Notices by f00f/eris/continuum/etc (f00fc7c8@kind.social), page 3

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)