Some people think Mastodon is too weird to become popular:
I joined Twitter in 2008. We had to put a "d" in front of a tweet to convert it to a direct message and every other day you had some embarrassing private moments exposed because someone forgot about the βdβ. Hashtags were just a community hack, introduced by Chris Messina to somehow tag content. Search? Hah, you wish! Tweets via SMS were supposed to be a thing. Oh, and the daily meet and greet with the failwhale. Totally not weird.
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Alexander
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • • •Elsie
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • • •Jason Tucker
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • • •Graves πͺ¦π€π¦πΈ
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • • •Spencer
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • •I remember tweeting via SMS! I was studying abroad in Japan and had a simple flip phone, but I could still tweet on the go by texting!
Another fun part of Twitter weirdness history: it used to be (no longer is) that if your tweet started with an @, it wouldn't be visible to anyone else, which is why you still, to this day, see people who will start a tweet with a period before @-mentioning anyone.
Bastian Allgeier likes this.
Spencer
Unknown parent • •nev
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • • •Baloo Uriza
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • • •β’SΔ±ΙΉ βupΚ α΄ΗΗlΗΚ π¬π§
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • • •JoΓ£o Santos
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • • •Bastian Allgeier
in reply to JoΓ£o Santos • • •Dan Lovejoy
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • • •JoΓ£o Santos
in reply to Dan Lovejoy • • •π΅πΈ Severian π¬ππ‘π
in reply to JoΓ£o Santos • • •R. L. Dane
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • • •Man, I totally forgot how DMs worked back then.
Also, I used the SMS gateway like crazy with my flip phone.
That was super amazing.
Don't forget that retweets were literally copying the tweet, hitting reply, putting "RT " before the @, and pasting the original tweet after the mentioned username.
THEN you had to creatively shorten it, because you just added about a dozen characters to the original.
Also, no threads. Mentions were just mentions.
Bastian Allgeier
in reply to R. L. Dane • • •R. L. Dane
in reply to Bastian Allgeier • • •I'm pretty sure hashtags were invented because there WAS no twitter search.
Oh, also no twitter images or videos! haha!! Twitpic came about and eventually #BirdSite bought them, IIRC.
Also, man, really wide open APIs. I miss those days. I never used them directly, but I benefited from them in many ways.
Peter G4MJS
in reply to R. L. Dane • • •R. L. Dane
in reply to Peter G4MJS • • •YES! And for a totally open platform, that was ok!
Now everything is so locked down, even bibliogram (instagram front-end alternative) had to shut down and quit development. Ugh π
I loathe the modern web.