Comment by inopinatus
1 day ago
On the rare occasions I still look at Twitter I use lists instead of follows, and this avoids both the awful algorithmic noise and means I'm not contributing to anyone's bullshit engagement KPIs.
I would still prefer an RSS feed, if there was a logged-out solution.
I was a heavy bloglines user back in the day and loved it. It was like a custom newspaper people printed for me and worked great.
I moved to twitter in 2009 and, for the most part, it was a better RSS experience. The udpates were smaller, more frequent. It was text only and had a size limit which automatically filtered for some level of linguistic ability. I used to only see people who I wanted to. It felt like a cross between IRC (which I used heavily at the time) and RSS and I quite loved it.
Over the years, the experience has degraded. Not just because of "the algorithm" but also because of influencers, social media marketing, spam, etc. But I had the frog in hot water experience and never really felt like moving away. I've blocked it on my work machine and use it only my phone via. the browser and a monochrome screen which makes it less compelling.
I've made a few friends and relationships on the platform and I think it peaked in 2015/2016 or so. Especially when you're in a city that's mostly on it. You run into people who you know "via. twitter". It's been a great ride but I do wish for some of the things of the RSS days.