The primary difference of course being that not a single worthwhile thing has ever been posted on TikTok, while X is a "public space" used by politicians, governments, public figures, news agencies, et al.

I'd like to see the fire department's tweet without having to sign up for X on the spot right now and do a 20 round captcha, followed by a prompt to install the app to verify my age, because suspicious activity was detected.

Of course - ideally - nobody would use this platform for anything important, but given that they do, I'd like open access to it.

> Twitter is a public space used by politicians, governments, public figures, news agencies, et al.

I'm quite happy that something like LinkedIn is separate from general purpose social media (imagine the self-aggrandizing spam otherwise, or having to sift past someone's holiday photos when wanting to see what's new in the corpo world).

What's missing is something the same for any and all official messaging - imagine something like Twitter, but for governments, various institutions, politicians, public figues and all that, a degree more separated from the regular and more individual content you often see on the "unprofessional" social media, almost like a news feed.

Tbh that could be a Mastodon instance, it boggles the mind that fire departments and police precincts and all of those institutions are on such a user-hostile platform run by someone whose motivations are at best unclear.

It's sad that such a distinction never developed, especially cause a lot of the orgs just want broad reach (especially when you're a politician or something), so network effects are once more kicking everyone's butt and we're held hostage and no competitors can gain enough steam. So if you want to see those posts, guess you'll have to make that account and get datamined or whatever.

> What's missing is something the same for any and all official messaging - imagine something like Twitter, but for governments, various institutions, politicians, public figues and all that, a degree more separated from the regular and more individual content you often see on the "unprofessional" social media, almost like a news feed.

It exists and is called "a website". You can even host a Twitter-like microblogging platforms that allows others to follow your crap like https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/

Yeah, Mastodon instances like I mentioned! It's just sad that it didn't catch on.

> If you don't like the content on X enough to make an account

The content itself isn't the problem, it's the website.

Other people keep linking me to X posts they want to share.

The website is so bad that it (was) faster to manually change the URL even on my phone than to let the browser try to load the original.

Now I ask people to share screenshots of the posts instead of sending links.

Indeed. I have the same... tons of links to tiktok or instagram... which I happily ignore. The fact that governments or other groups are not able to properly disclose important information through actually public channels is the problem.

I often run into businesses or events that only publish information on facebook. There was also a time (not sure how prevalent this still is) that people organized parties solely through facebook. I wish them well.

Although overall I agree that we basically dug a very deep and nasty hole for ourselves. xcancel or nitter not working anymore is quite irrelevant imho.

It's more that tons of local services (like firefighting updates) directly post their latest updates there

Time to pressure the local place to do the right thing.