Mastodawn

The history of social media in 5 waves:

1st wave: Focus on protocols. Examples: Email, finger, Usenet, BBS, listserv, IRC

2nd wave: Focus on web. Examples: Classmates.com, LiveJournal, Habbo, Friendster

3rd wave: Focus on browser-based apps. Examples: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Reddit

4th wave: Focus on mobile apps. Examples: Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok

5th wave: Focus on decentralization. Examples: Mastodon, Bluesky, Matrix, Pixelfed, PeerTube

Wave 4 of social media is already 17 years old. That was when Twitter initially came online.

Interestingly, Twitter was established before the smartphone went mainstream.

It was 140 characters because it had to be carried through SMS, and SMS had a limitation of 160 characters.

And the service wasn’t easy to use at first.

@atomicpoet my Twitter is is 2676. Back then, it was an SMS interface only. I think you sent a message to TWTTR to post