The tweets are real, and a couple people joined in on the collaborative fiction at the time.

This story also appears in _Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories_, a brilliant collection of short stories.

Anything by Qntm is awesome, to be honest. _Antimemetics_ is my favourite.

Just because they're a fiction author doesn't mean everything on their site is fiction. See the page called gay (I remember that link from reading it a decade ago, interestingly enough) about database normalisation, or the things mentioned in a top-level comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37725082