A message from the past about the future

Twitter passed me by at the start, and if I am honest I still don't really get it. Today, though, I was bringing in old posts as usual, and they included links to a couple that were, to put it delicately, skeptical about Twitter's chances. Tim Bray got one thing very right:

The basic problem is that Twitter is centralized; that’s not how the Internet works.

He was hoping for federated blogging, and pointed to Laconica, which seems to have been an instance of identi.ca. Both still exist, but as far as I can tell have not fulfilled their promise; ready to be corrected on that.

Among the comments was this gem from ickledot (who seems to have moved on from his 2009 self):

Question from a know nowt: Is identi.ca to Twitter what betamax was to VHS? ie the former is better but less popular?

And all that took me, in a roundabout way, to this: