>What is the main use case for X these days?

I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.)

I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because...

It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site).

And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site". There's a certain genre of satirical accounts that is very entertaining as well. Definitely a guilty pleasure component to it all!

>Is it still as popular as it used to be?

A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.

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kemayo 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order.

Oh weird, I'd rate X as medium-hard for that amongst the microposting sites I look at. Mastodon and Bluesky both default to almost-that, varying mostly in whether you need to jump through hoops to not see reposts.

X was always the one that (a) doesn't default to it, and (b) would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back to the algorithmic feed.

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Brendinooo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

>amongst the microposting sites I look at

"major" was doing a bit of work for me. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit were more in mind when I said that.

>would keep "forgetting" and pushing you back

This hasn't happened to me in awhile. Dunno if it was a transient thing, an app thing, or something that has been reversed.

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kemayo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Facebook, Instagram, Reddit were more in mind when I said that.

This might be me showing I have strange views, but I don't even think of those as being in the same category of service, so I didn't think of them as a point of comparison.

	▲	Brendinooo 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		People use these things differently, for sure! I compare to those because these are social networks - the network is the biggest thing that matters. I LOVE what Bluesky is doing with atproto and was there pretty early as a result, but I didn't stick around because the kinds of people and topics I am most interested in are not represented on the site. The network just isn't there! FB has a network I want as well, they just make it way too hard for me to see content from my actual friends.

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alex1138 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem is that network effects are everything

You are using a relic of what-used-to-be-Twitter. That's what people signed up for. I happen to think what Musk has done - although I'm highly skeptical of him - is not totally insane - Twitter did used to have some pretty notable censorship. But you follow people because that's where the people are. Competition does not spring up overnight, companies know this, and so they're left to gradually (or quickly!) enshittify

"easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order"

Yes, well. That should be the standard. Companies that don't follow that standard should be turned into pariahs

	▲	cindyllm an hour ago \| parent [-]
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