Many of these microblogging sites seem to be populated by people with extreme views. One of the pleasant things about old Internet forums is that they were like a local bar: there's some kind of community with some local code there. Reddit etc. function like forum aggregators and get halfway there, but the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sense there.
Twitter used to have SimClusters[0] but either they decided against that or the tech as it was no longer functions to prevent context escape.
Personally, I've found that I end up being 'infected' by these angry people and I also post outrageous nonsense in response - so there's some sort of virality to this behaviour. I stopped using Twitter around the time of the Charlie Kirk killing because I figured that everything was going to get twice as inflamed as it already was and it was honestly worse than I actually wanted anyway.
The other day I went to the For You tab and I was struck by how insane it seemed to me. A few days away and suddenly everything looks ridiculous. I have noticed that I do have these interactions on Hacker News as well, so I wrote up a quick server and Chrome extension to filter out people who comment things that infuriate me and HN has gotten so much better (and consequently I am better too).
I do like microblogging. It scratches a different itch. But I haven't figured out whether I should run my own Mastodon server or my own ATProto PDS and, to be honest, when I browse those sites the front page makes me not feel like I want to be part of those communities.
Mastodon has [1][2][3] as the top few posts. Blue Sky is better but among the top five are these [4][5] and I really am not that interested in all this outrage-mongering.
0: https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023...
1: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/115572086526058545
2: https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115572233358693165
3: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/115572239317649349
4: https://bsky.app/profile/wendyjfox.bsky.social/post/3m5tz3fa...