@bastianallgeier I just joined last week and I find it's not any more weird than twitter is now. It takes a little to get used too, but that's just expected for any change.

@bastianallgeier Those were the days! Personally, that was also the time I interacted with and discovered the majority of the new people that weren't just "influencers" or other sources of news that you'd want.

Here's to Mastodon's success! 🚀

@bastianallgeier I remember an older guy I worked with complaining bitterly that # wasn't hashtag! hashtag is silly! what is that!!! its for phones!!!

@bastianallgeier I remember the day hashtags were invented! I was like: THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING. Had no idea how much it would...

@bastianallgeier And not that far away there was this trick with a dot at the beginning of tweets.

@bastianallgeier Thanks for the reminder!

@bastianallgeier supposed to be a thing? I did tweet via text! I'm sure I did some tweets while at Reading festival 😂

@bastianallgeier totally remember those days and had those awkward public aka private message snafus. I had totally forgot about that 🫣

@bastianallgeier I'm old enough to remember when Facebook had the compulsory "is" before each post.

@bastianallgeier I joined in May of 2008 and it was definitely a different place back then! Excited to be here now.

@bastianallgeier It’s seriously baffling how popular Twitter has become considering how clunky it was and how often the entire website went down in the first few years.

@bastianallgeier man, I had totally forgotten this day of Twitter. Back when people were mostly tweeting the most mundane part of their existence.

@bastianallgeier it is funny how quickly we forget those days. Lots of rough edges over here too but it's further along than Twitter was in '06-'08 or so.

@bastianallgeier I used to have Twitter synced with Google Chat on my BlackBerry. Good old times…

@bastianallgeier holy shit... I'd completely forgotten about the "D" tag in Twitter

@bastianallgeier Well, then prepare for their surprised faces when they see what kind of things that are possible with a federated environment on steroids. So many talented people start to notice the #fediverse exist and this will boost adaption and lead to totally new use cases. Let's be weird! 💪

@bastianallgeier And best of all Mastodon doesn't have to "beat" anyone. Doesn't have to profit. It just has to keep going and build enough community to be worthwhile. And feed the maintainers and contributors (hopefully well.)

@bastianallgeier Around that time (judging by the "feature" set), the most popular "hashtag" among Croatian Twitter users was Croatian word for breasts/tits. I kid you not.

Nobody better even try to complain that Mastodon is childish.

@bastianallgeier and the long questions, if something is shown outside the mentions if a . isn’t the first character. Very sophisticated indeed.

@bastianallgeier I do not miss the failwhale 🙈 had forgotten how that happened all the time.
For years I used twitter through text messages and on my laptop as I didn't have internet on my phone 😆
And I'm pretty sure there used to be a Mr and Mrs Twitter that we could vote on weekly 😆🤔

@bastianallgeier Tweets via SMS are literally why I joined Twitter. :D

@bastianallgeier writing RT and then quoting something to Retweet it!

@bastianallgeier OMG the failwhale. I forgot about the failwhale!

@bastianallgeier Yeah, it's amazing how small-time apps can become larger and larger in just days.

@bastianallgeier I don’t understand it at all.

@bastianallgeier it's far too long since there was some nonsense social media like that. Both vintage and refreshing!

@bastianallgeier I remember not having a smart phone and always tweeting via SMS. Having to inform people that the original 140 char limit was because SMS limits are 160 and Twitter via SMS was one of its big features... Ah, those were the days. I remember drunk tweeting from my flip phone in a bar on more than one occasion and being completely embarrassed the next day because T9 had fascinating guesses what drunk!Dax was trying to say. 2008/2009 Twitter was wild.

@bastianallgeier This is a great memory. Been trying to explain to folks over on a subreddit how Mastodon (and all of the Federated Services) is different from birdsite for a couple of days now. People tend to forget (I wasn't on it in 2008) how weird their favorite site was at its' inception.
Not that Mastodon is weird, it's just not what birdsite currently is. And some people don't get it.

