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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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.