@gnu2 @get @verita84 @bot gnu social was completely stagnant when we used it, and it was really slow and also insecure (but nobody noticed because nobody evil used it). A few people like moon and Kenji fixed some issues, I fixed one or two but then I thought "let's not fix a ping pong code php project" and first rewrote the frontend, so I could rewrite the backend in a second step. Mastodon did exist but it didn't really work, I think after I started getting some parts of pleroma-fe going gargron put more energy into mastodon and made it basically usable. I wanted to just work on mastodon then but there were some disagreements (harmless ones) about the API and so on, so I just continued with my own project. Remember, things weren't serious business back then, the whole network was like under a thousand actual users.