this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
702 points (99.3% liked)
Microblog Memes
9958 readers
2921 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:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Basically, yes. In the olden days, cell phones sent a ping at least once a minute to the nearest tower, and sometimes more often. The tower would respond with a similar message. There was a 140 character field in the ping that could be used for a variety of diagnostics and network controls. That field was also used for text messaging and so was pretty much free for the providers, other than the very small amount of general network backhaul overhead of sending that message to another phone. Charging for texts was a hell of a rip off.