Back

We take things like this for granted now. But for the record, the tweet sharing experience was rough for quite a few years in Twitter’s early history.

We worked hard to create a set of basic, minimal standards when sharing tweets, and even set up tools for broadcast media to recreate tweets for sharing on-air. And later on, our eng and design teams put in lots of hours figuring out the best ways to flexibly embed tweets in almost any environment.

We knew we couldn’t beat Facebook in terms of size. But as a public, real-time network, we (Twitter) knew we could kick ass in reach and being the most quoted source of all time. Creating standards for sharing tweets aided recognize-ability and greased the wheels for tweets becoming the go-to, authoritative source when quoting public figures.

I’m excited to see features like this come to Mastodon, because it means sprinkling in the same familiarity and utility for public federated posts.