@bastianallgeier @annsmiley I used to tweet by SMS!! There was a setting on each user I followed which meant I could get notified by SMS if they tweeted as well. It was so exciting at the time!

@bastianallgeier I joined in 2009 and have a lot of those memories. They did eventually get SMS tweets working and I used that a lot, I lived in a rural area with spotty cell data so sometimes that was my only way to use twitter

@bastianallgeier The challenge for some will simply be choosing an instance/server. It isn't something they're accustomed to, and some servers are much more capable than others (in terms of the ability to handle traffic) at this point. My concern is too many will jump onto a few general servers and swamp them, then get turned off to the experience due to unresponsiveness.

@bastianallgeier

"Mastodon is too weird to become popular:"

Same.

@bastianallgeier remeber how we threaded conversations? #trttpt

@bastianallgeier fair enough but I still think most people just won't bother switching unless the thing becomes too unusable.

@bastianallgeier the good old days of Twitter!

@bastianallgeier it's crazy to think many won't even know what the Fail Whale is.

@bastianallgeier I literally remember doing that back in the day. We were all just evolving together to make it get better in a way.

@bastianallgeier I remember those days very well. Twitter has gone a long way from there to how it is now.

@bastianallgeier this is true. In fact the failwhale continued to appear routinely until about 2017.

@bastianallgeier @ross for that little bit of time we did have the ability to track, which was fun

@bastianallgeier and remember HT@ and putting a period in front of a reply… good times. I’ll miss it, if/when it implodes. Enjoying it here quite a bit (I joined today), but my feed over there took me a decade to perfect and I find it limitlessly engaging…Hope I build up a great one here over time.

@bastianallgeier@mastodon.socialtwitter via sms, omg, that was a well hidden memory

@bastianallgeier Oh God, I remember tweet by SMS…

@bastianallgeier even the @ was initially a community hack. After all, it was not intended to be a platform for conversation but to leave short, public messages.

@bastianallgeier I totally forgotten the d for direct mail. :awesome:

@bastianallgeier my first social network where bbs messages over gopher and maybe some usenet. so...

@bastianallgeier Tweeting via SMS. I remember that. Good old time!

@bastianallgeier thanks for making me feel old 😂​

@bastianallgeier In the early days before ubiquitous highly capable smart phones, the SMS functionality was totally a thing! Quick broadcast of transit delays via a flip phone made twitter amazingly useful.

@bastianallgeier the fail whale used to drive me nuts

@bastianallgeier they also had a native xmpp-bridge. (:

@bastianallgeier I had a skype call with some random guy from singapore because we were discussing science on the global public timeline while everybody else was on some internet stuffs.

@bastianallgeier the federated concept does make it a little bit harder nowadays though.

For example, I could not tell if your toot had more than one reply (I assume so as you mentioned 140 replies in a different one). I can only see one.

I cannot search across instances, at least starting from my small own instance (if someone knows how to add more relays, please let me know). I wonder where the tech people are.

I cannot follow someone from another instance by looking at their profile.

@bastianallgeier oh wow I remember this!

@bastianallgeier ah, I just remembered being at the Cannes film festival in 2009, tweeting via SMS about the great movies there and having to count the characters, since we had 20 characters less.

@bastianallgeier I actually did SMS tweet at times back in 2007, though I could never be bothered to "Twitter OFF".

@bastianallgeier I’m trying this thing out not entirely sure what I’m doing tho 😂😅 kind of feels like my first days of twitter

@bastianallgeier and RT's were user created at first with no official support for them

@bastianallgeier I joined in 2008 too (Fb 2007) and I just go with the flow. I've been in almost every SM platform. It doesn't matter. There would be more platforms where we feel at the right place and those will be gone too.
SM platforms are volatile! That's what I learned since CompuServe Worlds Away 😂😂😂

@bastianallgeier i was early enough to the Twitter party that Stephen Fry followed me. Not going back, it’s a cess pit.

