To your points (1) yes, everything was slower back then (2) people could and did post streams of their work within the BBS framework, everything from multi-part posts to “owning” a message-board topic, to text/ansi e-zines, but back then the focus was much more on following topics than people.
Maybe it's time for Usenet to come back.
- Truly federated
- Topic focus instead of people-focus
- Killfiles!
- Proper threading
- Standards-based servers and clients
Ah yes, censorship rears its ghastly head again. Or, what a quaint approach to spam.
In other words, it's a personal filter on incoming information. It's Joo Janta Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses. If it is censorship, it is a censor who works for you, obeys your commands, and never imposes your opinions on anyone else.
And it's not particularly good for spam, nor does anyone think that is its purpose. A killfile works against persistent trolls and idiots.
Right, and still I was super amazed that I could send a message to someone halfway around the world, and it would arrive there only a couple of days later! Compared to a letter that's really fast!
Twitter doesn't really give handlers the tools to manage their celebrity client, otherwise we would have seen things with Trump go very differently.
An owned and managed instance can invest heavily into moderation and image cultivation in ways that Facebook and Twitter will never provide.
The whole thing with Wil Wheaton on mastodon.cloud was a good example of what goes wrong, however.
Perhaps that's what Bluesky is intended to be.
Twitter could re-enable RSS if they really wanted to show that their interest was genuine.
me neither. I think, based on Twitter's track record, people should remain skeptical until shown otherwise. They haven't delivered much to prove they're willing to do the right thing.