I've found no substitute for getting breaking news on a specific topic (e.g. natural disasters, war, politics, sport). Google News is second best, but the sites it indexes are at the absolute least 20 minutes behind twitter.
Zite was my favourite app from many, many years ago. But it was good at collating daily reading, not for up to the minute/second curation.
For certain topics that are time sensitive, I haven't found anything that comes close to twitter.
Genuine question: who cares?
There is almost no news where the difference between getting it now, twenty minutes from now, or tonight makes a meaningful differ to your life. Much of the information in the first twenty minutes of an event will be confusing, misleading, and/or wrong.
E.g., when I saw police helicopter that seemed to be doing a low altitude search pattern about 300 m away, and a TV news helicopter hovering higher up in the same area, I wanted to know if this was something I needed to be concerned about.
A quick search on Twitter and I found a recent tweet about gunfire in a store in that area and a shooter on the loose.
True for the most part. But occasionally there's good reason to want to know some information sooner rather than later: outbreaks of war, dangerous/breaking events in your localised area, dangerous weather alerts etc.
So to avoid twitter, you can subscribe to the primary source.
At least it used to be this way. But then a few official places that annouce things have turned to use twitter as their primary source.
I don't really get into the news enough to want a real time feed. Even if I did, I think I'd look for something more reliable than a collection of posts from Twitter users. It probably even goes deeper than not getting into news for me though, because heck, I don't even watch much TV really.
But I am into sports. And I think the best real time sports feeds out there are the reddit game threads. Now maybe the threads on X are better for some people? I don't know? But reddit game threads are far superior for my purposes. ie - Finding out if everyone else is thinking "What The Actual F--- was that?" Whenever Drew Allar threw the ball in a bowl game for instance.
Similar to you not having found a substitute for news over Twitter, I haven't found a substitute for reddit game threads where these kinds of sanity checks are concerned.
The tech is there now for the government and other entities to distribute with open protocols or things like rss, but Twitter never was that
Yes and no. The thing that makes a social media useful (not necessarily good) is the same thing that makes it hard to leave: userbase. Centralization.
I think it would be weird if people __weren't__ upset. You act as if it is easy to make a collective decision to move platforms. I can't get a collective decision in my friend group for where we should go get food and drinks, and that requires far lower consensus and the stakes/effort needed are much lower. People also frequently complain about places they visit in real life, including restaurants they frequent.
> It’s yet another corporate-owned
Btw, being privately owned doesn't mean it isn't a public space.[0] This should be a bit unsurprising when we look around places and how people organize. People go where other people are, full stop. Doesn't matter if it is public or private property (clear example being malls or cafes). Doesn't matter of online or offline. The major difference is we don't treat online spaces as abstracted versions of offline spaces despite them often being built to serve as that exact thing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privately_owned_public_space
The way twitter was used by local governments during emergencies absolutely made it equivalent to one.
Fortunately at least my area has moved away from twitter and towards SMS based notifications for that purpose.
those governments should be held responsible rather than giving Twitter a free ticket to calling itself a utility.
I'd personally love to see the government build a lot of frameworks that can be considered "public goods" and be less reliant on private entities who must generate a profit. I happily pay taxes to serve many networks which operate as natural monopolies, such as roads. I'd also be happy to have that extended to such things as telecommunications. I'd happily pay more taxes if it got rid of my phone bill or internet bill. Though I'd say that personally this is conditioned on them being E2EE and privacy focused, since I consider that information having a higher potential for abuse in a single governmental entity than distributed among corporate powers (even if they still want to abuse it, they can do less and there are competitors).
