On desktop web it's mostly fine, as long as you stick to the "Following" view rather than "For you".

Who are you following that's so important?

A small assortment of people that I found interesting/insightful/amusing at some point, plus a few local orgs occasionally announcing things. Why does anything need to be "so important"?

Without wishing to sound trite, what interesting/insightful/amusing people are still on that platform?

Ditto local organisations announcing things: are there any respectable originations (such as local government and sports groups) that still wish to be associated with the cesspool Xitter has become?

Aside from the stupid rename, I haven't noticed it become any more of a cesspool than it was before the takeover, and in some ways it's arguably healthier (less echo-chamber-ey, and community notes can be useful). Again, this is purely talking about desktop web and avoiding the algorithmic feed.

I think you're taking a very particular partisan US view and projecting it onto the rest of the world.

The problem now is everything you see if paid for ad. Even the people you follow if they have paid (blue checkmark) to have their posts raise higher in the feed (which is the same as an ad). It is all ads.

I feel like suing every blue checkmark person for deceptive advertising.

As I said, I don't use the algorithmic feed at all, so I don't see how "paid (blue checkmark) to have their posts raise higher" applies.

> I think you're taking a very particular partisan US view

Spare us the US defaultism.

I'm not American.

I know a guy (not quite close enough to call him a friend, but I know him from non-tech activities) who's member of the w3c, tech researcher, great and interesting speaker, and has tons of interesting insights to share. He talks a lot about open standards and what's wrong with all sorts of tech hypes, and yet the only way to follow him is on Facebook and LinkedIn. Why aren't you on the Fediverse!? Can't I just RSS your blog? Aren't you undermining your message by the way you share it?

> are there any respectable originations that still wish to be associated with the cesspool Xitter has become?

Yes, that was the biggest topic under discussion in the threads about the Nitter C&D. And most of sports is apparently still on there, to the point I hear people talking about how they only use it for sports news.

Honestly, the belief that Twitter has suddenly become a cesspool and everyone left is a (vocal) minority view, and it's only the liberal tech/terminally online left echo chamber chamber that thinks that.

People saying that "The MechaHitler App" is a cesspool are the out of touch ones?

The vast majority of users rely on the algorithm that suppressed posts that Musk doesn't like and promotes insane white supremacist propaganda.

You say that you can avoid that, and I agree. You can use other apps. There are other ways to get the information you're interested in, there are other ways to disseminate information. You don't need to participate in that insanity while pretending not to.

> People saying that "The MechaHitler App" is a cesspool are the out of touch ones?

No, I chose my words carefully. Thinking it suddenly became a cesspool makes you out of touch. Twitter, like all big social media, was a cesspool before Musk bought it, and that hasn't meaningfully changed since. And also like all big social media, it's basically fine and not a cesspool if you put a little effort into curating it. Twitter is actually better than some of the others, even, in my experience (though maybe I've just been more diligent in my curation of it).

There was a minor inflection point where a lot of very politically vocal people left, but for the majority, especially institutions, not much changed.

(And yeah, I'm not denying that Elon puts his hand on the scales of the algorithm. Some of what it pushes is disgusting and obnoxious. But I see disgusting/obnoxious stuff on other platforms too -- and that includes bluesky/mastodon)

because, basically, why paint Elmo's fence?

The people they want to follow. What's your point?

So... Who?

There's plenty of funny people on Twitter, folks like Mr. Chau, Brooks Otterlake, Will Sennet to name a few. For news, Joe Weisenthal and David Weigel are two guys that are pretty hip to current goings-on in economics and politics respectively.

If they were mirrored to another platform, would you follow them there, or do you only follow them to populate specifically your X feed?

For whatever reason, I can't reply to your comment further down. I'd be perfectly happy to follow them on another platform if their tweets were piped elsewhere.

> For whatever reason, I can't reply to your comment further down.

In case you happen to read this, that is (presumably) due to an anti-flamewar feature on HN, which hides the reply button for the first few minutes of posts in deep comment threads. You can either wait to comment, or comment by clicking the "X minutes ago" text next to the commenter's username.

Lots of local LLM people with cool setups and ideas, conspiracy stuff, politics beyond Politico/Atlantic/etc. So mostly stuff that gets one banned on Bluesky and Mastodon that's not on nostr.

Local LLM people aren't getting banned on those platforms unless they're being hostile to other users. Even then, it's unlikely.

Sorry to go off-topic, but you started it... Disagreeing with Musk politically is OK, but it might be advisable to not let your hatred warp the reality...Easily searchable _facts_:

X remains a large, influential real-time news and conversation platform (~half a billion combined MAUs)

- About 550 million monthly active users across X + Grok combined as of March 2026

- Up from about 520 million in December 2025

- ~ 350 million daily posts; 1.3 billion accounts active in the prior 12 months

They claim to have that number of MAUs.

He was complaining a lot about bots when he tried to back out of the sale. He's now built a bot into it. I find myself unable to trust his statistics, not only because of his history, but also due to what I hear from people who run advertising campaigns.

Are there any 3rd party estimates of twitter's user base/MAUs?

> X remains a large, influential real-time news and conversation platform (~half a billion combined MAUs)

Not news from anyone I want to hear about, not people I want to have a conversation with.

Considering the number of users, even official government departments, it still has, you would have to be very myopic and have very few interests for this to be true. The fact you're posting on Hacker News at all invalidates it; a huge portion of the type of people who hit the front page here are on Twitter.

> a huge portion of the type of people who hit the front page here are on Twitter.

Yes, but I can ignore them.

I ignore Nazis because people get really upset these days if you punch them.

The overwhelming majority of folks on twitter (>99.9999999%) are non-nazis. Oh, I don't use Twitter myself but that's because its also overwhelmingly social media spam on steroids.

If someone sits down for dinner with ten Nazis there are 11 nazis at the table.

I'm pretty sure there are some here on this forum as well. Fell free to log out and never come back.

Yes, I don't follow anyone on Twitter directly but often the primary/authorative source for something that gets posted elsewhere is still an post on X.com.