@bastianallgeier I was just thinking the other day that I hadn't seen the Failwhale in ages, and that Mastodon needs something similarly whimsical instead of these 500-errors

@bastianallgeier Not to forget the weird times a little bit later when someone invented Retweets RT @ which was weird because you further reduced the remaining chars.

@bastianallgeier T-minus six months until #WhyDidntWeDoThisSooner 😁

@bastianallgeier I joined in 2009. Yes, it was very weird.

@bastianallgeier totally and the retweets with RT !

@bastianallgeier Good times...

@bastianallgeier I tend to think of twitter as this one weird mastodon instance, that for no good reason has blocked all the other instances and has one of the shittiest moderation teams. Also there's ads and this one emoji that you can add to your name for $8/month for some reason.

Weird is a matter of perspective.

@bastianallgeier 50500? Or 40400 ? I can’t remember anymore.

@bastianallgeier also we would retweet by writing "RT [append tweet here']"

@bastianallgeier And #FollowFriday and #ThrowbackThursday :-) Here at mastodon it smells a lot like those days (joined in 2008 as well). We were shaping the service. And then, the algorithm took place. Maybe we can help shape Mastodon, and expect no algorithm, this time :-) The return of the utopia? :-)

@bastianallgeier People forget this! And that "retweets" were just people putting "RT" in front of someone else's tweet!

A lot of the things about Twitter even today are objectively weird and only seem normal because Twitter gained mass social acceptance over the course of like 15 years. No shit Masto seems odd and inscrutable if you've only known about it for five minutes.

(I actually used the SMS function, incidentally)

@bastianallgeier I don't find popularity necessarily a good thing ...

@bastianallgeier Toots via SMS would be a killer feature for instances targeting places with bad mobile internet.

@bastianallgeier I remember starting my tweet with a dot ".@user". I just can't really remember exactly why this weird thing was important.

@bastianallgeier I joined Twitter in 2008, also. I forgot about he "Failwhale" showing up all the time.

@bastianallgeier I wouldn’t think weirdness would be the issue, but complexity and confusion will be. I’m not saying Mastodon isn’t successful. You could certainly argue it is, and the architecture is a huge part of that right now. (I’m a big proponent of the open internet.) But it is complex, and that complexity is off-putting to a majority of mainstream would-be users.

@bastianallgeier Same for me, March 2008.

@bastianallgeier Tweets via SMS WERE the thing!
My God. I forgot about that :D

@bastianallgeier Had to Google "failwhale". For the lazy: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1987/fail-whale

@bastianallgeier : I need to RT this on Twitter ! :P

@bastianallgeier and for years new people would sign on and have no idea what to do, what the point was, or how to find people. IMO it was way more confusing to people than the server thing is now. At least now people get what microblogging is and how it basically works.

@bastianallgeier you had to use URL shorteners, and external sites to post images.

@bastianallgeier I joined Twitter in 2006. There was even a global timeline!

@bastianallgeier I absolutely forgot about the d to dm someone…

@bastianallgeier Oh yeah... The failwhale... I almost forgot about that!

@bastianallgeier tweets via text were a thing. We used to use it on camping holidays. Meant you could save money, send one text and all your friends for it. Because you got charged by the text back then.

@bastianallgeier It really was so simple at the start that it felt like a glorified email exchange.

@bastianallgeier just text 40404 to tweet!

@bastianallgeier FAILWHALE! I could see it now. Wow. And then I remember going to a horizontal scrolling network called Plurk (which still exists somehow!) Lots of progress has been made since then, and i'm super excited to be back in the beginning stages of something with good people.

@bastianallgeier Manual "RT"s! Images needed to be hosted externally! Fun times 😁

@bastianallgeier although I've never been a heavy Twitter user I remember those days, but the main difference is that back in the day we weren't spoiled by 10+ years of social media algorithms and carefully designed UIs. A lot of people learned to use the internet inside those ecosystems and breaking free won't be easy (or even desirable) for many of them..

@bastianallgeier been on Twitter since 2009. Mastodon isn't bad at all.

@bastianallgeier so true.

@bastianallgeier @pfhllnts remember twitpic?

