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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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"
"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.
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
~edit: this post turned into a thread, and mastodon's thread handling has been broken for years; when the thread appears to stop abruptly, click on the date in the post to see more of the thread~
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"
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
~edit: this post turned into a thread, and mastodon's thread handling has been broken for years; when the thread appears to stop abruptly, click on the date in the post to see more of the thread~
Please don't tag me in the same post as famous ppl who I don't actually know or talk to, thx
Dan's Online Community Management Thread that started off as me bitching about a subreddit and turned into a server-spanning Epic Thread about What Not To Do when running online communities, part 1:
https://mastodon.social/@ifixcoinops/105778289798706182
Part 2:
https://mstdn.social/@ifixcoinops/109354147264054179
Part 3:
THIS THREAD RIGHT HERE, YOU'RE READING IT BUDDY, also the fact that this very thread is split over three servers now is, uh, shall we say Illustrative Of The Issues Discussed
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops