Technology

Getting attention in *communities* as a single entity or (self)claimed *authority* is probably more difficult than in *users*-based streams.

Agreed. It feels like a bunch of people broadcasting to the void with megaphones. Threaded forums are 100x better

I don't have a Twitter account but I use rss through nitter. It's useful depending on the account like if you just want to be updated on the progress of some video game mod for instance, which can take years to complete. So it's useful for project updates over manually going to like nexusmods or moddb.

As for why people use Twitter. That's a easy one. It's a good platform for self promotion and advertising. It's less a platform for discussions, and more useful tool for getting exposure. It's why Mastodon is not appealing as Twitter to individuals who use it, since it's not for ideological reasons that they use something like Twitter but how many eyeballs they can get to view their content.

Because some people are good at what they do. In online communities you often have people talking out of their ass. It's interesting hearing what experts in certain topics have to say. Also not to mention following friends and family. Not sure what's hard to understand there.

I never understood it either.

But now I'm on kbin and can interact with mastodon I follow a few of them that I see in my magazine. There seem to be a lot of scientists posting stuff like sea ice updates.