About Stigmi
2022. Twitter is acquired for $44B and taken private. Then rebranded to X in 2023.
Twitter was also born 20 years ago. Stigmi is the faithful recreation of Twitter back in those days - 20 years later.
(if you're looking for how to use Stigmi, check out the help page)
Twitter was acquired in 2022 and rebranded to X in 2023. Verification became something you could buy instead of something the platform vouched for. The timeline became algorithmic by default. The character limit grew, then grew again, 178x more than the original, or, 25,000 characters. Long-form video, monetization, and an entirely different brand identity arrived. Whatever X is now, it isn't trying to be the thing it was in 2007 -- and there's nothing wrong with that; it just means the original thing doesn't exist anywhere anymore.
Stigmi is a hobby project, created entirely by exerinity to recreate the specific feeling of early Twitter: a small, chronological, text-first, slightly broken website where the only thing happening to your timeline is the passage of time.
If you remember refreshing a 140-character timeline in 2008 and you'd like to feel that again for a few minutes, that's what this is for.
Disclaimer
Stigmi is still in an extremely early alpha stage, is experimental, and might never see a release. Don't yet depend or rely on it. And frankly, I have to be a bit cautious with how far I take this project: I don't want the press, the authorities, the government, or Elon Musk beating my door down. Or anyone, for that matter...At the heart of Stigmi are short messages called Stigs. To repost is to Restig. A stig can - for now - contain up to 140 characters, a location and links. Images might come soon.
What "faithful" means here
- 140 characters character limit - not 280. Or 25,000.
- Favorites.
- Restig. Reposting attributes the original author and does nothing else.
- Reverse-chronological. Your timeline is sorted by time.
What's however different
Stigmi is not Twitter, X, or affiliated with either in any way. It's an independent tribute built from scratch. The underlying technology is entirely modern -- JavaScript, Express, this and that... it just happens to be wearing a 2008 costume. Your data lives in a database file on the server running this site, not in a huge data center.
The name
Stigmi (Στιγμή) is modern Greek for moment. A Stig is meant to be exactly that: a small, timestamped fragment of what you were doing, thinking, or looking at right now - a moment, in 140 characters or fewer.