@bastianallgeier Tweets via SMS were absolutely a thing, and that's how I used it on the go! I won't forget the SMS number, 40404. This was before I had any "smart" mobile devices.

@bastianallgeier good ol' days of Twitter. When cell data plans severely limited who could participate. When Twitter SMS rolled out and the ability to quote SMS tweets. I thought that was the best access of it's time. 2k + per day for me. LoL texting plan was better. Then it changed to app notifications, bloated app ware. smh Good thing internet hit some parts of this Rez. Or I wouldn't be here.

@bastianallgeier thanks for that bit of history! I waa remembering the advent of hashtags last night but didn’t know who to credit.

@bastianallgeier those were the days. I kinda miss them. I did tweet via SMS on Vodafone in the UK too.

@bastianallgeier I still have 40404 in my phone!

@bastianallgeier yep it was a complete mess and I didn’t bother with it much until years later

@bastianallgeier I remember people impersonating others by tweeting over SMS. I can't recall the details, but I think some journalists or public figures did it on purpose to show the dangers of it.

@bastianallgeier lol yep I joined in 2007 - tweets by SMS were the ONLY way. and people were walking around with failwhale tattoos 🤦‍♀️

didn't we add a period to the front of tweets so it wouldn't cross-post to fb? or something?

@bastianallgeier Hah right? And the space before an @ so it was still on your timeline?

@bastianallgeier I remember this!

@bastianallgeier The failwhale....good times, good times.

@bastianallgeier Those were the good ol' days 😀

@bastianallgeier I made a contact called Birdman who had the 40404 sms number, so I could ask Siri to tweet for me

@bastianallgeier I remember the Fail Whale! Twitter was super weird at first. Much weirder than this site, lol.

@bastianallgeier though that also plots a grim trajectory for Mastodon.

@bastianallgeier I'm not even sure what's weird about it aside from the federated servers and the fact that toxic crap doesn't go viral.

Both are major selling points IMO.

@bastianallgeier I remember it blowing my mind that, back then, there were so few people on Twitter that you could even see the public feed. Was cross when they took that away.

@bastianallgeier lol with the 140 character count you’d have people doing all sorts of abbreviations and it looked like code...there was even a fad of users posting like the Hulk because cutting out articles and participles etc. you could reduce your character count! HULK SMASH PUNY TWITTER

@bastianallgeier I remember SMS to Twitter being the only way to send updates reliably while holidaying in China 😅

@bastianallgeier Agreed, I remember texting tweets as I had a small data plan. Also RT for retweets.

@bastianallgeier Ha ha I'd forgotten about trying to tweet via SMS...it was like trying to roll a six on a five sided dice.

@bastianallgeier the fail whale! Omg I almost had forgotten

@bastianallgeier Even @ mentions started as a community hack that got turned into a feature. And yeah, tweets via SMS were great as mobile internet plans were still not great back then. It was still available for a while for the whole world before they turned it off due to cost.

@bastianallgeier oh geez.. I forgot all about the "d" prefix for DMs - and I was writing a client back then! Good times.

@bastianallgeier I definitely agree that a lot of popular conventions now were weird back then. But there are a few things with Mastodon that need to be streamlined - most especially following/liking across servers. But this seems like a pretty cool place that I'm going to have fun playing with!

@bastianallgeier ☝🏼💯🔥 right?!?

@bastianallgeier 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.

@bastianallgeier Not even every carrier supported SMS to tweet. I was ridiculously happy when Cricket Wireless started supporting it because this was before smart phones were commonplace.

@bastianallgeier Yeah but it's not 2008 anymore, is the main thing.

@bastianallgeier When I joined you could search but it could only find tweets of the last two weeks or so. In order to see older tweets you needed to have it's link. That's why "Favstar" became popular, they had links to good tweets. 😅

@bastianallgeier I do miss those days when all we seemed to talk about was donuts, coffee and the sandwich we had/were going to have for lunch :blobcoffee:

@bastianallgeier I remember that times. And now, Mastodon and other social networks in the Fediverse, have functions that Musk would charge $50/month for

@bastianallgeier Yep. I remember all of that. Those were fun times.

@abbyladybug joined Twitter on Thursday October 05, 2006

User id: 7,551

There's a nostalgic part of me that hates to leave, so I'll probably keep my account open, but I'm moving here as my primary online spot. It's just time.

