Confession:
Iâve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other âmodernâ social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.
The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very âego-centricâ. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).
I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great â and it didnât even suffer from the need to federate.
Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.
On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But itâs not that great and the protocol isnât meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of âlikesâ has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. âčïž