(2020-03-17) Swyx Writing Twitter As Universal Metacommentary Layer

Shawn Wang on Twitter as Universal Meta-Commentary Layer. Twitter has enhanced my Internet experience in 2 similar ways recently - Webmentions and Twitter Links

With Webmentions, you let people comment on domains they control

The Indieweb movement has a strong "stick it to the man" vibe, but unfortunately it takes a lot more work for a lot poorer quality experience. So a compromise is to use Twitter as a basic auth/microblogging source that everybody can use.

Twitter Links

I've been enjoying Internet-friend Maxim Leyzerovich's Twitter Links Chrome Extension. It's so simple - while you're reading something interesting, you can hit the extension and it puts that URL into Twitter search!

This lets you a) easily find the creator if they are on Twitter, or b) see what others are saying about it.

This is like Webmentions on demand, with no crawling service needed and built in social interaction.

Twitter and the Metaverse

my broad interpretation of its essence is that it is the ideal form of a decentralized Internet - where you can seamlessly hop from world to world to world, instead of having everyone being centralized on one of 3-5 platforms.

the irony of using Twitter, a centralized platform, to achieve a decentralized goal of the Metaverse, is not lost on me. However, the experience is simply better than all decentralized alternatives

But the core reason why Twitter works as the base layer for Universal Meta-Commentary is because the format is so constrained.