It's 2026 and you wonder what your friends are up to. You tell the app on your phone to go and get everyone's most recent news. Jim's phone takes a sec to load because his wifi is crap in the garden, and Alex's phone takes a sec to load because their wifi is crap in the workshop, but nobody times out.
You don't worry when your friends time out. You're not one of those Worrying People who panic when they open the app and their friend's phone fails to respond to the ping, you figure they're just, y'know, in the garden or going through a tunnel or something.
Jim is of course posting hole. You comment "Nice hole Jim," and that comment goes straight from your phone to Jim's. Your phone saves a copy as well because it deliberately doesn't know the difference between a four-paragraph furnace repair guide and "Nice hole Jim" and it makes a local backup of anything you type, in case Jim drops his phone down the hole and doesn't notice until he's planted a tree on top of it. Everyone still teases him about that, and he jokes along with them because it was pretty funny. The tree has its own account now.
You scroll through today's posts, mostly goodmornings and fantastical lies about all the stuff your friends are gonna get done today. All these posts were downloaded from people's phones when you opened the app a minute ago. You reach the end of today's posts (the first one of course was Jenna and her early-bird nonsense) and that's it, nothing more to see, you're up to date on what your friends are up to. You're not ready to go back to Actually Doing Something With Your Life so you move your thumb over the Yesterday button, but before you can tap, a mitherbox pops up to tell you that Alex is posting shaft.
Your thumbs do a happy dance and "Nice shaft Alex" is sent directly from your phone to theirs, without needing the permission of any weird billionaires sitting in between, a connection as direct as a phone call, not that you're thinking about that, you're thinking about Alex's shaft. Apparently they've been polishing their shaft all morning and they're almost ready to give it some lube and stick it in. That car's gonna be Gorgeous when they finally finish it.
Anyway that's it now, you're all caught up. You didn't see any ads (why would you? All this is stored on your friends' phones' SD cards and sent over their wifi, they're the ones paying the 0.0001p to respond to your phone's "What's new" request) and everything was shown in chronological order (there are alternative apps that mess with your timeline ordering but nobody uses those because they're shit) and you've read the whole day and you're done. You put your phone away and start getting dressed.
As your coffee brews you check your friends app again and Jen the birdwatcher wants to show everyone her tits
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You turn on the telly while you make breakfast and the celebrities are moaning about how nobody goes on the advert app anymore now that folk just talk to their friends instead. You turn it off again. You went viral once; your phone battery was flat in half an hour, but on the bright side, your phone battery was flat in half an hour. You make all your posts friends-only now.
Anyway "Nice tits Jen"
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"Thanks, but didja get the high-def version?"
You put your glasses on and tell your phone to quit being polite about Jen's phone's battery and give you the zoom-in-able high-res "I'm actually going to look at this photo and not just scroll past it" version of the photo, and you go "Awwww!" aloud and congratulate Jen on her cute new piercing.
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It's weird, last year everyone was really excited about this app and talking about it all the time but now you can't even remember what it's called. You vaguely remember that everyone uses a different version of the app and they all have different names, and at one point you knew why that was, something about "clients" your computer friend said, but these days you don't think about it, you just think about your friends.
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Kinda like how the podcast people don't say "Get us on soundsli" or "Peep us on greebo" or whatever, they say "Subscribe however you get your podcasts," it's that sort of deal, everyone gets them from somewhere different and it all works out fine. However you get your friend updates. Podcasts for your mates. But not audio. More like nodding cheerfully at each other. Nodcasts. Except Jen's more birdcasts. And sometimes bodcasts.
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One day you couldn't sleep and you were looking at your phone at 3am when a notification popped up saying your friend-status-thing app was synchronizing. You got curious and tapped on the thing and watched it.
It told you that some of your friends had nominated you as one of their trusted text backups, and your phone was now checking all their posts and downloading any it'd missed, so if their phone got stolen by a crow or buried under a tree then they could come round your house with their new phone and get their old posts back. You remember seeing the option when you first installed the app, and you didn't bother with it, but in that moment you felt weirdly grown-up and reliable, and you told yourself to try and remember to sort out backups tomorrow.
You watched it looking at each post in turn and getting the comments and reactions and stuff, and you imagined some scruffy little librarian raccoon nodding and scribbling notes and putting them in lots of different drawers, making sure that nobody lost anything. This somehow made you feel safe.
You were glad it decided to do all this when you were asleep, because your phone got kinda warm.
