I’m not very active on Mastodon, but saw this post - browsing the bluesky hashtag for a bit afterwards did not really give me much info. I can definitely imagine enshittification happening there, but what is causing the current drama in particular?
I’m not very active on Mastodon, but saw this post - browsing the bluesky hashtag for a bit afterwards did not really give me much info. I can definitely imagine enshittification happening there, but what is causing the current drama in particular?
twitter was founded as an app that allowed you to basically broadcast a text message. back then, sms messaging only allowed for 140 characters max per message. that’s why twitter became so big - it was basically a great way to shout headlines out to everyone who wanted to hear you. this was back in the days where the internet was still becoming a viable commercial thing and people were still mostly using tvs/cds/landlines.
now, texting is pretty much indistinguishable from emailing, and everybody’s phones are fully on the web. the only thing imo that’s still keeping tweets around is that people don’t want to consider options that provide for a reason they might have to read more.
The broadcast part is what matters, not the character limit. A normal SMS message has just one recipient, maybe a few more for a group MMS, but a Tweet goes out to the world wide web. Although Twitter was designed such that it could be used via SMS, that never defined the purpose of the platform, and changes to the SMS protocol do not obsolete Twitter’s use case.
I am still having serious trouble following. Is your problem the fact that there’s a character limit?
twitter is an outdated phone app that was built for SMS back when text messages had a limit. it should have had a predictable lifespan, but now it’s become a fake-ai-assisted culture war battleground that’s run by the world’s biggest idiot and oligarch.
i’m having trouble following what the fuck you’re having “serious” trouble following. and i’m starting to think you aren’t asking this question in good faith.
Twitter definitely was not any attempt to emulate the function of SMS.
I can’t tell if you don’t know what SMS is for, or what Twitter was for.
where am i wrong? twitter - as i understand - started as a phone-based application which had a 140-character limitation. where did that limit come from?
It did not. It took 4 years before they launched an official mobile app. The char limit was solely a marketing ploy.
you’re right, i’m wrong. i addressed it in another comment.
deleted by creator
Think you replied to the wrong level comment :)
You are absolutely right! I will delete and re-reply. Thank you!
Apparently somewhere here people have finally convinced you that you are entirely wrong about the origin of twitter.
But the word you’ve been looking for (which also describes Mastodon, Calkey, etc) is microblog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging
The limit was there because in its early incarnation it allowed post-submission via SMS. SMS already had the 140-character limit for other technical reasons due to the GSM networks.
I thought we were talking about Bluesky here. Sure, Twitter can go die.
goodnight, comrade.
Twitter was not founded as a mobile app. Twitter was (officially) desktop-only for the 1st 4 years of its existence. Calling it a SMS-replacement app is ludicrous, since it mainly existed on PC for the first few years. I personally think the concept is dumb, but it became famous because it forced people to keep their messages short and interesting (aka clickbait?), not because it replaced SMSes.
Early on you could tweet by sending Twitter an SMS. (Not that this contradicts what you’ve said. I still don’t know what they’re getting at)
holy shit, really? that’s even dumber than what my idiot-mind-retcon just did.
Breaking: Early internet was weird and people tried a lot of weird things. More at 11.
i was there for crystallinks and geocities.
you think you know gifs?!? you don’t know gifs! you don’t know nothing!!
With a 140 characters limit, silly and meaningless rants like yours cannot exist. That’s a win!