a tweet by Chenoe Hart (Twitter)
Whenever I find myself actively seeking something to RT it always feels like thereās nothing but noise. Seem to find the most interesting things to share after Iāve already found too many things to RT at once.
Sometimes I find myself wanting to tweet just in general, and wish there was an easy way to just have casual conversations on here, tweet about the weather or something. Itās often really just a proxy for trying to meet people anyway.
Iāve had this feeling before and often long for the earlier days of Twitter when it functioned more like this. The popularization of Twitter in 2009 and the subsequent iteration on the platform and its community killed all the original spirit. It also reminds me of a piece Iād read recently by John Naughton1 about how toxic the retweet functionality (and other gamification like likes/favorites) can be.
Iāve seen the type of interaction youāre describing in smaller pockets of the internet on services like App.net (aka ADN, now defunct), pnut, andĀ 10centuries, and a few corners of the Mastodon sphere.
The place Iāve seen it done well most recently is on Manton Reeceās awesome micro.blogĀ service, which I think has some strong community spirit and a greater chance of longevity. Theyāve specifically left off āfeaturesā like follower counts, number of likes, and made conversation front and center. As a result it is a much more solid and welcoming community. Iām curious, as always, if they can maintain it as they scale, but the fact that they encourage people to have their own website and own their own data mean that you can take it all with you somewhere else if they ever cease meeting your needs in the futureāsomething that certainly canāt be easily done on Twitter.
I hope you find the connections with the types of people youād like to meet.
Originally bookmarked on April 01, 2018 at 09:22PM
References
1.
Naughton J. How to stay sane on Twitter: ignore retweets. Memex 1.1: John Naughtonās online diary. http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2018/03/11/25409. Published March 11, 2018. Accessed April 12, 2018.
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