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   f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:15 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

   Since Mastodon saw its initial popularity circa 2017, I've noticed that most users and those reporting on it either don't think about the Fediverse as anything more than Mastodon, or treat its history as beginning with Eugen Rochko and the beginning of Mastodon. In fact, Mastodon is the latest in a long line of federated social networks going at least back to Identi.ca, and though I wasn't around for all of it, I find this history pretty interesting. (Thread; boosts welcome!)

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     Chris 🤩 Reinbothe (phneutral@ruhr.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:29:52 JST Chris 🤩 Reinbothe

     in reply to

     @f00fc7c8 Looking forward to a future with ActivityPub enabled tumblr and flickr. It’s like the good old internet of decentralisation and open standards finally has some sort of rebirth. Here is to the open ones!

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:29:55 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     But this influx has brought new challenges as well - slowdowns and moderation issues on many instances as they have difficulty absorbing the increased traffic, a further increase in the zealous use of instance suspensions threatening to fragment the network and create centralized silos, and many new users having difficulty understanding how the network functions.

     (Thanks for making it to the end of this thread! I hope I didn't make any egregious errors.)

     admin repeated this.
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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:29:58 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     As a result, many fledgling social networks, as well as established networks with better reputations, absorbed massive influxes of Twitter users. The Fediverse was among the more established networks; it saw activity rise into the millions of users, and that's where things stand now. Amidst chaos on the large instances, the usefulness of the Fediverse in finding communities has increased greatly.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:00 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     In October of 2022, billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter, the platform that the largest Fediverse platforms had always aimed to compete with. Under his leadership, in just a month, most of the company's staff was fired, several features of the website became broken, right-wing content was massively promoted, and fears rapidly rose about the website dying or becoming the exclusive territory of the far-right.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:02 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     Around the same time, Pump.io's ActivityPump protocol was being built upon by a number of experts to form the W3C standard ActivityPub. Mastodon, Friendica, and Pleroma were eager to adopt the new standard, even before it was formally published, and eventually Mastodon and Pleroma would drop their support for OStatus. The Fediverse would continue to expand and new platforms were developed - PeerTube for video sharing, Pixelfed for image sharing, BookWyrm for book reviewing, etc.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:04 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     Blocklists of instances with problematic content were widely shared, effectively shutting those instances out of the network; most successful was the #FediBlock hashtag, started by Black users such as artist Marcia X. For a time, this was highly effective in protecting some users, and even led to the fediverse becoming a haven for queer, leftist, and neurodivergent communities. Unfortunately, racism on the Fediverse persists to this day, even on some otherwise well-moderated instances.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:05 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     Mastodon saw significant expansion in 2017, with #DeleteFacebook and similar pushes against proprietary social networks, and a few larger companies supporting the platform. This was also the first time many instances began suspending, or "defederating from", entire other servers in the Fediverse.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:07 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     Mastodon's arrival on the scene nearly constituted a reset of the federated social web. Upon its release in 2016, it federated with GNU social, but it quickly eclipsed that platform in userbase, and most of the new users were unaware of the history behind the federated social web. While Mastodon expanded, GNU social seemingly stagnated, with major instances either disappearing or moving to more advanced federated platforms like Mastodon or Pleroma.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:08 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     Unfortunately, the federated social web of this time was quite poorly moderated; there were servers with rules against certain kinds of harmful content, but their admins had difficulty keeping up with other instances that did not share the same rules, including a lot of "free speech" instances that permitted everything within the law. The existing platforms were not yet able to suspend entire instances, so the moderators of each instance were effectively required to moderate the whole fediverse.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:10 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     That June, control of the StatusNet software was handed over to the GNU Project, one of the oldest collectives of FOSS developers. There it became GNU Social. Without Identi.ca as a central hub, the number of instances expanded and decentralization was realized. I started getting involved a few years after this change; I tried out GNU social as part of a broader effort to open-source my life, and I found quite a lot of people also involved in open-source.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:11 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     In 2013, StatusNet Inc. was running short on money. Prodromou closed registrations for Identi.ca and laid off the company's staff. But his efforts continued, as he developed a new, more extensible platform called Pump.io. It was never as popular as Identi.ca or StatusNet, but those interested in the future of the federated social web followed its development closely.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:12 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     Adding to this were other projects, such as Friendica, which used the same protocol but with a different feature set. Though Identi.ca remained the central server that most users went to, this collective of servers communicating using OStatus became known as the "federated social web," or alternately as the "Fediverse".

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:13 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     For this purpose, he created the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, which, although limited, allowed Identi.ca users to communicate with users of other Laconica instances, like Leo Laporte's TWiT Army. In August 2009, Laconica - both the company and the software - was renamed to StatusNet. The same year they began developing OStatus as a more advanced protocol for federation, which by March 2010 had allowed different StatusNet instances to act almost as a single social network.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 03:30:14 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     The open-source microblogging software Laconica was developed by the company of the same name, owned by Evan Prodromou, starting around 2007. It was to be the basis of the social network Identi.ca, and a hosting service for the internal networks of various companies. Since Laconica was open-source, any user had the right to run their own public instance of the software, and Prodromou wanted these instances to be able to communicate with one another, like e-mail servers.

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     Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified: (mattl@social.mat.tl)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 08:51:45 JST Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified:

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     @f00fc7c8 four students. Ilya died in 2011.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 08:51:46 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

     in reply to

     A couple additional notes:
     - There were plenty of federated communication platforms before Identi.ca. Usenet, FIDOnet (federated BBSes), and of course, e-mail are examples. The lineage to Mastodon is less direct, but it's there.
     - The Diaspora social network, founded in 2010 by three NYU students and inspired by the ideas of Eben Moglen, was another large federated microblogging platform, but used its own protocol and was separate from the others.

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     Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified: (mattl@social.mat.tl)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 08:57:35 JST Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified:

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     @f00fc7c8 GNU FM is summer 2009, GNU social later that year, using StatusNet code is 2011 and merged project with Free&Social in 2012? There was also a moment when some OTHER project tried to claim the name GNU social and that was after I left the FSF in June 2012.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 08:57:36 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     • Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified:

     More edits: comments by @mattl indicate that the GNU social project existed long before StatusNet merged with it, which is confirmed by this FSF blog: <https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-to-host-gnu-social-architecture-meeting>. I've updated my wording to reflect that.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 08:57:37 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

     in reply to

     • clacke
     • jeSuisatire …ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

     Made some edits to the thread. @clacke tells me that the term Fediverse has been in use since 2011-12, and I can believe that. @jesuisatire confirmed my suggestion that instance suspensions didn't exist in the fediverse during the GNU social era - at the very least, Friendica did not have such a feature.

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     f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 08:57:39 JST f00f/eris/continuum/etc

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     • Dr. Matt Lee ?

     - The maintainers of GNU social also worked on the federated music community GNU FM, of which the most prominent instance was Libre.fm (which I also used around the same time I used GNU social). As @mattl describes it, GNU social was his effort to redirect use of GNU FM as a social network, to something better suited for social networking.

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     Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified: (mattl@social.mat.tl)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 09:05:32 JST Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified:

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     @f00fc7c8 also worth putting it into context that GNU social was focusing on a Facebook replacement. All the typical Facebook stuff like Events etc.

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     Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified: (mattl@social.mat.tl)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 09:14:33 JST Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified:

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     @f00fc7c8 https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2010/fall is full of interviews I did with people at the time.

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     Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified: (mattl@social.mat.tl)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 10:53:15 JST Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified:

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     @f00fc7c8 oh and the company behind Libre.fm made a monkey movie in 2015, released in 2017.