If you use it that way, great, but it's not really a social network, but rather a personalized news feed with comments. Which brings us back to the OP: Twitter doesn't feel very social,

I agree. Twitter is just RSS on steroids. And you don't really need steroids.

It's like RSS on a sugar rush.

And once promoted content started bombarding me in Twitter, I went back to RSS. Unfortunately sites are dropping RSS, though most WordPress sites have an unpublicized feed.

Twitter via Bitlbee solves this problem for me: https://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoTwitter

i used to use rss for podcasts too but most just use dedicated services now they are a lot harder to find these days and im sure your right about the rest.

Why should all networks feel the same? A news feed where I can ask questions and get personal answers from real journalists, politicians etc. feels very social to me.

How is it not? The vast, vast majority of the people on facebook (I have like 1.2k friends) don't seem to ever post anything except maybe a pic once in a while.

Likes are similar to retweets.

Seems like such an absurd distinction.

Twitter is also fast and snappy compared to obese FB. It's basically noble in comparison.

its even categorized that way in most app stores. its how i used it too never found a news source that was not on twitter either.

I've always disliked Twitter but it does fill a very useful niche. News and sentiment will always bubble up first on Twitter. I think the potential of Twitter as a real-time stream of world events is, to this point, really untapped.