I'm just going to address the elephant in the room: Twitter, before Elon's takeover, was a crypto-obsessed political echo chamber. You cannot get an "alternative" to it because people refuse to acknowledge that Twitter was never all that great in the first place. You can never go home, as they say, and that applies to old versions of social media just as well. You will never, ever have an alternative where all your friends and role-models post on the same network. It just doesn't happen, ever. Not with Twitter, and not with a Twitter alternative - your expectations aren't realistic, and so you're bound to be disappointed until your outlook changes.
If you're willing to adjust your expectations and use a smaller network, you can still enjoy social media. You just have to stop treating it as an attention-stealing exercise where you're in competition with your peers to get noticed by "the world". Platforms like Mastodon are great, as long as you don't rely on likes and reposts for dopamine.
> Twitter, before Elon's takeover, was a crypto-obsessed political echo chamber.
Like Youtube is a Heavy Metal Anime obsessed echo chamber?
You've said more about the sliver of your personalised algorithm parameters and less about the breadth of the platform.
If you are a hobbyist writing blogs for fun and not spending hours doing seo for google old twitter was the only way your post / site could be delivered to your intended audience . You wrote a post about the latest python update ? Twitter will deliver it to python liking cluster . Something no other social media does nor do search engines like google where only limited sites are shown .
You vastly overestimate how many people actually use Twitter. The "python liking cluster" does not uniformly hang out on Twitter - maybe like less than ~3% of them probably still use the site. Also, X will happily downrank your content if it isn't controversial enough to be viral. After all, your python-likers aren't reading on a chronological timeline. They're being fed an algorithm of doomscrolling - finding your posts on the site is little more than a beneficial mistake.
You can continue to cling to Twitter until the corpse is cold and they've replaced the blue branding with black, if you wanted. People are both stockholm-syndromed to the app in an unhealthy way and addicted to attention-seeking in ways that X knowingly exploits for ad revenue and premium subscription tithes.
It will only get worse!
I do overestimate user count But sharing links was a big thing in twitter . And for cluster for someone who has zero traffic , ten or a hundred traffic makes a huge difference . I do intend to leave twitter but as my previous comment indicated there aren't any .
> Twitter, before Elon's takeover, was a crypto-obsessed political echo chamber.
Pretending a platform as large as twitter was/is "one thing" is silly. It may have been that for you, it was not that for many.
> Platforms like Mastodon are great, as long as you don't rely on likes and reposts for dopamine.
As long as you're willing to post to no one, sure.
It's most likely the their personalized timeline was filled with crypto and politcs .
I agree on mastodon . Twitter is for finding new people . Mastodon is for following people you know .