I'm old enough that I used Twitter before it had @-replies or hashtags built in. I spent all of 2018 in TweetJail.
I used Twitter via TEXT MESSAGE for most of 2008-09.
There wasn't an official Twitter app for a really long time. The bones of the current official app was something built by a third-party developer. I paid real actual money for it, and then Twitter bought the company.
@maxeddy that was a big deal
@c0debabe It was huge! Ironically I went out and bought Twitteriffic almost immediately afterward.
We really are somewhere between BBS and Web 1.0
But at least we have emojis and fewer "Under Construction" animations to deal with.
@ScottMortimer @TheGibson @maxeddy I’d take „under construction“ animations over JS eating a full CPU core and still not rendering 1kb Text any day
@maxeddy
Twitter was good in the beginning, then Twitter the company wrecked themselves with promoted-content, non chronological timelines, content curation, unethical data hording practices, a top-down experience... the list goes on
I'm not sure why I'm saying all this.
I think it's because all the really good stuff in Twitter (@-replies, usable clients) was actually designed and built by users, not Twitter. Twitter, the company, didn't embrace those ideas until very late.
Mastodon and other fediverse remind me of that time, when good ideas could come from anywhere. It's the bottom-up experience that's been missing from the web for years.