blaineNov 11, 2022

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. 🧵

Show threadblaineNov 11, 2022
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 ...
Show threadblaineNov 11, 2022
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!)
Show threadblaineNov 11, 2022

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.

Show threadTom ScottNov 12, 2022
@blaine didn’t you and <sorry can’t remember who> work all night at SG Foocamp (?2008), to federate Twitter and Jaiku via XMPP PubSub?
Show threadblaine
@derivadow yup! @ralphm who is a wonderful and kind person, and also here! 😊
Nov 12, 2022 at 12:20pmMastodon for Android
Show threadTom ScottNov 12, 2022

@blaine @ralphm of course! Sorry Ralph, I can only blame my failing memory.

That whole incident has stuck with me. Hard to think of that sort of thing being possible now.

Show threadRalph MeijerNov 12, 2022
@derivadow @blaine No worries! Also, the problem never really was technology.
Show threadTom ScottNov 12, 2022
@ralphm @blaine that’s true for so much in life! What I found cool was the fact you could just make the change to these global services (without approval)