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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

I'm still waiting to hear any kind of official word, but it looks pretty bleak.

Without Tweetbot, Twitter is almost impossible to use. Checking in on https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/, the alternate UI, it's almost usable, but still missing like 8 of the most important features that made Twitter useful to me.

I have been posting sometimes on Mastodon but still primarily on Twitter, waiting to see how things turned out. But if Tweetbot at least isn't restored, I will switch roles and will likely try out Mastodon for a while, posting just a little on Twitter.

The problem is, most of the "Fediverse" right now is a big echo chamber (kind of like Voat was when Reddit had its weird issues a few years back, or more charitably like a community like HN is... it's not always bad as long as people are aware of it). So it's not the same kind of community as Twitter had.

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> Without Tweetbot, Twitter is almost impossible to use

In what way? Don’t probably 99% of people who use Twitter not use Tweetbot (including myself)? I use the browser and/or the iPad app and don’t find anything unusable about it. What am I missing in my ignorant bliss?

> Don’t probably 99% of people who use Twitter not use Tweetbot (including myself)?

My understanding is that the significant accounts tend not to use the official apps / web interface, one of the biggest reasons being so that they can track accounts for reading purposes without providing what the algorithm treats as a positive endorsement of them, and so that they can use the signal boosting effect of “following” selectively and separately.

Interesting idea but it doesn’t really support:

> Without Tweetbot, Twitter is almost impossible to use

So some celebs, journalists, and the overwhelming minority of users have to use a burner or browse incognito?

Alright, why don't you tell us why people use Tweetbot.

Why would I do that?

Someone said Twitter was essentially unusable without Tweetbot. As someone who finds Twitter very usable without Tweetbot, I asked, “Why?” Someone else said that a very small number of people have a very specific use case that makes Tweetbot better than the Twitter apps/website. I said that was a neat example but doesn’t really apply to many people.

How do you find your last read tweet? How do you move from phone to desktop and pick up reading where you left off? It's like, not impossible to write a novel on a typewriter, or on a pad of paper. Writers have proven that for hundreds of years. But when you snatch someone's word processor, and tell them to get the selectic out of the closet from now on, it is pretty damn annoying.

> How do you find your last read tweet?

I’m not too worried about it. I just read what it shows me when I open the app or go to the site. If I’ve seen it before, I keep scrolling. When I lose interest I stop.

The lack of any official word is part of the message. They cut their third party partners off in the most abrupt, unprofessional way possible. That is what Musk's Twitter is now. (The leak yesterday suggests they are working on messaging at Twitter.)

I’m reluctant to use Mastodon because I don’t see it gaining much traction outside of tech. It’s incredibly annoying to use, and the entire concept of how different servers work is far too complicated for any non-tech user. It really needs a frontend to take off that regular people can join without having to worry about getting anything setup.

Please give it a go. For all the talk about needing to know things and the process being complicated, I've only heard from one person who actually had any issues with that side of the system. I think people mostly overthink this. For example, go to https://hachyderm.io , register your account, done. If you want to research other instances and think about it some more in the future, you can move somewhere else - you're not stuck to one place. In the meantime, I don't ever think of the "entire concept of how different servers work" while using the service.

This is a really common attitude _on Hackernews_, but, well, on Mastodon, non-tech people seem to be using it happily enough (in particular it is full of journalists, for obvious reasons).

I don't think this should be that surprising, because people already use _email_.

I've been using Mastodon for the past couple of months for most of the people I follow, but prior to that I had been using Twitterific for Twitter because it was so much better for how I used it.

Up until a couple of days ago I was still using Twitterific to keep up with those who hadn't yet made the jump (mostly non-tech-adjacent people/communities), but with the iOS version now being dead my usage has seen a nosedive. For now I still check every so often with the Mac version since it's still functional, and if that dies then I'm going to try to figure out alternatives for aforementioned communities (probably Discord, but we'll see) and drop Twitter altogether. I have no interest in the stock client/site whatsoever.

Twitter was never one community though, of course. The amount of interaction I had outside my bubble was really minimal. I could see other people shouting at each other if I wanted to, but of course I could do that without having an account.

I have to say that Mastodon has surprised me in that regard: fewer followers by number but roughly equal on the count of pleasant interactions.

Apparently it's the same for engagement with content. I've seen a few people comparing their large user bases and getting the same amount of link clicks on Twitter and from ~10% of that many followers on Mastodon.

I remember Voat! It started off with great intentions, just to be a more free speech version of reddit and at the end was just posts about Michelle Obama being a man and Qanon.

It was an interesting case study in how free speech can decline to a lowest common denominator type situation.

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