A comment on a Hacker News thread on a Business Insider article titled It’s not just you — no one is posting on social media anymore got me thinking about my experience with switching to Mastodon and why I have found it a refreshing experience.
The true secret of X and its predecessor was to not use the main timeline. It was to put everyone you follow into a List and then only look at that.
Downside? You don’t see what your follows liked. It was that way before the new manglement too.
The other downside: If you’ve not been adding follows to a List on a regular basis as you followed them, making such a List from hundreds of follows is going to be a bit of a chore because the Lists feature has never made it all that easy.
Considerable upside: No ads. Literally none.
Of course, now that I’ve put this out there, the boss man might get wind of it and shut down or enshittify the Lists feature, but it’s had a good run.
Over on Mastodon, I mostly follow hashtags instead.