@bastianallgeier Good points! I’d forgotten about the ‘D’ thing.

@bastianallgeier Oh, yeah! I used the SMS to tweet feature a lot, as living in Mexico and having a mobile phone connecting through WAP was an absolute nightmare 😅 I guess there is a bunch of us that have been adopting platforms for more than half of our lives…

@bastianallgeier I joined Twitter in 2010. I also remember the ancient method of Retweets, writing "RT @handle ..." :D

@bastianallgeier I joined in 2009. Took several years before I felt I was part of community. Took less time in the fediverse.

@bastianallgeier I joined twitter in 2009 and it took me years to actually use my account and see sny real purpose in twitter. I jpined mastodon in 2017.....

@bastianallgeier failwhale <3 haven't heard that for a long time haha

@bastianallgeier I remember!

@bastianallgeier There wasn't even pull to refresh until Tweetie, if I remember correctly.

@bastianallgeier fun times! 😁🤪

@bastianallgeier

I just wrote in my bio that I missed the twitter of 2008-10. I even built a little web app called blogatweet because there were no threaded conversations. For any conversation with more than two people a user had to use the search bar! Twitter acquihired a team from Brazil (I think) with a similar (ok far better) app in 2011 and threaded conversations finally shipped in 2013? !

@bastianallgeier Fully remember the missing d shame.

@bastianallgeier @shanselman I totally forgot about the "d." I think I was user number 8,000-something. My brother somewhere in the 3000's I think?

@bastianallgeier Joined the bird site in 2007. It was a total basket case but so much fun!
More innocent too. You'd routinely discover that the person you were chatting to with the famous name was actually them.
Then it all grew too big and angry.

@bastianallgeier I remember the days in twitter when we had to use RT infront of the tweet - had no clue what did -- until I found out it was retweet years later

@bastianallgeier …and I/we loved it!

@bastianallgeier True but tbf the entire rest of the internet was also much less streamlined in general.

@bastianallgeier the best time. Miss it.

@bastianallgeier I remember when the birdplace was so new and exciting and friendly! (I joined in 2009.)

@bastianallgeier Ha! I remember the SMS tweets and the daily fail whale. 😅

@bastianallgeier 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.

@bastianallgeier Must have been very special 😆

@bastianallgeier Yeah. The SMS thing was also why tweets had a max length of 140 chars (160 SMS minus 20 for the handle …).

And you couldn't tweet pictures, until companies like twitpic offered this as add-on.

And link shorteners like tinyurl basically came up because links back then counted for the character limit.

@bastianallgeier those were the days...

@bastianallgeier I actually used that sms->tweet feature. It seemed to be marketed as a post from your phone kinda platform.

@bastianallgeier this is reassuring 💜🐘

@bastianallgeier so true! I've been on there a long time too, the age of manual retweets and the fail whale.. I have a feeling people are going to be seeing that fail whale again here soon...

@bastianallgeier oh yeah, I remember when I could read my whole timeline via sms because I only saw a handful of tweets an hour

@bastianallgeier I reallllllly like it here. The culture is so cool, so enjoyable. So different from bird hellscape...Got big hopes for this place tbh 💗

@bastianallgeier haha yeah, I joined Twitter in early 2008 and remember thinking how wonky it was. "NOBODY IS GONNA WANT TO USE THIS!" 😂 How wrong I was.

@bastianallgeier just out of curiousity, to you have any screenshots or links where one could see how it looked earlier on?

@bastianallgeier I remember in late 2006 early 2007 and it was totally Tweet by SMS as one of the selling features.. I think a lot of the "140 characters" requirement was born because of that!

@bastianallgeier That is really true. I remember them days.

@bastianallgeier I remember being very excited to get an RT button.

@bastianallgeier I don't think mastodon won't be popular. but it'll never be mainstream, because it is not a product. it can be reddit popular. which is cool. still not twitter

@bastianallgeier familiarity bias at its finest