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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 “d”. 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.
Alexander Saddler
I remember the Fail Whale! Twitter was super weird at first. Much weirder than this site, lol.
Elsie
totally remember those days and had those awkward public aka private message snafus. I had totally forgot about that 🫣
Jason Tucker
@ross for that little bit of time we did have the ability to track, which was fun
@ross
Graves 🪦🖤🦇🕸
I’m still on the bird app. I have been since sms on my little neon green LG with the slide keyboard. Unless it gets paywalls I’ll always be there. But I’m thoroughly enjoying it here as an additional platform.
Spencer
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.
Spencer
Cool! I've been well-established on my personal Friendica instance for several years now, but it's neat to know that GNU Social has that feature.
nev
I tweeted via SMS for years! On a prepaid phone plan no less, $0.10 a tweet. And I was super broke so there were times I had to beg for people to transfer me some credit so I could keep livetweeting City Hall. On a candybar phone with a horizontal slide-out keyboard.
Baloo Uriza
I quit Twitter around the time you started to be able to post from the web.
™Sıɹ ∀upʎ ᴚǝǝlǝʎ 🇬🇧
yup me too so you would think I would be ok with Mastodon, but I am finding it non-instinctive. Perseverance is key.
João Santos
Toots via SMS would be a killer feature for instances targeting places with bad mobile internet.
Bastian Allgeier
never thought about it that way. You are totally right.
Dan Lovejoy
Unfortunately, SMSes still cost a little bit, even at huge scale, so you’d have to have some sort of revenue model to pay for them.
João Santos
receiving SMS is included on plenty of VOIP/SIP services, so it would "just" be a matter of having a service to bridge SIP to Mastodon. Of course this would one way, but helpful in general if you just want to send live updates from a zone without mobile internet.
🇵🇸 Severian 🔬🔭📡📚
There are bridges which send toots vía email. Combined with DeltaChat they are a good alternative for poorly connected places
R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:
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
Yep, it was pretty rough 😀
R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:
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
You could get an API feed of the whole platform. Everything everyone posted.
R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:
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 🙁

I loathe the modern web.

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