Discussion
so, one of the things you have to keep in mind is that Twitter was created by the people who first founded Blogger/Blogspot. that’s why the generic for that kind of site ―which includes #Mastodon― is “microblog”.
tweeting and tooting are microblogging.
blogging is not just a form of publishing online, but of writing; of transforming into new digital formats the conventional forms of writing and publishing on the media of paper.
which means: QUOTED POSTS ARE MICROBLOGGING BLOCKQUOTES
🧵
i joined Twitter in April of 2007 at a SXSW. actually, a whole slew of us Black bloggers joined Twitter that day after our panel, Blogging While Black. that is, by the way, the real origin story of #Blacktwitter.
anyways, i joined that year but the blogosphere was still going strong. some people considered it a passing fad. others like me saw it as an API that you plugged into publishing platforms, not the platform itself.
actually, some of us wondered if Blogger was going to be twittered… 🧵
ANYWAYS, the point of this background is to remind y’all that tweets are microblogs and every feature that made Twitter what it is today came from bloggers like me trying to adapt blogging & writing conventions into the limited framework of 140, 250 characters.
the explosion of acronyms ―already developed thru text messaging― came out of that too: OMFGLOL, QFTMFT, RTFM, FAFO
so my QTs ―quoted tweets― were always intended as a form of citation & blockquote; of repeating with attribution… 🧵
@blogdiva (i'm not disagreeing with you here, mind) fwiw the current mastodon implementation is modelled on what bluesky and twitter are doing now, with an additional emphasis on consent.
bluesky allows to disconnect the original skeet from the quote, and while my memory of twitter implementation is murky (i deleted my accounts in 2022), i think that was also a possibility there at the time i left; and bluesky allows for control if your skeets can be quoted or not.
(also, the glitch fork of mastodon we're running on circumstances.run has a ui knob that enables inline rendering of embeds for remote links; that's a feature that is not available in mainline mastodon)
REMEMBER: 2008 is when the Oembed API was published. this is what makes it possible to embed snippets of a website’s HTML ―for example, Youtube videos― on other people’s sites.
before Oembed, we would download the videos or images, keep a copy on our servers, and link back.
the problem is, you can’t do that with text. so we would copy and paste, linkback; and in the instances of needing evidence, we’d take a snapshop.
WAYBACK MACHINE was a solution to this forensics problem, btw
🧵
BACK TO QUOTED TWEETS
taking snapshots of a tweet and posting them was a way of circumventing the blockquote conundrum with the 250 character limitation; BUT there was another limitation: CELL PHONE DATA PLANS.
there was no #Android when Twitter was first created. mobile posting wasn’t by way of an app. we posted via text messaging.
how much media you included in a mobile tweet was limited by your phone’s data plan. i certainly was, and that’s why my QT was optimized for texts… 🧵
WHENEVER I POSTED A QT, i limited the text to 100 characters, always included the permalink to the source and name or handle of the writer.
AGAIN: because at their most basic function, a #quotePost is a form of bloquote and citation. you don’t just want to include the text or image of import but you also want to give ATTRIBUTION.
so, with a QT we were able to:
- highlight interesting or important text
- establish a source and attribution for that text
🧵
i started experimenting almost immediately with Quoted Tweets back in 2007; but i didn’t originally called them that.
sometimes i would start the tweet with "CITATION:" or "QUOTE:" because, more often than not, i was quoting a person speaking or an article from a blog or publication.
AS AN ASIDE: i was one of the first indie bloggers to use Twitter for journalistic liveblogging that wasn’t about tech. by 2008 i was liveblogging events, some political, others artistic & cultural… 🧵
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