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One of your friends uses an app called Yesterday or something, except spelled wrong, Yes!Today! or some crap like that, it does the daily Go Get Everything thing too, except that's it, it never updates in real time, it only ever shows you what your friends did yesterday. Every night he puts on his glasses and makes a drink and gets in his comfy chair and makes a ritual of it, like people used to do with the newspaper. He has one of those e-ink phones that doesn't even scroll, just flips from page to page like a book.
You might try it one day, or you might not, it sounds equal parts cosy and infuriating. But it takes all sorts, doesn't it? That's kind of the point, right?
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You've got the wall up, you've got your lunch and there's nothing good on the telly and you're too dusty to play a videogame one-handed so you figure alright more scrolling while I eat this nice baked potato, and look at that, you're out of friend stuff.
So you hit the button for Friends Of Friends. Now this is dangerous, because it sucks you in, but this shows you posts from people who you're not friends with, but you have friends in common. Sometimes you'll make a new friend here, and other times you remember why these people are at arm's length.
Some folk hit the third button, friends of friends of friends. You're glad you have to hit the button, you have to make that decision, because it's usually nicer to read a book or play a game. If you hit it enough times your phone gets warm. If you see Kevin Bacon you've gone too far.
There's also Links. Sometimes folk find an article on the web and copy the link to it on their own phone feeds. This is separated out for a reason, this app is supposed to be about what your friends are doing, not what your friends are looking at on the internet. There's another different app for that, because it really is a different thing, but some folk just want to use One App so it's here as well, whatever. You don't look at that section much but it's fun sometimes. Like multiplayer web surfing.
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Sometimes you don't want to talk to your friends. Sometimes you just want to be with them. Like, hang out and watch things together, parallel play, sometimes not even that! Sometimes you just want to know what they're up to. Sometimes not even that, you just want to know that they're... y'know, there.
Ambient updates. You saw the forecast for the bitter cold, but a friend posted that they're eating some stew, so you don't have to worry about that friend. Mundane taskposting, someone putting their to-do list online and letting folk know when they've run the vacuum and had a shower.
The boring updates are good. News that you don't care about, from people you do care about.
The old social media apps spent most of their time telling you about all the danger in the world. It's useful to know of the danger of course, but it was never a good idea to do that in the same place you go when you want reassurance that your friends are safe.
It took far, far too long before someone thought to make an app whose sole purpose was to give you evidence, upon demand, that your friends are safe.
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Sounds weird to say it aloud, now.
"Hey, anxiety rectangle, tell me my friends are safe. But also, y'know, mix it in with some dread? Thx"
No wonder it never worked right.
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"Damn thing never worked right anyway," you muttered, when you (metaphorically speaking) put the old website out on the curb like a rusted-up washing machine.
At the time it felt like a really big step, even though it was really just tapping a different thing on your phone, but the phrase "Damn thing never worked right anyway" helped, because it wade you wonder what "worked right" would've even meant.
Like, what was it for? It "worked right" for the guy who owned it, as in it made him a bunch of money, but did anyone ever actually tell you what was the job this thing was supposed to do?
Nah, 'cause if they had, you'd have responded "Well the damn thing doesn't work right" and probably binned it sooner
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You moved off FriendHole because of the accusations against the programmer, and now you're trying FishingFox instead. All your friends and their posts are already there, just like they were on FriendHole, it's all the same on like the techy programmy level, but FishingFox is better anyway because it has cool animations.
And they're not just for show, they actually do something too. See, every post floats gently down a pixelly river, and there's this lil fox guy sat on the bank with a fishing rod. You can scroll through the river like any other app, but if you tap on the fox, then whatever post happens to be under his rod at the time, he reels it in and walks over to another screen and asks you where you wanna put it for safekeeping.
But where do you wanna put it! You've got all these boxes, and those boxes can go inside other boxes, like your hard drive y'know? You might put a post in recipes/bread/sweet, or diy/wood/plans, that kinda thing. The boxes are good because it doesn't matter how old a post is, you can still get to it easily, you don't have to scroll back through the time stream to remember when you saved it, you just have to remember what it's about.
Cool thing is, you can mark these boxes as open boxes, and folk can come and rummage through them if they want. Alex has a box per car, with all, like, service manuals and shaft photos and stuff, and Jim has a garden box and inside that he's meticulously placed one box per tree and kept logs of when it was planted and fertilized etc. Someone posts a question you know about, you go "Oh dude check my boxes, I got whole boxes full of that stuff," you feel useful.
