A word of warning. You think you're curating it yourself, but the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased towards finding you an opinion you already agree with.

This is why a) social media is often characterised as a narcissistic echo chamber, and b) why it becomes so rapidly toxic when two naturally opposed communities coincide on a topic.

A wonderful petri dish for anthropologists, but not a medium we'll be proud of fifty years from now.

> ...the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased...

That depends entirely on how you use Twitter.

Find people you know or have heard of other places and think are smart/interesting/important/etc. Follow people they retweet. Repeat. Meet Kevin Bacon.

Fighting human psycology, sociology, and site design through individual conscious will scales poorly.

Your friends and FOAFs are not likely to exercise the same level of control as you're expressing. I've consistently observed this even among a carefully curated set of sources on several SocMed sites.

The problem with Twitter, IMO, is that it's a fire hose. Let's say that I decide to follow John Carmack. I'm interested in his thoughts on technical topics and especially articles or posts that he may have written. Instead, I get all of that plus* the inspirational quotes he posts every morning, his political opinions, his thoughts on current events, etc. None of which I care about, and none of which (AFAIK) Twitter gives me the ability to filter.

*I don't know if John Carmack actually posts anything of the sort, just a hypothetical.

Is there a comparable service that has a public/private feed? I guess Facebook wall posts would be the closest, but you can't publicly follow people there.

Meanwhile Facebook does filter out things it thinks you're not interested in, and it outrages people that they're missing out on something.

Thank you and the others who replied. I may have to revisit Twitter.