As AP was coming up, @lain started working on Pleroma to explore:
1. AP, and a backend written to use it as its internal datamodel from the get go
2. A backend in a language for highly concurrent network services (Elixir)
3. A frontend with new ideas for threading and a modern web framework (Vue)
The first phase was to bootstrap by building the new frontend over the GNU Social backend. Some time around 2017-04-01 I joined heldscalla to be there as it happened. We can see in chirp.cooleysekula.net/convers… that I was setting up my follows on the new account.