[syllablehq]

I think the key to a massively successful new social network will be a fallback API of just email/text.

Why not let your shiny new social network UI parse any dumb input into a fancy thread format? Zero adoption friction. Federation baked in.

Example: You run a mastodon-like service that can receive email. When it gets an email, it publishes a twirt with the contents. Truncates as needed.

If it's a new email address, spin up new user with email username. No password needed, cause it came from the email address you own.

Conversely, in the fancy interface, you can @[e-mail] and it will email them for you. Doesn't matter if they've "joined twartordon." So it has a dumb-simple user growth model baked in.

I've been promoting this idea for years in the man-yells-at-clouds format, but folks don't seem to get why it's so powerful...

[cardamomo]

SMS is how I used to use Twitter, back in 2008 or so. You could text 40404 with your tweet, and you could receive Tweets from that number too. It was great in that era before I had a smartphone, and it felt like something halfway between a group chat and microblogging. I miss that mode of interaction.

[pixl97]

Have you ever ran a mail server?

When you're blocking 99.93% of incoming messages as spam you'll learn to be more selective.