Twitter does have ways to follow both topics (following a hashtag, basically, iirc) and joining communities. I've never used them because what I want from a Twitter-like network is to follow people who I'm interested in, or have interesting things to say.

If I'm reading my timeline and think "geez, this person sure does post a bunch of political stuff I don't want to see" I either mute specific keywords, or just unfollow the person. Back on Twitter I was aggressive with keyword muting - I don't care about Marvel or people having passionite topics about "MCU", so I muted those phrases and my timeline was free of them.

What had made Twitter easier to use for me was the aggressive use of filters to just block out most of political Twitter. It didn’t block everything, but you would be surprised what blocking the names of Presidents, former Presidents, Presidential candidates, the clap, and a few popular political slogans can do to really cull the politics from a Timeline in the height of election season down to almost nothing. I was going to investigate targeting shibboleths next but then Twitter killed Tweetbot and Twitter is dead to me without Tweetbot.

A bit of a baby-with-the-bathwater approach as I would like to keep following straight news sources.

I mean, if you use Twitter for political news, then yes. I hadn’t even considered that, but my approach would also wreck your ability to follow political news via Twitter.

The problem is that I'm interested in what people have to say about some topics and not others. Sometimes I'll follow a musician I like and realize when he's not posting about his music he's talking about conspiracy theories I'd rather not look at. Or someone will be pretty funny and interesting but also spend a lot of time interacting with porn. Or just post a lot about a topic that I have no interest in. If it worked differently I could interact with these people on subjects I'd like to without being subjected to every thought that enters their head and everything they want to follow.

>Twitter does have ways to follow both topics (following a hashtag, basically, iirc) and joining communities

ehhh, sort of. i tried a few of these before the musk takeover, and it was pretty disappointing. it was essentially a way of opting into more of the trash algorithm-recommended tweets in your timeline. instead of just the normal "recommended for you" stuff, you'd also have "recommended for you because you follow X".

The 'mute' function is wonderful for opting out of certain communities

I suppose I'm really looking for a more fine-grained way to filter certain topics from certain users without ignoring them entirely.

I've thought about building a ChatGPT-based Twitter interface for this but... ironically, Twitter API is dead.

Twitter has quite an extensive option to mute things nowadays. Such as keywords, phrases, usernames and hashtags. That's how I can keep following people that sometimes go on political rants.

You don’t have to “unfriend” anyone. And I’ve never seen any of the “for you’ stuff:

https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/

Aren't you describing reddit?

Or a traditional forum, yes.

TBH I prefer traditional forums over Twitter/reddit. There are a few I go to every now and again, and while there is way less content, I feel people are way less inflammatory over random things and conversation is usually way more civil.

Reddit should have been a technology, like PHPBB or Wordpress, instead of a website. That would have been better.

That technology exists. It's called newsgroups, it's fast, distributed, hard to censor, without a central authority and based on community of interests. It's also pretty much dead except for sharing pirated contents.

Should it have been though? Something to be said for having it all in one place with one account.

Consider Hacker News. It's a forum that's laid out somewhat similarly to reddit. It has pretty good moderation but in a way that is distinct from reddit. I don't think it would be better as a subreddit.

It would be nice if someone with minimal tech skills could just spin something similar up. Related forums could link to each other, like the webrings of the past lol. That would be the ideal structure of interactive communities on the web, at least to me.

lobste.rs has an open source even engine that I have seen a couple of other sites use

I used to think that following people was lame and that communities (like on Reddit) were where it was at. Until Reddit shut down a sub I joined. Because it got mass reported. Yes, it had some toxic people on it, but it also held really deep debates, and it wasn't 5% as horrendously hateful as some of the subs that still exist. It just felt wrong to me, that everyone's conversations were shut off by the electric eye, and all history off those debates was lost. How do you even begin to change your mind, or other people's minds, if you can't even talk? Isn't it the foundation of a working democracy, asking with a functioning press?

Meanwhile, my wife is playing the long game on Twitter. She has a specific way of using it that just works for her. She follows a few hundred people, and she's followed by ~5k people, mostly "nobodies", but a handful are impressive: researchers, journalists, politicians, authors. She has conversations with "household names" daily. She even orchestrated an interview been a well known researcher and an ex NYT journalist on substack. Yet she's an be absolute nobody.