24th February 2021 at 10:06

I’m really happy to see Dispo coming out of beta. It’s such a nice, fun little app.

The only “social network” apps that bring me any sort of joy these days are Dispo and TikTok. I guess I should lump Tumblr in that group too.

Everything else is just such hard work. Sure there are good bits—Twitter brings me, personally, a lot of benefits. It also brings a lot of bollocks with it too—especially with bollock-owning people in the replies.

Social networks like Twitter are booming increasingly corporate, too, as people’s work lives merge into their personal lives. I guess the pandemic and tech twitter’s obsession with “passion” are partly to blame for that. The link between people’s personal identity and work identity is certainly growing though.

Services like Dispo and TikTok bring back the raw creative joy that’s been mostly absent from the web for so long. Byte tried it and failed, in my opinion. I think that was a combination of it being dominated with extremely mild content and that content being produced by really unfunny white people. The users also did a lot of gatekeeping when they came out of beta which immediately turned me off the app. I hope Dispo users don’t do the same, but based on what I’ve seen so far as a beta user: they’ve been nothing but delightful.
I even got followed by @piss.

Anyway, go and grab Dispo and give me a shout if you need an invite. You can find me with the @piccalilli handle.

One last thing is it would be lush to see this stuff on the web alongside the walled gardens that are native apps. TikTok has a pretty solid PWA but whinges at you to download the app a lot. I guess that’s something that needs to change, long term.