App.net to close

During the springtime of 2013 I decided to join a new online community at App.net (Wikipedia entry). Heck, as it’d recently changed to a’ Freemium’ funding model I even paid for social networking! Today (Friday the thirteenth in year 1 PostCelebPocalypse) I found that the service will close in the middle of March 2017.

Its major strengths: no ads, 256 character posts, awesome apps, and a willingness by all to engage with and welcome newcomers. It simply wasn’t too big. Though on the surface an oasis of calm amidst the chaos of the wider Internet there were indeed flaws, the business model wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t matter to me, I ‘belonged’.

The apps that stood out for me in a network originally setup to encourage and to fund app and service development:

So Baz haz a sad that the inevitable end is near. But why, seeing as I’ve not been an active participant since before the middle of 2016?

Signing up to App.net (ADN) resulted in the some of the best things, the most stimulating things (even including btinternet.chatter!) I’ve ever done online. Rather than simply participate I joined in.

My big but short, exhaustive but necessarily incomplete, list of stuff:

It’s not a big list, and though I may have forgotten something big it’s representative of the network’s scope.

But, without all those lovely people, none of my activities mentioned above would have been remotely possible . I’m conscious of the fact others may have been involved prior to my arrival, but I’m speaking from my personal experience. And that’s the key to ADN, a very personal experience, not shaped by the knowledge someone’s looking over your shoulder with a view to monetising your post content.

Best-of-all I relaxed. I met some wonderful, chatty, clever, insightful, downright amazing people there.

Thankyou all, I’ll never forget.

But, to perhaps understand what I’m thinking right now, you had to be there. I was, it was great.


I am @bazbt3 both on 10Centuries.org (Jason Irwin’s burgeoning social/blogging/podcasting network, for which I have invite codes) and on Twitter.


*Let’s just say I popularised them, albeit in a limited manner.