I think Substack fills that gap for me. If you haven't already explored it then by the sounds of it I think you'd like it.
It functions more as a platform for blogs, but if you use the app there are blog-specific group chats, you can follow people, and the home page contains 'notes' that are pretty tweet-like in format. Once you have a collection of say 15-20 blogs that your subscribed to I found that the notes I got recommended were quite good and could spark some interesting conversations.
A few tech related ones I like are The Pragmatic Engineer, ByteByteGo, Bad Software Advice, and Exponential View.
It’s funny, because I took the suggestion and went thru the substack sign up process (which wanted email, phone number, contacts, and interests.. not exactly lightweight).
The first thing they show you is a feed, a never ending scroller.
I don’t get an intro to any channel - it seems like Twitter for writers. Half the stuff I subscribed to (you can’t peek in the onboarding) was absolutely written by ChatGPT, emoji headers and all.
I’m sure there’s interesting stuff happening on there, but it’s a scroller just like Reddit, and it’s pretty disappointing how much apps like these don’t respect a single user need - only the needs of the platform to engage engage engage.
Also holy shit, there’s no option to not send emails - only “prefer push”. You can’t turn it off. There’s zero respect for users, their inboxes, or their attention here whatsoever.
It functions more as a platform for blogs, but if you use the app there are blog-specific group chats, you can follow people, and the home page contains 'notes' that are pretty tweet-like in format. Once you have a collection of say 15-20 blogs that your subscribed to I found that the notes I got recommended were quite good and could spark some interesting conversations.
A few tech related ones I like are The Pragmatic Engineer, ByteByteGo, Bad Software Advice, and Exponential View.