@@reiver ⊼ (Charles) :batman: Mastodon did start out as a full-stack Web application AFAIK. It used the OStatus protocol, the same protocol as what GNU social was based on and what StatusNet was using prior to its merger with its own fork, GNU social.

However, at first, it was not positioned as a fully independent project of its own, much less a federated walled garden that allegedly only connected to itself. It was initially conceived and advertised as an alternative to GNU social proper with a different, "easier-to-use", more Twitter-like GUI being its main selling-point.

I guess it's pretty obvious that what was working underneath was not GNU social proper either. Two examples to prove this:

Neither Identi.ca nor StatusNet nor GNU social had a rigid, hard-coded character limit of 500 characters. Mastodon had it from the get-go.

Also, Identi.ca, StatusNet and GNU social had a summary field. It was part of the OpenMicroBlogging and OStatus protocols. Both Friendica and Hubzilla made use of this summary field as such. Mastodon did not have the summary field implemented because summaries were pointless if all you had was 500 characters.

Fast-forward to 2017. Mastodon had meanwhile repositioned itself on the "market" as a stand-alone microblogging platform, implying to be a "decentralised, federated walled garden" with its own exclusive technology that nothing else used, and that nothing else connected to. Something that just about every last Mastodon newbie takes Mastodon for still today.

At some point in 2017, a Mastodon user from the demo scene with some development experience submitted a pull request to Mastodon's GitHub repository which would repurpose this very same summary field as a content warning field. The pull request was accepted and merged. Ever since shortly afterwards, Mastodon users started believing that Mastodon's content warning field was invented by Eugen Rochko from scratch. And they still do.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Identi.ca #StatusNet #OStatus #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseHistory