I have an account but rarely go on the app and never post. I follow a couple of niche accounts for things like our town’s police blotter and, as I’m an aviation geek, accounts that tweet about flight emergencies in order to find out more info about them. It’s also good for breaking news I’ve found.

I mostly used to shitpost my days away, sharing jokes and memes, pausing every now and then to shout at politicians.

It wasn’t terribly healthy.

So now I use Mastodon, where I spend my days shitposting and sharing memes, but I block most journalists and any politicians that have made their way over there. And that’s healthier.

I followed people who made things that I liked to get the latest news about those things. I participated a lot in group watching of trash TV, that’s what I miss most. Mastodon doesn’t have the numbers yet to do that regularly. Also, customer support for almost any company, where else can you reach someone as easily as on Twitter?

Oh and very local stuff happening right this second. A few years ago, the sirens in my area randomly went off and nobody knew wtf was going on for at least an hour. Turns out they were misfiring and nothing was going on, as we eventually learnt from an official announcement. Twitter was immensely helpful for communication in that situation, not least to see that everybody else was just as confused as I was.

I joined because a company who ran a creative product I used ended up using it as their primary comms channel. So a scene and community formed there, because it was the only way to stay up to date.

I ended up following quite a few people from that community, and I never use the algorithm feed - all I see is posts about games, art, music etc made by the community and it’s where I share or promote my own games and other work.

I never see any other twitter garbage or drama in the course of average use. I have seen the shit thats out there, and as fucking abysmal as it is, it’s no better or worse than default/popular reddit, which I equally avoid.

I only used to have it for work. Altmetrics were largely driven by tweets unless any ‘real’ media took an interest. However, I mostly ended up using it to echo anti-Ryanair & anti-Tory views. Made leaving it quite simple. Also, a lot of science moved to Mastodon.