thoughts.page

September 9, 2021 7:39 PM

thoughts.page is a platform for hosting a small webpage for your thoughts. it's basically like twitter, but nobody can @ you. [via mefi projects]
posted by aniola (15 comments total)

Spooky timing :)
posted by fallingbadgers at 8:58 PM on September 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

but can they be red?
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 9:01 PM on September 9, 2021 [15 favorites]

Is this something I'd need thoughts to understand?
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:05 PM on September 9, 2021 [9 favorites]

The pages don't have RSS feeds or any other means of aggregating them. Which is cozy and cottagecore and minimal and so on, but also impractical, as nobody is going to keep a browser tab open for each of their friends' thoughts page and periodically poll them.

At this stage, it looks like guestbook.cgi with nicer CSS.
posted by acb at 2:24 AM on September 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

But if rss support was added then what would differentiate this from Twitter? I like that it is impractical in that way, I think it is a deliberate design choice.
posted by Literaryhero at 2:34 AM on September 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

Well, who is the audience for your thoughts? Presumably not your coterie of friends who all have their own lives and aren't going to be hitting reload on it several times a day. The only possibilities I see are that no other soul ever looks at your writings there, in which case you might as well write your thoughts to a text file on your hard drive, or that it attracts attention of a sort you'd rather not get: an obsessive follower with creepily too much time on their hands and a laser-like focus, a gang of bored *chan griefers who decide that your tears would taste delicious, Russian autonomous predatory systems targeting the vulnerable and prone to oversharing, or similar.
posted by acb at 2:44 AM on September 10, 2021

I don’t see how a setup that doesn’t let people message you or follow you (and in which you don’t have to use your real name) can be used for griefing. If anything, it neuters negative interactions.

Neither do I see how this is more prone to stalking or obsession than Twitter, IG, FB, etc.

I would absolutely visit a thoughts page for a comediana local band or anyone else who had interesting ideas. In practice it’s literally no worse/different then visiting MeFi via a browser bookmark. It’s harder to follow lots of people, but that’s the point, no?

It’s a form of one-to-many communication without having to worry about toxic interactions.
posted by oddman at 4:27 AM on September 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

This reminds me of the way people used to use the finger protocol back in the early days of the web. If you know where to look, here's a bit of my current status / thoughts / feelings.

Not having an RSS feed raises the level of effort required to follow someone. I don't use twitter, but there are a handful of people I occasionally check up on by using a web browser to view their twitter page which I've bookmarked. This has the benefit of keeping the number of people I follow to an absolute minimum and limits how often I read their tweets to however often it is I remember to check if they've said anything new.

I wonder how many people do this because I've noticed that Twitter has recently started discouraging passive viewing. Just browsing to someone's twitter page now results in an embedded popup asking me to log in, and trying to follow any links results in a similar popup that can't be closed.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:20 AM on September 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Or, in practice, a one-to-epsilon communication, with the average number of readers approaching zero. A bit like building a dish aerial, pointing it upwards and beaming your thoughts into space.
posted by acb at 5:21 AM on September 10, 2021

I like that we're now reinventing Web 1.0, but now with better top-level domains!
posted by biogeo at 7:50 AM on September 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Incredible thoughts
Incredible minds
I'm so overwhelmed
How did my brain conceive them?

Incredible Thoughts
posted by Omon Ra at 8:12 AM on September 10, 2021

Hmm I could pay $5 a month to post thoughts no one will ever read, or I could pay $2 a month to post pictures someone might look at.

Honestly, it's a toss-up.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:31 AM on September 10, 2021

Metafilter: $5 [...] to post thoughts no one will ever read
posted by biogeo at 11:56 AM on September 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

I admit I kind of like the idea for posting trivial thoughts without anyone really seeing them and getting offended and people can't respond or easily complain about them.

Probably not that motivated enough to pay $5 to do it, though.
And lord knows their example thoughts were...not worth reading.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:44 PM on September 10, 2021

Is the posting-them-to-the-internet part meant to serve as a ritual, like writing them on paper and burning them or something?
posted by acb at 3:46 AM on September 11, 2021 [1 favorite]