I've been noticing a few problems I've been having with Twitter, besides the problems of it enabling Nazis and being shitty to developers.
1) I used to use it to put down thoughts that I might want to come back to later, and if people like it and have reactions, hey, that's cool, too. You can download your archive, but without that, it's rather hard to find what you have said before on Twitter.
1A) I've become uncomfortable in general with user-exploiting companies having my data.
1B) I've become re-charmed by static HTML and don't like loading apps that have more in them than they should.
2) Reading Twitter, while sometimes satisfying, is always really distracting. Sometimes, I want to say something without getting distracted. You used to be able to post from the iOS Notes app, but no more. (And before that, I had my own mobile journal app that posted to social media.)
3) The Twitter feed, chronological or algorithmic, tends to amplify the most-frequently tweeting and most-frequently retweeted voices. It will drown out your quiet friend. (And I, certainly, was a frequent tweeter that probably drowned out your quiet friend.) One nice thing about the days of weblogs, which of course, had it's problems, was that either you visited individual weblogs or you clicked on individual weblogs in Google Reader. Usually, you ended up with the amount of each weblog that you wanted. On Twitter, there are hacked to help with this, but they're not robust.
And so, I built this thing (mostly by modifying a thing I originally built to simulate Vine when it shut down). There's a simple http service (https://github.com/jimkang/note-taker) that listens for posts from a really basic web app (https://github.com/jimkang/note-sender), and then updates a set of static HTML pages, served by nginx. If things fail, the HTML pages will still work. It does lack features (like automatic hyperlinking, I just realized), but that is OK, I think.
So, this doesn't solve problem 3 unless everyone goes back to having their own blog, which isn't going to happen. But if you want to use this system, let me know! jimkang@gmail.com
I was thinking of building it so it'd work for people other than me, but at this point, I know to never build anything unless someone explicitly wants it. So, I left the door open, but didn't go through.