There's still some passable anonymous access still but not great. For many many years Twitter themselves had RSS feeds publicly available... that was the way I

There's still some passable anonymous access still but not great. For many many years Twitter themselves had RSS feeds publicly available... that was the way I followed Twitter folks for a long time. It's hard to appreciate how much worse Twitter has gotten, and how much sense it made to be there when it was such a vibrant open platform. I also think another commenter is spot on, that this is/was one of the best most effective ways to get information out fast. If one of your friends notices the alert they'll probably message you even if they're in some other area to let you know. The ability of any random thing to quickly get visible & boosted is unparalleled, especially for a general purpose communication network. Cynicism is fine but it has to be willing to meet with truth to & this all used to make so so much sense, was so good. And again as another great commenter said, there were & ought to be many different ways this stuff was sent out; it's never just been Twitter.