@thepoliticalcat yup! We're a little worried that mama is gone, but we only saw her sporadically so no conclusions yet. We oddly don't have slugs or snails (🤯) but we live in the forest so there's plenty of other tasty things for them to eat!
I bet it burns Zuck just a little that his half-assed Twitter clone got more users in 1 day than the Metaverse he pivoted the entire company to has got in years and years.
When Facebook started, they bootstrapped networks by downloading & matching contacts from email. Twitter, and everyone else, did the same.
Threads is blowing up because Facebook is using their monopoly on the social graph. Legislation to guarantee easy, fast access to your own contact lists for use in non-billionaire-owned media would help level the playing field, because Zuck & co sure aren't going to give the connections they stole back to us otherwise.
First Generation Social Networks were like the Tower; they were always destined to splinter. Losing touch can feel like a curse or punishment, but strength comes from diversity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
I've been mostly offline lately, hanging out in the garden instead of on the internet. This morning I accidentally looked at the corporate "news" and it confirmed my bias that it's not worth watching.
"Protests erupt as [Trump] to appear in court" / compare with video of same, where fewer people than occupy an average lineup for the DMV are clowning around with Trump capes on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf_bRgDXCtA&t=2000s
I'm sharing a thing that I hope can be the beginning for many conversations, and represents for me a statement that is the result of many years of conversation:
While everyone's being nostalgic about what Twitter means to them, I may as well add my two cents.
I didn't give birth to Twitter – that was Jack and Florian. But I was its midwife and adoptive mother; for two months in early 2007, I was the code's sole guardian and caretaker.
I was also the first person to hate Twitter; back when it was SMS-only, I did the math and realized that my immigrant prepaid phone plan would charge me $2000/year to send and receive even a 2006-era number of tweets. 🧵
But, eventually, I came to love it, and it's lived rent-free in my head ever since. In so many ways, it defines me as much as I want it not to. It's a relationship that's unreciprocated – the job will never love you back. A friend used to say that I didn't owe it anything, but ...
Twitter – the concept, not the collection of servers and contracts and code – is something so much bigger than a job. It's the most visceral representation of human communication and ideas that we've ever created. And how do you let that go? (no seriously, if you've got ideas!)
That's another aspect to this that is so poignant for me, personally. I tried to make Twitter better. I tried to make Twitter the fediverse, back in 2008, and after I failed, I left and tried to make the fediverse a thing without Twitter.
That was not an easy task. For a long time, I truly felt it was my fault, personally, that we failed. The enormity of Twitter became oppressive, because it was so obviously the wrong thing, corrupted from its potential by capital and a lack of imagination.
Seeing Mastodon and the fediverse succeed today is deeply gratifying and hopeful for me. It's imperfect and early, but watching thousands of people birth communities that they can nurture and shape and watch grow and evolve, after so many years hoping and dreaming of this ...
