What was great about it? Its model made no sense tbh. Pay $50/year for an API key to a twitter like platform that nobody is using. Anybody can create an app, but you have to pay them separately. The branding made no sense, “app.net” a microblogging platform? It felt like the only people who ever signed up to app.net were ex-third party twitter developers who felt burned by twitter’s 2012 changes. Their development track seem to be just “hey this thing is popular now, let’s spend 2 years and deliver a half-assed limited implementation for it too late.”
Technically, app.net was a full-fledged Twitter clone, with twice the character limit of Twitter at the time. It was every bit as good as Twitter. As a centralized service, it didn't have the annoying, confusing friction of federated Mastodon, and it wasn't nearly as primitive as Bluesky, which is still very bare bones.
The best part was the community. Almost all of the toxicity of Twitter was absent. And no spam, no bots, or other crap like that.
> Pay $50/year for an API key
You weren't paying for an API key. You had a username and password like Twitter or any other social network. There was a full web interface, as well as native apps, just like Twitter.
And it had RSS feeds, which Twitter had just abolished in 2012.
> The branding made no sense, “app.net” a microblogging platform?
Sure, that was a bit weird. They pivoted to a social network from a previous venture.
> It felt like the only people who ever signed up to app.net were ex-third party twitter developers who felt burned by twitter’s 2012 changes.
Not true. Replace "developers" with "users".
Initially, there were a lot of signups for app.net. The problem was that people didn't quit Twitter. I personally quit Twitter and deleted my account, but most other people didn't fully commit to app.net and kept their Twitter accounts, so they found themselves splitting their time, which isn't a great experience, and a lot of their personal network was still only on Twitter. In the end, Twitter's network effect defeated app.net.
If people only knew in 2012 what Twitter would become in 2022...
app.net was supposed to make sense as a name because it was supposed to be like a Sandstorm or Chrome Web Store for social apps, with a feed engine like getstream.io at its core.
