I'm not very active on Mastodon, but saw this post - browsing the bluesky hashtag for a bit afterwards did not really give me much info. I can definitely imagine enshittification happening there, but what is causing the current drama in particular?
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Some people are expecting the imminent apocalypse because there's verification now. I don't think it's a bad idea to verify that somebody is who they're claiming to be but what do I know.
oof. is that what this is about? that's a big thing for some people - especially now.
i know what you're saying with your last sentence, but it also allows people to be tracked down and held accountable for criticizing trumps favourite things.
Not like you have to be verified.
i just still don't get it. like, twitter was a 2012 thing, back when text messages were a thing with limitations. now, the only limitation you have is texting between an apple and an android. why the fuck is twitter even still a thing - if not for the fact that most people can't take a thought longer than 140 fucking characters?
Wha? Because this is not "texting"? I don't know what you're asking.
twitter was founded as an app that allowed you to basically broadcast a text message. back then, sms messaging only allowed for 140 characters max per message. that's why twitter became so big - it was basically a great way to shout headlines out to everyone who wanted to hear you. this was back in the days where the internet was still becoming a viable commercial thing and people were still mostly using tvs/cds/landlines.
now, texting is pretty much indistinguishable from emailing, and everybody's phones are fully on the web. the only thing imo that's still keeping tweets around is that people don't want to consider options that provide for a reason they might have to read more.
The broadcast part is what matters, not the character limit. A normal SMS message has just one recipient, maybe a few more for a group MMS, but a Tweet goes out to the world wide web. Although Twitter was designed such that it could be used via SMS, that never defined the purpose of the platform, and changes to the SMS protocol do not obsolete Twitter's use case.
I am still having serious trouble following. Is your problem the fact that there's a character limit?
twitter is an outdated phone app that was built for SMS back when text messages had a limit. it should have had a predictable lifespan, but now it's become a fake-ai-assisted culture war battleground that's run by the world's biggest idiot and oligarch.
i'm having trouble following what the fuck you're having "serious" trouble following. and i'm starting to think you aren't asking this question in good faith.
Twitter definitely was not any attempt to emulate the function of SMS.
I can't tell if you don't know what SMS is for, or what Twitter was for.
where am i wrong? twitter - as i understand - started as a phone-based application which had a 140-character limitation. where did that limit come from?
It did not. It took 4 years before they launched an official mobile app. The char limit was solely a marketing ploy.
Think you replied to the wrong level comment :)
You are absolutely right! I will delete and re-reply. Thank you!
you're right, i'm wrong. i addressed it in another comment.
Apparently somewhere here people have finally convinced you that you are entirely wrong about the origin of twitter.
But the word you've been looking for (which also describes Mastodon, Calkey, etc) is microblog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging
The limit was there because in its early incarnation it allowed post-submission via SMS. SMS already had the 140-character limit for other technical reasons due to the GSM networks.
I thought we were talking about Bluesky here. Sure, Twitter can go die.
goodnight, comrade.
Twitter was not founded as a mobile app. Twitter was (officially) desktop-only for the 1st 4 years of its existence. Calling it a SMS-replacement app is ludicrous, since it mainly existed on PC for the first few years. I personally think the concept is dumb, but it became famous because it forced people to keep their messages short and interesting (aka clickbait?), not because it replaced SMSes.
Early on you could tweet by sending Twitter an SMS. (Not that this contradicts what you've said. I still don't know what they're getting at)
holy shit, really? that's even dumber than what my idiot-mind-retcon just did.
Breaking: Early internet was weird and people tried a lot of weird things. More at 11.
i was there for crystallinks and geocities.
you think you know gifs?!? you don't know gifs! you don't know nothing!!
With a 140 characters limit, silly and meaningless rants like yours cannot exist. That's a win!
Twitter was a thing because celebrities won't text at you directly.
Not that texting can't be toxic and social, though. Whatsapp groups are a major vector of far right radicalization, among other super shady stuff. All social media was a mistake.
They weren't a mistake. They were deliberate and calculated. They came to us with lies and fake gifts, but ultimately offered only serfdom.
One criticism I saw was that if you want to verify, you have to use a Google Form and log in with a Google account, which goes against lots of people's efforts to get off Google.
yeah, i'm a bit pissed that proton blocks verification emails unless you provide a phone number
I've thought it would be cool to run a $1 monthly paid mastodon server where your username has to match the credit card used to pay. + maybe other stuff like verifying degrees, medical licenses, etc so that people with such things can have a verified presence with which to interact with the rest of mastodon.
Uuuuuh, I would not like my actual real name associated with an account like that. If I'd use that for work purposes solely, like LinkedIn, OK... But this, no.
Obviously. You'd only use it if you specifically wanted to back up what you were posting with a medical license or status as a public figure or whatever. This isn't a service targeted at the average shitposter.
That's an interesting idea. Could be useful for doctors, lawyers and dentists (folks who tend to have a company presence but no IT staff.)
For others, technologists with a website can self-verify on Mastodon with a specially formatted reference link.
I hope you're planning to delegate the verification to a KYC service...
Tbh this is as far as I've ever gotten with this idea but I appreciate the tip if I ever did actually try to implement it! Edit: had to look it up but probably actually. My fuzzy original thought was one of the many services my various employers have used to verify my license, but these seem more consumer focused which is probably better suited to this use-case.
So you would make about 10$ a month and would have to use your time to verify people's identity and credentials?
I feel like the specific price is something you figure out after you figure out how much it costs to run the thing and no, I had not gotten that far yet. How much do your accounting services cost?