I joined Twitter on February 25, 2009 and can still remember that day quite well. I was sitting in a small cubicle at Sun Labs, 16 Network Circle in Menlo Park and was desperately procrastinating. My actual plan was to make some progress on my master’s thesis that I managed to combine with my Sun Labs internship. Everything else was more interesting so Twitter it was.
Those were not quite the early days anymore but the original ideas of having a “raw utility” of information exchange, an API for messaging of sorts, sounded quite exciting to me. Of course, none of that really came true but nonetheless it started to be an interesting place for getting news and oppinions about from a wide variety of people and a range of topics. As far as social media goes, a — at least from my point of view — fairly positive place. Until recently. I wouldn’t have thought that things would go downhill quite that quickly but having Twitter now actively censoring links to other social media sites (in addition to the hypocritical banning of various accounts) is a bit much.
Mastodon might not be perfect but it works actually quite well and with a growing user base it is fun. Moreover, having a system around open formats and implementations makes the original idea of having a programmable “information infrastructure” actually much more real than what Twitter ever accomplished. So for what it’s worth I can be found at https://toot.kra.hn/@robert and I’m looking forward to experimenting with ActivtyPub.