When you tap on Alex's boxes, there's a lil pixel raccoon in the corner saying hi. That's because Alex is vegan, and doesn't like the fishing fox, and uses the raccoon sifting trash out of the stream with a net instead.
You're vaguely aware that some folk would call your boxes a "website" but it's nowhere near that complicated, you're not gonna go learn about HTML and servers and all that crap just to save some wiring diagrams, you just tap on things and tell the fox where to put them, and everything's neat and tidy and organized.
Well, YOUR boxes are neat and tidy and organized anyway, Jen's are just labelled BIRDS and NOT BIRDS
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One night you drunk a lot of wine with Jen and you said "Jen I am begging you to rename your boxes" and she laughed and said sure and now they're BIRDS and NIRDS
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(someone please make this. Not to make money, it won't make money, but just because it would be funny as hell if ad-driven social media was bankrupted and driven into irrelevance by a bunch of furries egged on by a pinball machine repairman)
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You've got the foxes and boxes, and Alex has the raccoon, because you're not all that tech savvy and they were just what came with the app. Sometimes you go look in other peoples' boxes and you're greeted by a different character, but your guy's the fox for two reasons:
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Alex knows someone who knows someone who makes graphics packs that work in a bunch of different friend phone apps. She gives away half of them for free, and sells the other half for two quid a character, or any dozen for a tenner.
She's not quite making enough to quit her job and do it full-time, but it's definitely earning enough extra cash that she can order a pizza without worrying.
They're not all pixelly either, some of them look like an oil painting, but you'd better be on a good data plan if you're using those ones
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Jim's phone just shows everyone's boxes like a bunch of folders in Windows 95, you're not sure whether he's on a crap data plan or if he just likes it that way
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Jen uses the crow because of COURSE she does
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Funny thing about that crow: when you're looking in Jen's boxes he's wearing a little waistcoat and being very polite, every bit a Courteous Crow Butler, but on Jen's screen he's a proper little chaos goblin. Like, she taps the crow and he lurches into the stream and wrenches the trash out like it owes him money, flies up to the top of the screen and LAUNCHES it into a box so hard it topples over. Same guy.
You dunno why you decided this crow was a transmasc guy but Jen's going along with it
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You flip over to the Links tab, wrinkle your nose in disgust and flip back to Friends.
Every website is now the "Look at the horrible things" website. This is why anything that includes a link goes in the Links tab, it helps keep the bullshit quarantined, it helps put the focus of the app onto your actual friends. Some folk tried the "Link in the comments" trick at first, but the comments section has a links tab as well.
It takes a LOT of careful planning to design an app that doesn't instantly turn into the "Look at the horrible things" app.
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Anyway, enough ruminating around, time to actually make a post.
Subject:
Post: morning my lovelies, gonna paint that wall today
And you include a picture of the wall.
๐ฆ Send without a subject line? It's possible, but some apps will skip your post. [send as-is] [edit some more]
Oh yeah, thanks fox. You always forget the subject line because you don't know what you're going to write until you write it. That's just how your brain works.
Subject: wall morning
You idly wonder if there's a thing in the settings to put the subject hole below the post hole so you see it's empty before you hit the post button.
Anyway you pull down on the post button and let it go like a catapult and your post goes zhoooom
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Half an hour later you compulsively check your phone and Jen's said "Wall looking good" on your post.
She must've spent ages trying to make that weird
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You scroll through today's posts and get to the Pam Chunk
The Pam Chunk is your phone's way of dealing with the Pam Problem; some folk post more than others. Jim only posts a couple times a week, and Pam posts twenty bloody times a day. So unless you follow a lot of folk who post about the same amount, your phone becomes The Pam Show.
The default behaviour of every app (that anybody actually uses) is of course "Show your friends' posts in the order in which they're made, no exceptions, no messing around," but the majority of apps also have some kind of Pam Compensation Mechanism.
The most common of these is to only retrieve the six most recent posts from any given friend's phone in any given day; hence, the Pam Chunk that jumps out at you around noon. Most days Pam remembers that anything beyond her sixth post today means that folk probably won't see her "Good morning," but some days you get Pam Chunk. Sometimes she posts "Please put your fetch limit up!" but most people don't know how to do that. It's in the settings somewhere, but nobody looks at settings.
The second Pam Compensation Mechanism is the more civilized option, but it totally messes up your timeline. It's called Take Turns, it goes and gets everybody's most recent post and shows them in order. Then it goes and gets everyone's second-most-recent post, and shows those in order. Then everybody's third-most-recent post, and so on. Everybody takes turns to speak, kinda thing.
