You don't.

You jump in occasionally, see what's going on and then continue on with whatever. I follow about 2k people and most of those are acquaintances, some colleagues, etc. The only reasonable way to keep an eye on things is lists or custom searches.

When I'm attending a conference, I add a hashtag search a few weeks in advance and kill it a few days after the event. I can catch all the last minute "who's in town?" or "here are my slides!"

And then lists are key. I have a few set up for specific topics, former colleagues (private), and my local tech community. That way I can stay plugged in regardless of other stuff happening.

When I first started using twitter, I found the upper limit on how many people I could follow without feeling overwhelmed was ~100, but as the years have gone by that maximum has grown to the point where I'm following around 700 people at the moment. Muting heavy retweeters helps a lot.

Depending on how chatty they all are, I think you could reasonably follow around 1,000 people and keep up with it alright. Much more than that and you're just periodically sampling a chaotic timeline you're not really engaged with, though.

Bear with me, as I don't use twitter:

If you mute a heavy retweeter on twitter, isn't that the same as just deleting them? Why continue to follow someone you've muted?

Not exactly the same. There are a few reason I might mute someone (opposed to unfollow):

1) They don't know I've muted them, which can be nice for personal friends that are just too damn chatty.

2) They can still DM me, again useful for closer acquaintances.

3) I'll often mute temporarily, e.g., I'll probably mute several people for a week during the RNC convention, because they'll be much chattier than usual. Or I just recently muted somebody who would not stop with Brexit articles. I care about it, but as a USA citizen, I don't need 70 tweets a day about it.

4) I still see replies to the muted person (from other people I follow). I don't see tweets directed to other people unless I also follow them. So if muted-friend-1 tweets something and unmuted-friend-2 responds to 1, I'll see that tweet and can swipe over to see the full conversation. IOW, I still see "@mutedfriend that's awesome!", whereas if I unfollowed, I would only see responses that purposefully broaden their reach, e.g., ".@mutedfriend blah".

Anyway, not a huge difference, but yes, there are enough small differences that I'll often choose to mute rather than delete/unfollow.

You can mute someone's retweets, while still seeing all tweets directly posted by that person. That's what I was referring to above.

But it can also be useful to just outright temporarily mute someone who's at an event or something and swamping your timeline with irrelevant tweets that you know are timeboxed and will soon return to normal. A 7 day mute or whatever beats unfollowing and forgetting to refollow.

I follow about 7,000 users, most of whom I don't know personally but have followed because we're in the same industry. But I don't ever attempt to read my feed beyond a couple of minutes. If a Tweet from a user I care about gets drowned out by 20 tweets from the randoms I follow...it's no big deal. I follow enough like minded people that many of them will retweet something that I want to see. And I like seeing random stuff from semi-random people...that to me is what Twitter is for.

I follow a few 100 users for news but it's overwhelming to keep up if you aren't checking every half an hour. To scratch an itch, I use a chrome extension (shameless plug [1]) to sort them by popularity and I can also tune down chatty users without blocking them.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpom...

Many of the accounts I follow only tweet sporadically. Some are weekly, some only at weekends, some in different timezones.

It isn't a novel which is needs to be read from start to finish.

I curate the number of accounts I follow to be exactly 187. That seems to be my sweet spot for Signal to Noise.