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Bastian Allgeier

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.

462 comments
dan2bit

@bastianallgeier all this! and the #failwhale will resurface shortly, according to the departed site reliability engineers...

Juan Luis

@bastianallgeier Re: search, "still not available" and "deliberately not available" are radically different positions.

Christopher Snowhill

@bastianallgeier Can't wait for the return of failwhale when the impending implosion occurs.

L'égrégore André ꕭꕬ

@bastianallgeier A friend of mine had a _very_ spicy DM convo and accidentally was so focused on getting the D that she lost the d.
Shocked hilarity ensued.

the last heron

@bastianallgeier Public embarrassment for want of the d. How appropriate

Raqim

@bastianallgeier
But the other social media platforms were not far ahead from twitter those days. You can't say the same for Mastodon.

Daniel Münch

@bastianallgeier oh yes, now I remember, we basically all signed up for Twitter because it allowed us to send free group SMS 😄

Joseph P.

@bastianallgeier brings back memories of using SMS to twitter & later SMS to mapping...

Struggling Programmer

@bastianallgeier Mastodon can be a Twitter killer if we, the users want it to be.

Jojanneke van den Bosch

@bastianallgeier Indeed! And we, the users, invented retweets and hashtags, and Twitter decided to formalise them into working tech features. This is how early stage tech works.

JoYo

@bastianallgeier the fediverse has been around for about as long as Twitter, longer if you count RSS.

DELETED

@bastianallgeier I have very fond memories of the fail whale

Darcy

@bastianallgeier even better when your Twitter was linked to Facebook so those public DMs went *everywhere*…😖

David Chartier

@bastianallgeier This! I've had similar discussions, and it's like... do you REMEMBER Twitter in the early days at all?

NO ONE knew what a "tweet" or a "retweet" or a "hashtag" or an "@ mention" or a "DM" or a "favorite" or a "thread" were. I get so frustrated when the argument boils down to "but learning new things is haaaarrrddd'uh!"

We all spent a tiny bit of time learning something new for Twitter! Learning stuff ain't gonna kill ya! So frustrating.

Koen

@bastianallgeier oh, the “d” for direct messages, right! I totally forgot about that. Thanks for bringing back good memories. ☺️

Daniel Duke

@bastianallgeier This! When I joined Twitter it was basically just a service that let you mass text your friends that you were somewhere and they should come hang out. It's come a long way!

Lars Karlslund :verified:

@bastianallgeier development speed of an open platform will increase it's pace along with number of talented users actually using it. It's all good!

JustAeon

@bastianallgeier
Journey of a thousand miles yadda yadda

Theo

@bastianallgeier I tweeted via SMS all the time! I miss those days.

assbach

@bastianallgeier actual pic from a test i made in april 2008 😁 #twitter /ps: thought i'd find some old screenshots of twttr, which was the original name, but unfortunately I didn't

Screen of my old Nokia in april 2008. I sent myself a direct message via short SMS.
Maurice

@assbach @bastianallgeier you can find some snapshots on web.archive.org
Did we really still use twitter via SMS in 2008? I joined 2007 but I cannot remember how I used it back then 🤯

assbach

@mauricerenck @bastianallgeier yes sure, but i wanted to find some I made myself ;)

assbach

@mauricerenck oh, I'm not quite sure about the year... I joined in March 2007, probably the exif data of that picture is wrong.

Maurice

@assbach might be right, I really can't remember 😅

Nicola Fankhauser

@bastianallgeier I joined in December 2008. Didn’t know much… What a ride it’s been!

Sebastian Herold

@bastianallgeier I've been on Twitter since 2008, and I totally forgot about the fail whale. Compared to what we have here, it was beyond weird. Thanks for the friendly reminder. 💜

Dr.Pollie

@bastianallgeier yes. I was there at beginning and started with sms. IPhone new and Nokia still had foothold in smartphone arena.

Steven Cahn

@bastianallgeier I remember telling people in 2007 (I joined in May of that year) that Twitter would be a good way to organize campaign workers in real time. Basically what would become flashmobs. But I didn't think some guy would one day have 110 million followers.

Garry on screaming

@bastianallgeier I can remember early twitter days. It's strange to be back on a fledgling social media again.

Rachel F. Elson

@bastianallgeier Been thinking a lot about the fail whale lately. How we just expected it and planned around it...

Karen E. Lund 💙💛

@bastianallgeier It was still very like that when I joined in 2010. DMs and hashtags were becoming standard, but I met the #FailWhale often. And when conversations got very active some of my friends would hit a limit on the number of tweets they could send.

Also, quote tweets weren't a thing yet. We had a work-around, though--which works here, although I rarely use it because the lack of quote-toots is a conscious decision.

MaryLUE42

@bastianallgeier The failwhale! I forgot all about it. :mastolol2:

Troy 🐀

@bastianallgeier I joined in 2007 and remember all of this too. All of the drama every time something changed. Wild times they were.

Bethan

@bastianallgeier I’m pretty sure I text -> tweeted a few times 🙂

Skyler Reed

@bastianallgeier no one remembers what twitters original version purpose was or who they were competing with at the time (I'll give you a hint, it rhymes with Soar Fairs)

If someone reading this can tell me, precisely, what v1 Twitter was supposed to accomplish I'll send you an ice tea or soft drink of choice 🥤

グレェ「grey」

@bastianallgeier I tried, unsuccessfully, to explain to netik about how perhaps twitter could use bitlbee to bring back the twitter to AIM/OSCAR gateway (remember that functionality? No? It died very early and never returned).

I think it went totally over his head. ;-/

André van Schoubroeck

@bastianallgeier The early days of twitter, had a twitter bot that would tweet when the server was down, so it would send an SMS to my phone.

Megan Lynch (she/her)

@bastianallgeier Yup. This is why it took me a couple yrs to join Twitter despite being invited to earlyish - I didn't own a smartphone.

ℭ𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰 ℭ𝔥𝔢𝔴

@bastianallgeier ha some berk so called journalist tried to pull me up something that I had in my feed in 2010. I had to explain what ‘RT’ meant before the post. 🤣🤣🤣

Michael Fisher

@bastianallgeier I’m an IT cloud solutions architect and systems designer by profession. My $.02 after being active here for less than a week: this platform has good bones and GREAT potential. Needs some spit-shinin’, but that will come in time. Good to be here.

jubnub :starfleet:

@bastianallgeier I remember the SMS Twitter. It was my high school English teacher that actually had us sign up for accounts back in 2007. What a crazy platform it was.

awh

@bastianallgeier Wasn't there an IRC interface back then? I think I remember using irssi as my Twitter client.

bashfoal

@bastianallgeier I actually got twitter just for the SMS thing, because I had finally gotten a phone and I wanted to look like I was texting LMAO

Derek P. Collins

@bastianallgeier Yes, buuuuut the template exists now, it didn’t exist back then.

Jack McKracken

@bastianallgeier tweeting via SMS was great. Could post stuff while being away with my not-smartphone 😅

toni ✨🧠

@bastianallgeier We had to use URL shorteners and upload images to external sites...

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