The Bluesky firehose viewed in the style of a Windows XP screensaver

A lot of commenters here are having their minds blown by this. And while I also love this I get the sense that many others here are maybe too young to remember that this kind of open access to data used to exist for lots websites. It inspired companion sites and loads of creativity. I find it tragic really, what the internet has become. I hope federated, and even more-so p2p, protocols take significant foothold on the internet and help revive this spirit of the web. The corpo-web is so fucking boring.

It’s worth noting that twitter itself owes a lot of its popularity to its openness in the early days. In the early days there were third-party clients, RSS feeds, XMPP support, etc. You could post from a curl command in a cron job, leading to all kinds of interesting automated feeds. Then they walked it all back in the early 2010s.

I like that Bluesky’s federation model makes it harder for them to do an “open platform” bait-and-switch like Twitter did.

I’m struggling to recall some of those early fun accounts. Do you remember any interesting automated feeds from Twitter’s early days?