I pretend to be my cat, and I only engage with other people who are also pretending to be their cats.

I only used to have it for work. Altmetrics were largely driven by tweets unless any ‘real’ media took an interest. However, I mostly ended up using it to echo anti-Ryanair & anti-Tory views. Made leaving it quite simple. Also, a lot of science moved to Mastodon.

You basically just get to argue with the worst people on the planet. Its terrible for your mental health and i wouldnt recommend it

I got to know things much before they come on main stream. Besides that I directed my complains to the correct person/entity since they have an account.

It was always a terrible place for discussion or debating, but I found it useful (back in the day) as a kind of personalised news feed for topics I’m interested in and following people I’m interested in hearing from.

the only thing twitter is still good for is art and porn, so i use it for art and porn

I mostly used to shitpost my days away, sharing jokes and memes, pausing every now and then to shout at politicians.

It wasn’t terribly healthy.

So now I use Mastodon, where I spend my days shitposting and sharing memes, but I block most journalists and any politicians that have made their way over there. And that’s healthier.

I joined because a company who ran a creative product I used ended up using it as their primary comms channel. So a scene and community formed there, because it was the only way to stay up to date.

I ended up following quite a few people from that community, and I never use the algorithm feed - all I see is posts about games, art, music etc made by the community and it’s where I share or promote my own games and other work.

I never see any other twitter garbage or drama in the course of average use. I have seen the shit thats out there, and as fucking abysmal as it is, it’s no better or worse than default/popular reddit, which I equally avoid.

I followed people who made things that I liked to get the latest news about those things. I participated a lot in group watching of trash TV, that’s what I miss most. Mastodon doesn’t have the numbers yet to do that regularly. Also, customer support for almost any company, where else can you reach someone as easily as on Twitter?

Oh and very local stuff happening right this second. A few years ago, the sirens in my area randomly went off and nobody knew wtf was going on for at least an hour. Turns out they were misfiring and nothing was going on, as we eventually learnt from an official announcement. Twitter was immensely helpful for communication in that situation, not least to see that everybody else was just as confused as I was.