Microblogging in the context of Threads (social network)

Twitterature (a portmanteau of Twitter and literature) is a literary use of the microblogging service of Twitter. It includes various genres, including aphorisms, poetry, and fiction (or some combination thereof) written by individuals or collaboratively. The 280-character maximum imposed by the medium, upgraded from 140 characters in late 2017, provides a creative challenge.

X, formerly known as Twitter, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, images, and videos in short posts (commonly and unofficially known as "tweets") and like other users' content. The platform also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists, communities, Grok chatbot integration, job search, and a social audio feature (X Spaces). Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.

The platform, then called twttr, was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, and was launched in July of that year; it was renamed Twitter some months later. Twitter grew quickly; by 2012 more than 100 million users produced 340 million daily tweets. Twitter, Inc., was based in San Francisco, California, and had more than 25 offices around the world. A signature characteristic of the service initially was that posts were required to be brief. Posts were initially limited to 140 characters, which was changed to 280 characters in 2017. The limitation was removed for subscribed accounts in 2023. 10% of users produce over 80% of tweets. In 2020, it was estimated that approximately 48 million accounts (15% of all accounts) were run by internet bots rather than humans.

Tumblr (pronounced "tumbler") is a microblogging and social media platform founded by David Karp in 2007 and is owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.

A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. In the 2000s, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, multi-author blogs (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users who did not have much experience with HTML or computer programming. Previously, knowledge of such technologies as HTML and File Transfer Protocol had been required to publish content on the Web, and early Web users therefore tended to be hackers and computer enthusiasts. As of the 2010s, the majority are interactive Web 2.0 websites, allowing visitors to leave online comments, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking service. Indeed, bloggers not only produce content to post on their blogs but also often build social relations with their readers and other bloggers. Blog owners or authors often moderate and filter online comments to remove hate speech or other offensive content. There are also high-readership blogs which do not allow comments.

Hyphanet (until mid-2023: Freenet) is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of censorship. Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke, who defined Freenet's goal as providing freedom of speech on the Internet with strong anonymity protection.

The distributed data store of Freenet is used by many third-party programs and plugins to provide microblogging and media sharing, anonymous and decentralised version tracking, blogging, a generic web of trust for decentralized spam resistance, Shoeshop for using Freenet over sneakernet, and many more.

A hashtag is a metadata tag operator that is prefaced by the hash symbol, #. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services–especially Twitter and Tumblr–as a form of user-generated tagging that enables cross-referencing of content by topic or theme. For example, a search within Instagram for the hashtag #bluesky returns all posts that have been tagged with that term. After the initial hash symbol, a hashtag may include letters, numerals or other punctuation.

The use of hashtags was first proposed by American blogger and product consultant Chris Messina in a 2007 tweet. Messina made no attempt to patent the use because he felt that "they were born of the internet, and owned by no one". Hashtags became entrenched in the culture of Twitter and soon emerged across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. In June 2014, hashtag was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as "a word or phrase with the symbol # in front of it, used on social media websites and apps so that you can search for all messages with the same subject".

David Karp (born July 6, 1986) is an American businessperson, best known as the founder and former CEO of the microblogging platform Tumblr.

Karp began his career, without receiving a high school diploma, as an intern under Fred Seibert at the animation company Frederator Studios, where he built the studio's first blogging platform and conceived, wrote, and edited their first internet video network, Channel Frederator. Karp went on to work for the online parenting forum UrbanBaby until it was sold to CNET in 2006. Karp then started his own software consulting company, Davidville, where he worked with software engineer Marco Arment on projects for clients. During a gap between contracts in 2006, the two began work on a microblogging website, which was launched as Tumblr in February 2007. As of November 1, 2017, Tumblr hosts over 375.4 million blogs. In August 2009, Karp was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur 2009 by BusinessWeek and in 2010, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

Mastodon is a free and open-source software platform for decentralized social networking with microblogging features similar to X. It operates as a federated network of independently managed servers that communicate using the ActivityPub protocol, allowing users to connect across different instances within the Fediverse. Each Mastodon instance establishes its own moderation policies and content guidelines, distinguishing it from centrally controlled social media platforms.

First released in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, Mastodon has positioned itself as an alternative to mainstream social media, particularly for users seeking decentralized, community-driven spaces. The platform has experienced multiple surges in adoption, most notably following the Twitter acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022, as users sought alternatives to Twitter. It is part of a broader shift toward decentralized social networks, including Bluesky and Lemmy.

Bluesky (abbreviated as Bsky) is an American microblogging social media service. Users can share short posts containing text, images, and videos. It is owned by Bluesky Social PBC, a benefit corporation based in the United States.

Bluesky was developed as a reference implementation of the AT Protocol, an open communication protocol for distributed social networks. Bluesky Social promotes a composable user experience and algorithmic choice as core features of Bluesky. The platform offers a "marketplace of algorithms" where users can choose or create algorithmic feeds, user-managed moderation and labelling services, and user-made "starter packs" that allow users to quickly follow a large number of related accounts within a community or subculture. The AT Protocol offers a domain-name–based handle system within Bluesky, allowing users to self-verify an account's legitimacy and identity by proving ownership of a domain name.