When I did use twitter it was for being the fastest way to get news on events developing in real time. George Floyd protests, J6 coup attempt, start of war in Ukraine, etc. And not just national/world news but also local news. I don’t really that type of use fits in to your two buckets and unfortunately I don’t think Mastodon is quite there yet to fulfill this type of thing either, but I definitely think it could with more time and more users. Fuck the influencers and people looking for ‘content’ imo, when people are going to Mastodon with breaking news is when we’ll know twitter is completely dead.
Inefficient how? I don’t use twitter, I never liked twitter being mentioned in the actual news (“a user twitted this, another use twitted that, etc”), but what’s more efficient than opening that stupid app and getting content from people who are in the area where the news is happening?
When you open a newspaper (or their website), articles are sorted and curated. You chose a section ( politics/tech/finance), and then you get fact-checked articles, usually one on each event. No more, no less.
In social media, there is less of that. For some events, like protests or a war, that’s ok. Speed is more important than journalistic work.
But if you have little time, Twitter is the wrong place to inform yourself. But it’s a nice bonus
