As parlementum was being wound down and encyclomundi withdrawing from online life in 2013, I took temporary refuge at unlimited.status.net, one of many general-purpose *.status.net servers Evan's company StatusNet was running, experimenting with different maximum post length. They had names like 280, 560 and ... unlimited.

This was during the #pumpocalypse. identi.ca was already running pump.io at this point, but *.status.net were still on StatusNet and OStatus. I was already on the pumpiverse with an account on microca.st, but wanted to stay on the OStatusverse as well. It was not yet clear what that verse would look like without its flagship.

web.archive.org/web/2013050608…

We can see one of the last parlementum posts reposted here:

FINAL WARNING! !parlementum SN site & hyacinth server are shutting down during the day of 15 April PDT.
about 22 days ago from parlementum.net at Wheel Estates Mobile Home Park, Washington, United States Repeat of encyclomundi

@lnxw37a2 Katsma is not sure herself if she coined the Fediverse term, but she definitely spread it.

Thanks for the further clarification that it was before and not directly caused by the impending #pumpocalypse , but rather both were caused by the instability of identi.ca.

Still, the earliest documented use is June 2013 (EDIT: Now Jan 2013). We last tried to find the origin two years ago, and since then now loadaverage.org is also gone. 😔

chaos.social/@moagee/103584660…

@f00fc7c8

@jaywink @sean As the experience with the #pumpocalypse back in 2012 has shown, even a very center-heavy federated network can survive the departure of the largest node, and grow to become bigger than the network before the split.

After identi.ca moved to pump.io, sites like quitter.se increased their numbers dramatically, and by the time of the two big Twitter exoduses around 2016 I wouldn't be surprised if the posting volume and the number of active users were already back to early-2012 levels.

I checked the "My logins" page. Apparently I connected my Google at some point.

> identi.ca/clacke (used Aug 24 '11)

Yep, that was my original SO login. That OpenID provider died in the #pumpocalypse.

@clacke We're losing the oral history enough that we'll need a Call For Papers about the times before #pumpocalypse to record the tales.

@platano @alda laconi.ca was definitely a thing. That's where OStatus comes from. Laconica became StatusNet became GNU Social. Identi.ca was the "flagship" instance, for good and for bad.

Many people didn't stay after the #pumpocalypse. identi.ca itself had 20000 users when it started as a pump.io server, and there were some people who had already registered on Evan's other servers at the time, but I think the number of active pump.io users has always been far below 100000, perhaps even always below 20000.

But killing the flagship was probably a good thing. I don't think the quitters and the rowdy bunch would have happened the way they did if identi.ca would have still been around.

@gargron I don't remember the correct numbers, but I believe that I'm in the ballpark when I say that identi.ca before the #pumpocalypse had something like 120000 users, and Evan kept something like 20000 users when filtering for any activity at all in the preceding 12 months.