I honestly forget who said "crank to buy" first; may have been me, maybe not. Either way, I had some thoughts on the matter and quickly built the prototype you see here. Wade Cosgrove polished it up nice and shiny into what is now in Playdate Catalog.
All seems simple and obvious, but a few random design considerations as I was working on the prototype: (in thread)
Stop thinking of Twitter, TikTok, IG, (et al) as social media sites.
They are **Content Refineries.**
Like processed food manufacturers they take user content & extract the most addicting/engaging content. Brains eat it up but in an unhealthy “devour the whole bag of chips” way.
They make hyper-processed social media junk food.
Mastodon is more like a potluck. We're all bringing dishes. It's a mess. Kids are running all over. But we are, at least, real people sharing real things.