this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
1067 points (98.1% liked)
Microblog Memes
10759 readers
2334 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
That's because cell phone audio quality in the analog era was shit. Knowing that you'd be giving condolences with a hissy, staticky, distorted voice is kinda rude when a landline payphone isn't that far away.
It was more that the person you were calling meant so little to you that you made the call while you were doing other things. Back then calling someone was almost like meeting them for coffee, often you would pre arrange the rough time you would call, and you were both engaged in the activity because you had to be at home sitting next to the phone. There was a certain effort to it that would seem lacking if you just could pull out a phone while you were walking down the street.
People weren't still scheduling calls in the '90s. We had answering machines and even voicemail by then.
In the early 2000s I was still arranging landline calls ahead of time with my friends because you couldn't use the internet at the same time as the phone.
A good portion of houses in my country never received a telephone line. Straight from arranging calls between phone booths to mobile.
Before 1989, the state monopoly had an installation backlog of several years (you could only get a line fast if you were high up in the party or had friends at the telco), high monthly fees and was woefully behind on tech: there was no digital voice equipment on the whole network, while the US's Bell trunk network had all-digital audio by 1970. Even until like 1980, in regional towns of 30k-50k, they required you to speak to operators for out-of-town calls. After 1990, the company privatized but it was still prohibitively expensive to get a line set up, as so much money needed to be spent to belatedly bring the network into the digital era. The monopoly ended around 2000 and prices went down but by that point, people saw the dawn of mobile and didn't want to pay for a new phone line anymore.