I’ve been finding this to be the case with the fediverse so far. I have different accounts on Mastodon and Bookwyrm, since Bookwyrm is more tailored to book reviews and quotes. But I can follow Mastodon, Bookwyrm, Peertube, and Pixelfed accounts from one main “reader” feed, providing more of a mix than I ever got on one platform alone.

Agree, that's why I say in theory it's a good replacement. I don't yet buy it'll take off. I find it much more likely that we start seeing a bunch of walled gardens pop up instead. But if I'm wrong, then great.

> The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites.

With ActivityPub, this shouldn’t be much of an issue.

>I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc.

I don't mean to sound overly dismissive, but maybe instead of putting the onus on a social media website to provide that experience, wouldn't it be more sensible to get that from a news aggregate site? I.e. Google News, Fark, Reddit, etc.?

Part of the issue with how modern social media platforms is the intent to keep users on their platform for many hours at a time. Instead, limiting content on those sites to the intent of the platform, and allowing users to find that other content outside of the site would be a "better" way to manage their experience on the platforms content. For example, a platform devoted to Formula 1 would not be a good place to inject articles about COVID information or political events. It wouldn't be a good place to do so, not just because it would be severely off topic, but also because it would be managed by people who would otherwise be focused on curating the topic they are (presumably) knowledgeable on.

Basically, I'm saying it's not a good idea to get news updates from Twitter for the same reason why it's not a good idea to get a sushi from a gas station bathroom.

I use(d) Twitter as more of a meta-aggregator. It had actual social interactions combined with the sort of pointers out to news sites, tech blogs, etc. Perhaps I'm an outlier in how I use(d) it but I haven't come across anything that provided the same degree of convergence. This is precisely because it's mixing in short snippets from friends, acquaintances, and other people I find interesting.

> Instead, limit content on social sites to the subject of the platform

That's my point. I'm saying the thing I liked most about Twitter was that there wasn't a single "subject of the platform". Don't get me wrong, I also spend plenty of time in more specific corners of the internet, but I've yet to find something that quite replicates Twitter for me.

That's fair. Personally, I like to keep things separated from one another for obvious reasons (controversial topics mixed with friends/family can lead to issues) but I can also see that others might prefer a single source.

One acronym: RSS

I have almost everything in one app: YouTube, Reddit, HN, Twitter, blogs, webcomics, news etc.