I always hated Twitter because it's like all social media - and it always worked like crap (poor UX, poor scaling), but all the US techies are there.
It's way less popular outside of the US.
The decentralised stuff didn't really catch on much from my experience, despite politicised people making an effort to recommend them.
The usability is even worse than X
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/26/8-facts-a...
It's starting to reach that critical mass where people become toxic but still much better than reddit.
And since it's all federated, you can interact with mastodon users from the comfort of your lemmy app. It's certainly not a town square that most people use, but a corner of the internet that's less shitty than the rest.
All social media will become tainted once they reach a level of people. Except 4chan this was always tainted :D
You pay 200 dollar for an asthma spray? Oh wait a High Billionaire needs to change the platform so for the first time a shit poster can actually achieve something. Nice!
And now the hole world should care!