It means that if you scroll far down enough you'll see a Jim post from last month on top of a Pam post from an hour ago. The further back you scroll, the more messed up the times get, but it means you see Everything that your friends posted. So yeah, it's an "Algorithm" you guess, but at least you know how it works and it's not hiding anything you want to see, so it can stay, so long as it behaves. You've got your eye on it.
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โ ๏ธ WOOP WOOP DANGER WILL ROBINSON โ ๏ธ
This post has breached containment. It has been boosted by semi-celebrities and linked to from other websites.
โ ๏ธ COMMENT WITH CAUTION, YOUR RANDOM THROWAWAY OFF-THE-CUFF REACTIONS AND JOKES ARE NOW INTENSELY PUBLIC. THIS IS NOT AN INTIMATE SPACE. โ ๏ธ
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๐ฆ Oh, y'all think this is a story? You think this is fiction? This is INSTRUCTIONS
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๐ฆ I am literally a pinball machine repairman. The reason this app/system/culture does not exist in the year 2025 is because pinball machines keep breaking down.
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There were previous versions of the app that worked through email. Like, you'd send yourself an email, and it'd show up on here somehow, you're not sure how that worked. There were also versions that worked through blogs; if you were same kinda tech wizard, you've got your own whole blog, a whole website just for you, you could put Something on that website that'd talk to this app, and when you posted on your site it'd pop up in the app as well.
These different ways still work with the new phone-to-phone apps, and you understand that this is because the data is the same shape. Like, everything's got a subject and a post, sometimes the subject's called a title, whatever, it's a short bit followed by a long bit and a list of people who can see it, it can all fit in the same hole.
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@ifixcoinops I read this entire thread, I'd read a novel set out like this tbh
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@ifixcoinops dan this thread is my current favorite thing ever
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@ifixcoinops
Idk, honestly the more people you add to your feed the less of an issue this becomes.
The hard problem is if you want to see posts from all the accounts and you only follow a small number.
The more relevant soft problem is Pam posts out of rhythm with everyone else, like in the middle of the night or something, but if you follow international accounts than the nightime Pam chunk is split appart from your perspective.
The same goes with burst posting at any time of day really.
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@ifixcoinops I read this without context and thought that the post retrieval limits and "take turns" timelines were real lol.
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@ifixcoinops this lovely thread is 1000% why we need to let software ideas bubble up from real people. I love this future and am trying to think of who I know who could help make it a reality...
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@ifixcoinops I thought Jim posting hole was pretty intimate!
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@ifixcoinops itโs always a good day when Dan goes viral. Maybe not for Dan, but I love seeing Danโs thoughts enter the zeitgeist.
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@ifixcoinops nice hole Dan
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@ifixcoinops not the first time Iโd seen your thoughts on stream and boxes and raccoon, though I think that may have been a server or two back. Iโm here for it.
@TheGibson does this sound like the kind of thing that would be possible to build on top of veilid? Thinking about how Google normalized the adoption of HTTPS, or how TORโs multiple use cases (espionage, crime, activism, privacy wonks) help bury each otherโs signal in the noise.
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@ajn142 @ifixcoinops
I don't see why one couldn't. It is not dissimilar to the concepts in VeilidChat.
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@ifixcoinops I sure hope someone out there is using these instructions to build something truly unique!
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@ifixcoinops Wait, why can't we have a setting that says if anyone posts more than 3-4 times a day, you get a digest version of all their posts at some fixed time? Listservs have been using daily or weekly digest versions forever. I'm not exactly how it would work but it seems possible.
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@chiasm why indeed
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@ifixcoinops Speaking as a Pam, I wish clients would collapse all my toots in a burst beyond dunno, three every six hours, in a sort of pseudo-thread UI element like "click here to see the remaining posts by Pam". yes the result is basically my profile page but the collapsing would make me feel less guilty
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@elilla @ifixcoinops
Pam's Toot Digest incoming:
AWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-GA!
End of digest.
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@ifixcoinops This is exactly why the "non-algorithmic" feeds are not the no-brainer selling point large party of the fediverse claims them to be. It's not "using an algorithm" that is a problem, it's that in closed systems the algorithms is tuned for the benefit of the provider, not the user's. Sorting things by timestamp avoids the e-corp issue but it's also a cop-out that causes other problems.
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@ifixcoinops
As a Pam, I loathe this solution.
Folks are not only entitled to my pearls of wisdom.
Their wellbeing RELIES on my messaging!11!12!
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text/gemini