A series of tweets dashed off in the middle of the night on my iPad.

I like the precedent Mastodon sets. A server product installed by users. A slow rise as opposed to an overnight success. A dominant competitor falls apart just enough to let a new entrant rise.

I also love the precedent RSS has set. Enduring a long PR campaign against it by tech giants, VCs and pundits, it persisted, having no employees or burn rate it just needs users to keep it going until both twitter and Google Reader are gone.

Bet the naysayers didn’t see RSS surviving through all that, but they don’t study history. Basic formats like RSS once entrenched never go away. Somewhere under NYC the pipes laid in Peter Stuyvesant's time are still carrying water to NYers.

Somewhere deep inside every Chromebook there beats the heart of an IBM ROM BIOS clone still handling all the events from the keyboard. And RSS is there now to provide Mastodon a solid path to informing people who don’t even use the product.

We pick up from where we left off when Twitter and Google Reader plopped their fat asses down on the feediverse. Hopefully we don’t let that happen again but I have my doubts as users flock to VC products just as dominant as those who are now vanquished.

We can now write postmortems on twitter. We know where all the promise, dreaming, vision, puffy news pieces led — it always was a powerful weapon waiting to be used that way, we don’t know it’s limits, but we’re going to find out.