Evan Prodromou
Sixteen years ago tomorrow I published the first post on the fediverse.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080618164355/http://identi.ca/notice/1
It's still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that.
https://identi.ca/evan/note/Y0QwGyc1QYilqqawkDrQlg
Thanks to everyone who made identi.ca a great place to be, and thanks to everyone who's expanded the fediverse since then.
Evan Prodromou
Thanks especially to people building software, making art, telling their personal stories, inviting friends or organizations, joining groups, making jokes, thinking hard, making connections, liking, reading, listening, watching, administering, moderating, supporting, sharing, being kind, making friends, answering questions, and otherwise laying down the careful and intricate network of connections between people, software and content that is slowly but surely changing the world.
Jesse Karmani
@evan thank you for all of your tireless work on making the fediverse happen!
Did you imagine when you started that it would take 16 years to get to where we are currently?
Evan Prodromou
@jesseplusplus Probably not. I think I had a very romantic idea of how powerful Open Source and open standards were at that time -- that they would inevitably wash away proprietary, siloed systems. It's also worth noting that there were hundreds of Twitter-like services, and Facebook-like services, and so on during that period. So the idea of federating them made a lot of sense.
Evan Prodromou
@jesseplusplus I had a much more pessimistic feeling about federation by the early 2010s, when that ecosystem had collapsed into a few dominant players. It wasn't until we started the Social Web Working Group at the W3C in 2014 that I started feeling optimistic again -- and even then, I expected the social web to be mostly enterprise social networks, small open source networks, etc. The entry of major commercial social networks has been a big and welcome surprise.
Sarven Capadisli
@evan hey hey! "What's up?" https://web.archive.org/web/20080619034204/http://identi.ca/notice/192
Evan Prodromou
@csarven I'm still glad to see you here!
Supergrobi
@evan for the first moon landing it was more clear to those involved that they'd have to have a historical message at hand :)
clacke
@pavsmith @evan The Fediverse was ahead of its time!
Now we have more people who have had the opportunity to realize what's at stake, and we have big institutions like the European Commission joining the free social web, with servers under their own control.
Paul McO'Smith III
@evan amazing really. why did the world not know about this until the elongate twitter implosion?
clacke
@aburka identi.ca as of July 2013 runs the pump.io protocol.
The standardized ActivityPub ("AP") protocol the Fediverse of today runs on was based on the pump.io protocol, but is not compatible. For starters pump.io uses ActivityStreams 1 but AP uses ActivityStreams 2, which was developed alongside AP.
Here's hoping that one day pump.io will implement ActivityPub and identi.ca will join the Fediverse once again!
aburka 🫣
@evan does it still federate? I pasted the identi.ca url into my Mastodon instance's search bar but it wasn't able to find it
Dr. Quadragon ❌
@evan Thank you for starting this whole beautiful mess!
Evan Prodromou
@ugurcan it wasn't.
Ugurcan Orcun
@evan I wasn’t aware first iteration of Fediverse was a Friendfeed clone 😮
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