>I'd rather not use any of these apps, not twitter, not mastodon, none of it. Social media is for losers. Part of the difficulty is that, if you include readin

>I'd rather not use any of these apps, not twitter, not mastodon, none of it. Social media is for losers. Part of the difficulty is that, if you include reading social media as using it, it can actually be quite difficult to avoid, particularly in the case of Twitter and the public sector in a number of countries. For some reason, many politicians and public services have chosen to use Twitter as their primary, if not only, method for official public announcements, especially ones that are quotidian but relevant, like unexpected service delays and changes. In many cases, not reading Twitter means not getting information that you may need. This is unacceptable, especially when Twitter has required logins to read tweets. It's also something that is entirely the fault of the agencies and politicians who make this choice and the governments that allow it, rather than Twitter or Musk. But it is the current situation. As a practical example: there are a number of train and public transport services that appear, in practice, to announce most unexpected delays primarily on Twitter, no longer even bothering to update their status displays in train stations or their own apps and websites. These are major rail services in developed countries. My reluctance to check Twitter has resulted, in just the last three weeks, in at least two instances where I went to a train station in Dublin, and to a platform listing a train as departing on time, for a train that, had I checked Irish Rail's official Twitter account, I would have known in advance was not going to be departing at all. Had I checked Twitter (or at least a Nitter instance), I could have taken an alternate route to begin with. On Amtrak in California, it appears that official Amtrak Twitter accounts will give information on service delays that is not being provided to station staff. Meanwhile, in the UK, it appears that, in practice, most announcements by politicians are made primarily via Twitter, then elsewhere. This has, in the past, also been the case with many businesses and Facebook, where Facebook may be their only online presence, even for basic contact information and hours, but it matters significantly more for the public sector, where one doesn't necessarily have a choice in what services to use.