one over the other (I know I do), but fundamentally they’re not trying to solve the same problem as lemmy, they’re just a totally different model for communication. More like a friend group than a discussion group.

At its best, twitter was group texting, but in public. its evolved into a semi-broadcast form with the expectation that many will read and few will engage, and in both twitter and mastodon the tooling is built for that.

within that, you follow people because they produce content you want, or because you intend to interact. Hashtags are there for topics you are intersted in so you can consume in a more ad-hoc way

The only use I’ve ever had for Twitter was THE public place to post notices on the internet. Bands, comedians and other touring performers could post concert dates, etc.

The end of that Sparah commercial from Virgin Mobile “I’m so confused” “That right there? That’s a tweet. Tweet that shit!” is mostly what actually happened though, which is why I didn’t have a Twitter account for long.

Jesus christ you and me both brother. It’s just a giant stream of fucking word vomit. Where’s the categories topics and subreddits Jesus Christ organize it what the fuck