Pebble, aka t2.social, was a short lived social network like Twitter. Last week they sent out emails to all their users to tell them that the site was shutting down on November 1st. I first came across it thanks to Topgold, but it was always a small site. In a crowded section of the Internet, another Twitter clone would have a tough time competing.
I hadn’t posted much there and wasn’t going to download my data, but this post by Eugen Rochko caught my attention and reminded me to go visit.
If #Pebble was part of the social web, they would have had a network of 1.8M active users, not 1,000, and perhaps wouldn’t have had to shut down.
Eugen Rochko
Maybe it would have survived, but it would have had to be extra special and offer some compelling features to compete with all the “free” Fediverse servers out there. The Activity Pub plugin for WordPress recently hit version 1.0 and was launched on WordPress.com too, so potentially millions of new Fediverse sites are coming online, all of which are on more mature software.
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Interesting. They used a compressed tarball (tar.gz) for their data download. Don’t see that very often!
This is probably a good post to include archive.org links immediately:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231030175939/https://pebble.is/
I was able to see posts 40 minutes ago and posted this photo there, but then it was showing a 500 graphic.
Now I see there will be shutting down at 2pm PT, so a few hours yet.
Pebble is gone. This is what it looked like a few minutes ago.