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".