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Comment by ansc | Hacker News Reader

I really wish there was a... "casual" or "slower" replacement for Twitter. I created a Twitter account and followed my favorites, unfortunately I keep getting "outrage" tweets recommended. Funny, it's like it's own little microsphere where people vent about trans, climate, "men are superior to women", all these 4chan-esque topics. It's not even about about being correct, it's just about short "gotcha!" posts that sound good but are riddled with logical fallacies and ludicrous points if you think about it for a second.

I, on the other hand, go to HN to complain apparently. :-)

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Have you tried Mastodon? It can be literally described as a "casual" and "slower" Twitter.

The problem with Mastodon viz Twitter is that all the important people, including politicians in particular, are still in the latter, often in order to attack each other on daily basis. I bet some of them actually love the polarizing algorithm as it only benefits them.

That is not a problem, but a feature as I see it. If "more casual" and "slower" doesn't fit these people, let them have their fighting arena at Twitter.

If you want the day-to-day opinions of politicians and other "important people", I suspect you don't want something calmer and slower than Twitter, you just want a better block list.

And its very slow growth over many years to 'just' a couple of million users (which growth hacking megaplatform enthusiasts have been deriding it for) contributes to this more healthy culture, imho. Yes, all the usual social dynamics exist that are also present in any other platform. But handled differently, better maybe.

It's funny. The most "Twitter-esque" replies I see on Mastodon come from mastodon.social, which thanks to now being the "default server" in several apps seems to be facing somewhat of an Eternal September.

There tends to be some drama around different attitudes to moderation on other servers but other than that they're usually fairly well-behaved and predictable by comparison. Twitter on the other hand seems to have opened some kind of hell portal giving 4chan a run for its money.

It takes a bit of work, honestly. I slowly shifted my timeline from tech/dev centric to a niche that feels comfortable and not outrage-based, but it needs pruning like a garden. The best way is to signal to the algorithm that i'm not interested in certain kinds of tweets when it pops up again. Also try not to open/see the replies of those tweets as viewing it is also a signal. It's a cost/benefit thing, me personally have found a lot of value in keeping adjacent tweets coming to my timeline.

I use RSS and for chatting with people: https://sonnet.io/hi

Twitter/Reddit/HN are too toxic for me to visit every morning, so I started allowing myself to visit these sites 1-2 per week before 5 pm. Evenings are fine as I’m already done with my work.

People are actually kind when you see each other’s faces. It’s bizarre how big the difference is.

You can disable all recommandations with "Control Panel For Twitter". IMHO, a life saver.

Just use the "following" tab. One of the best changes since musk is that now it's a prominent button and it remembers that setting, instead of tricking you into using the algorithm.

Not for me - on the iOS app it will still randomly switch to the "For You".

It worrying how long it takes to realise it's happened. But after reading the several tweets from conspiracy nuts and right wing fruit cakes you notice.

Tumblr. It's much more "empty" and full of niche communities. It'll also add support for ActivityPub so it'll be a decent way to hook into Mastodon servers as well. https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23689570/activitypub-prot...

A whole bunch are being launched: spoutible, cohost, etc. Unfortunately "slower" necessarily means "less content".

Dunking was always a part of twitter culture, but it's got far more vicious, unrestrained, and stupid lately.

nostr is currently very open, happy and accepting. Unfortunately, not many people are there yet, unless your interests contain Bitcoin.

Holding me back from posting updates of what I had for breakfast is the problem of private key sharing with services that I can use in order to post updates of what I had for breakfast.

A client or service will inevitably be compromised. And with it, the private keys of some, or assumed all, using it, whether stored by the service or logged on entry by a compromised system.

Private keys should be chained, master->subkey, with subkey the public key of the service __or a solution like that or that ends in the same result. When (not if) a service or key is compromised, the key can be blacklisted and/or any key co-signed by a compromised service blacklisted.

I'm confused by the oversight. It's also been raised here https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr/issues/97

Until then, I'll have to keep my updates of what I had for breakfast to myself.

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