I guess if you want to follow people like terrorists, Trump and criminals, then Twitter is the place for you.

It is pretty wild that centralized automated content moderation amplifies their voices, but decentralized manual moderation shuts such lunacy down.

I've been on Twitter for going on fifteen years and have yet to see a Taliban tweet. The advantage of having everything in one place is obvious, you can find the most obscure stuff. But by the same token, lots of bad stuff will be on there. The responsibility to choose what to look at wisely rests on the user much more than "the algorithm".

I'm sure a 200 user Mastodon instance moderated by a vigilant hall monitor will not have a problem with Taliban content, but then it won't offer any of what makes Twitter an interesting site.

I don't think Twitter amplifies the Taliban or drug cartels, in many years on Twitter I've never seen a tweet by them.

Trump doesn't post anything on twitter, if this helps?

Spaces are kind of a gem hidden in plain sight right now, a few months ago when the censorship dam broke it felt a lot like early 2000s internet where literally any topic could be broached. It's died down a bit since then as the pent up topics were cleared out of the collective consciousness but it's still a great place for news analysis, at least compared to anything on cable, by far.

I don't think that's why most people left Twitter. N=1, but for me it was much more the rapid decline in "default" content: when I sign in now, my DMs are filled with spammers and my recommended feed is just the owner and a bunch of reactionary stuff.

Your feed can be just people you follow. You never have to look at the recommended feed or whatever it is called now.

I did that for a while, but both the app and Twitter’s website would always switch me back to the inorganic feed. And honestly, it was fine before — most of the recommendations were appropriate.

Personally I’m not on Twitter anymore just because Tweetbot does not work anymore.

It doesn't matter anymore why people left (and barely any people actually left.) What the OP brought up is that Musk vastly overpaid for the thing and he's got to wring money out of it, so even if you love (especially if you love) twitter you need an alternative. There's no reason not to inflict any sort of humiliation on a person who has no alternative to you.