@bastianallgeier I remember all of those little moments. I joined Twitter in 2007, driven by my blogger friends. I was into blogs.
And I bet Jaiku and Pownce were better than Twitter.

@bastianallgeier I remember it well!

@bastianallgeier Zum Thema Usability @witek

@bastianallgeier oh the fail whale and Twitter jail if you were too active..... Those days!!!

@bastianallgeier I used to tweet via SMS! Did it from an old Nokia phone when I refused to upgrade to one of these new fangled smart phones 😂

@bastianallgeier To say nothing of the scintillating conversations and insightful political analysis. I'm thinking of donating my precious archives of those days to the Library of Congress.

@bastianallgeier yeah, when I first signed up for Twitter, I used it from my flip phone.

@bastianallgeier and RTs were just copies of a tweet with RT and the @ of the original

@bastianallgeier

I remember typing "RT" and a handle to retweet before Twitter added the button.

Yep. Plus people keep going on about how cringy "tooting" is. I'm old enough to remember when "tweeting" was just as cringe.

@bastianallgeier I joined Twitter in 2006 in order to set up a group SMS. That is about all it really did. No real community, no reply feature, no hashtags. Here's an email I got in October 2006 introducing...permalinks!!

@bastianallgeier Goodness, the memories. The failwhale.

I also remember twitter jail for tweeting too much at once (always good at election times).

@bastianallgeier Rename the network to Masto?

@bastianallgeier I created an account ~2y earlier. I don't think the SMS option was available outside of the US, at least at a sane cost, so I used services that allowed me to upload photos via email. No smartphone at the time, I had to do with what I had, and email was awesome for that!

@bastianallgeier it took years after that for Twitter to mature and take off from 2008.

@bastianallgeier

It's easy to forget, or be unaware of, #twitter's humble beginnings. Thanks for the reminder.

@bastianallgeier Yeah I joined Twitter in 2009 and totally did that quite a few times. Mastodon also doesn't feel like you are just shouting into the void either which is a nice change.

@bastianallgeier This is my major point. Everyone forgets how bad TW was (and is still) just because it 'works'. Mastodon takes a little 'work' to figure out, just like TW did when they were 'new' to it. It will get better just because of all the new / returning users.

@bastianallgeier I forgot about tweets via SMS! I even used it a few times. 😂

@bastianallgeier haha, I'd forgotten about the d for DMs! lol

@bastianallgeier I said this to someone yesterday but Mastodon's size isn't really as important as people assume. We're not competing with Twitter, we're not aiming for world domination, we're not a business, our advertisers arent demanding engagement, controversy doesn't create wealth. We're just somewhere social where like-minded, welcoming people can chat. The more the merrier.

@bastianallgeier That's absolutely true and I remember people asking me how twitter worked exactly the same as now. I do think some user search across instances to find people would really help usability and immediate ability to get to grips with it. That's the bit I find most frustrating. The rest (excluding the lack of a proper DM thing, just like the d in twitter of old issue) is fine.

@bastianallgeier Can you please stop being rational? Thanks.

@bastianallgeier
Fail whale. those were the days!! Thanks for the memory.😎

@bastianallgeier How many people even remember Twitter's shortcode? I do! 40404

@bastianallgeier I used to tweet via SMS exclusively because I had an old phone & it was the only reliable connection I had. (I used Twitter for about 15 years)

@bastianallgeier I forgot about that! Seems like eons ago.

@bastianallgeier well it was 15y ago, people expectations of tech products aren’t the same (and that’s not the same people). This comparaison doesn’t make sense to me

@bastianallgeier this is so true. Despite being early adopters of the internet, Twitter seemed overly complex at first, compared to other platforms at least. The one thing making Mastodon seem complicated is the choice of server at signup. Your average disgruntled Twitter user doesn't understand what 'decentralised' means.

@bastianallgeier I remember the failwhale so well! Twitter was slightly better when I joined in 2009 but still a pretty odd bird. For me it lost social traction when G+ came along and scooped the artists only to fold and have people migrate to Facebook and Instagram. My tweet space was never quite the same and definitely not social anymore. Mastodon feels right, open and engaging. I like that!