Notices by f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social), page 2

@puniko ah, so it's the "let's not get foreclosed on" task force

@puniko i honestly don't play this game either, i just saw "foreclosure" and thought "the bank, foreclosing a mortgaged home due to unpaid loans (i.e. eviction for homeowners)"

@puniko > foreclosure task force

wait is hoshino an evil banker

boost this cat whenever you feel like it. no rush.

I often hear that the conlang toki pona is stereotypically popular on fedi, but I haven't found many toki pona speakers to follow myself. Any recommendations of who to follow?

mi kute e ni lon tenpo mute: jan mute pi toki pona li lon linluwi ma ni. taso, mi ken ala alasa e ona. mi o lukin e jan seme pi toki pona?

@evan evan.

@mattl @aeonofdiscord @hierarchon GNU FM. Is the Hacienda project superseding it?

@aeonofdiscord @hierarchon it just saw its "final" release, but @mattl is developing a proper federated replacement for it

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.