That prompted me to imagine what a parody of a GNU-style Twitter would look like, and yes, the connection works from the opposite direction.

Tilable interface, requires days to set it up, tweet with i "Hello World!" <ESC> t, native vim keymap support, and hard to quit.

> tweet with i "Hello World!" <ESC> t, native vim keymap support

vim is not GNU, emacs is.

That means it would actually be <M-t> Hello World! <C-x> <C-s>, and the documentation would have a lengthy section on what the "Meta" key is and why not just call it "Alt".

Neither actually :-)

EMACS dates back to 1976 (David Moon & Guy Steele); vi also dates back to 1976 (Bill Joy).

GNU Project dates back "only" to 1983, with GNU Emacs soon after: 1984.

It's maintained by GNU. GNU Emacs is the modern Emacs.

That's unnecessarily complicated. The vim way is better.

Sadly, it seems to be dead.

...which is exactly what one should expect something called "GNU Social" to be.

(not actually the op)

I agree. I say that a someone who doesn't tend to support popularity contests as a solution to everything. For example, privacy, buying local, supporting SMBs, thinking critically, and many more are hard, in different ways but those albeit important are not easy to do. Many people would say "make privacy easy!", OK we've got Signal, Tails, Tor, etc. "Make supporting SMBs more appealing!", OK we've got Shopify, Stripe Etsy, Gumroad etc. "Make thinking critically easier!!!" ... Wait a second, thinking critically is and will be hard, perhaps not hard but at least not easy.

GNU Social was called StatusNet and Laconica before that, but no, they still chose a deliberately uncool name in one of the most extreme popularity-driven markets. Not that we ought to drop our standards, but why choose such a petty hill to die on?

I hear that it hosts a relatively vibrant Hurd community.

It’s not exactly modern design but it does work and is super easy to set up.

It can be made relatively pretty: https://web.archive.org/web/20100413124819/http://identi.ca/