I never understood why people were so into Twitter, from my perspective it's like a new media version of press releases - big name people harp about whatever they harp about and I read about it elsewhere if it's relevant to me.

It is not (just) for narcissism: it can fill a niche similar to RSS. When I was using Twitter, 90% of the posts I read were from companies or projects announcing news and updates. It also had a built in comments, so you have a single, shared discussion/q&a space in the same app.

Obviously, the biggest advantage it has over RSS (and Mastodon, so far) is critical mass. More creators have Twitter accounts than RSS feeds and for those that have both, the Twitter account is always more active.

And for me at least, Twitter is almost exclusively read-only for me. There are some people that tweet stuff that I like to keep up with, but trying to engage there is super toxic. Reddit/lemmy is way better for actually talking about stuff with people. There is toxicity but it's easier to ignore/downvote than Twitter, somehow.

That’s a great way of looking at it! (First post ever)

I use Inoreader to put in the Top Day or Top Week RSS feeds of various subreddits. (Just found out I can do the same here on Lemmy.) It helps keep my usage from getting addictive like I'm trying to squeeze blood from a rock, and it keeps me from seeing the same posts over and over again. I see all the important stuff. Once. I really enjoy it.