So one of the aspects of #Mastodon that I'm finding fascinating is its the ability to have essentially real time chat conversations about random topics. This was technically possible on Google+, but a bit unwieldy in practice. It never worked worth a dime on #Twitter, due to all the horrible crud there.
It's perhaps most reminiscent of Usenet from a 100 years ago (or so it feels), though for much of its life Usenet depended on dial-up connectivity, so replies could take hours or even days, depending on call schedules and post routing. But the overall *feel* of the chats is very much similar here. Again, fascinating.
And yet this is (mostly) a store-and-forward system, so it (a) technically degrades gracefully in case of high latency (b) doesn't provide UI affordances that degrade heavily under high latencies (e.g. a typing indicator would be one). (I think that store-and-forward and, in general, latency-tolerant systems are better for multiple reasons: ability to provide some privacy guarantees, and that making them so forces the design to be simple in some ways I care about.)
On a related note, it seems to me that realtime (i.e. characters appear to all parties as one's typing them) chat systems have gone basically extinct. I wonder why; is that a consequence of domination of mobile devices, or something else?
I used ytalk a lot in my early teens and actually preferred that: you could e.g. stop typing something early, because the other person obviously already understood it. Also, typing cadence gave me much more of an impression of there being another person I'm interacting with (similar to what one gets from voice chat).
@robryk Yeah, but did you chuckle at bad typists?
@lauren I don't remember doing so. It might've been the case that ~all my conversation partners were actually good typists :P
@robryk There are technical reasons of course, but also that watching that kind of real-time typing can be quite annoying especially when you're watching real-time corrections and such.