Scott Oldfield
f00f/eris/continuum/etcSince 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 and GNU social (which would eventually replace StatusNet), which used the same protocol but with a different (in the provided examples, Facebook-like) 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, StatusNet development merged with 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.
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.)
AutisticMumTo3 She/her@f00fc7c8
Thanks for writing it
Thanks for writing it
Prem Kumar Aparanji 👶🤖🐘@f00fc7c8 *sigh* those were the days! I lost track of Identi.ca & TWiT after around 2013ish. Thank you for rejigging my memory. ☺️👍🏼
@prem_k I wasn't around for those, so I hope my summary (mostly pulled from Wikipedia and archives of the StatusNet blog) was accurate!
@f00fc7c8 sounds about right, though I'm sure Wikipedia might be a better source than my sketchy memories which are legendary in my family and at work as such🤣
elena razlogova@f00fc7c8 @prem_k Thank you for a great #fediverse history thread! Where is the archive of the StatusNet Blog? Would love to read it.
@erazlogo @prem_k By archive I mean the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine, so expect some difficulties, but here: https://web.archive.org/web/20131206162815/http://status.net/blogs/evan
Sasha Costanza-Chock@f00fc7c8 thank you for writing this excellent short history of the #Fediverse!
@schock thanks for reading it!
Chema Hernández GilAgreed, thank you! I am bookmarking it to share with folks.
Alistair Davidson@f00fc7c8 great thread!
There was also Diaspora in 2010 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
It was inspired by a series of talks given by Eben Moglen, the Free Software Foundation's lawyer.
Eben Moglen - Freedom in The Cloud
Auf YouTube findest du großartige Videos und erstklassige Musik. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder mit der ganzen Welt teilen.
Tapio@f00fc7c8 nice one, thanks! I remember the identi.ca days but wasn’t aware about its fate.
Ron Starman@f00fc7c8 Thank you! Very informative for this n00b.
André Cotte@f00fc7c8 Many thanks for this history of federated social networking. I appreciate.
Chris 🤩 Reinbothe@f00fc7c8 Looking forward to a future with ActivityPub enabled tumblr and flickr. It’s like the good old internet of decentralisation and open standards finally has some sort of rebirth. Here is to the open ones!
Lord Blood 
lefterisjp@f00fc7c8 Thank you for this thread! I learned something new.
Ehud@f00fc7c8 whatever happened to Evan?
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
Evan Prodromou (@[email protected])
5.07K Posts, 297 Following, 107 Followers · He/him. In Montreal, from San Francisco. Greek, Arab, American, Canadian. Husband, father, cook, gardener. This is my private account for family and close friends. Check out @[email protected] for my public persona.
A couple additional notes:
- There were plenty of federated communication platforms before Identi.ca. Usenet, FIDOnet (federated BBSes), IRC networks, and of course, e-mail are examples. The lineage to Mastodon is less direct, but it's there.
- The Diaspora social network, founded and crowdfunded in 2010 by four NYU students and inspired by the ideas of Eben Moglen, is another large federated microblogging platform, but uses its own protocol and is separate from the others.
- There were plenty of federated communication platforms before Identi.ca. Usenet, FIDOnet (federated BBSes), IRC networks, and of course, e-mail are examples. The lineage to Mastodon is less direct, but it's there.
- The Diaspora social network, founded and crowdfunded in 2010 by four NYU students and inspired by the ideas of Eben Moglen, is another large federated microblogging platform, but uses its own protocol and is separate from the others.
- 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. Both projects started around 2009.
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.
jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ#fediverse most likely came out of:
#federatedweb #thefederation
https://the-federation.info/
https://pod.geraspora.de/tags/federatedweb
11 years ago (23/11/2011):
https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/241894
https://pod.geraspora.de/tags/thefederation
8 years ago:
https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/207698050916223098054533c43e9e16
A publication of diaspora.arg about how to get rid of a troll on an instance scale (27/03/2017):
https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/35714b00d6b201330f7c00145e5c073c
(I know because .. 😮 )
¿Qué es un troll y cómo nos defendemos de ellos?
¿Qué es un troll y cómo nos defendemos de ellos? http://bitsocialmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Internet-Troll.jpg http://bitsocialmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Internet-Troll.jpg En la jerga de Internet, un trol o troll describe a una persona que publica mensajes provocadores, irrelevantes o fuera de tema en una comunidad en línea, como ser un foro de discusión, sala de chat, comentarios de blog, o similar, con la principal intención de molestar o provocar una respuesta emocional negativa en los usuarios y lectores, con fines diversos (incluso por diversión) o, de otra manera, alterar la conversación normal en un tema de discusión, logrando que los mismos usuarios se enfaden y se enfrenten entre sí. Según la Universidad de Indiana son una comunidad en aumento. El trol puede crear mensajes con diferente tipo de contenido como groserías, ofensas, mentiras difíciles de detectar, con la intención de confundir y ocasionar sentimientos encontrados en los demás. (https://es.w...
clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛@jesuisatire People involved with the identi.ca-centered network used the term "federated social web" at least a few (EDIT: months) before the first Diaspora pod was deployed:
www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/fede…
The Fediverse was coined as an alternative to the Identiverse. Marjolein Katsma used both in parallel to promote the term:
web.archive.org/web/2013051712…
@f00fc7c8
www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/fede…
The Fediverse was coined as an alternative to the Identiverse. Marjolein Katsma used both in parallel to promote the term:
web.archive.org/web/2013051712…
@f00fc7c8
just to clarify, not sure about the "timestap" you are talking about here:
2005?
2011?
#diaspora wikipedia:
> To obtain the necessary funds the project was launched on April 24, 2010 on Kickstarter, a crowd funding website.
..
The group received crowdfunding in excess of $200,000 via Kickstarter. A consumer alpha version was released on 23 November 2010.
@jesuisatire @f00fc7c8 > The Federated Social Web concept was started in summer 2010
@jesuisatire @clacke According to that w3c page: "The Federated Social Web concept was started in summer 2010 at the first Federated Social Web Summit in Portland" and "This XG started on 15 December 2010 and transitioned on 12 January 2012 to Federated Social Web Community Group."
So around the same time, apparently.
sounds like friendica was involved?
You might argue friendica was the one that tried to "federate" the whole time with any protocol that showed up, beingit diaspora* or identica/GNUsocial, actually you'll find even twitter and fb in the federating tools of friendica.
> Mikael Identiverse
Good morning !tzag !identiverse #friendicaverse #fediverse
@jesuisatire Yes, that's how Friendica was and is and it arrived in 2010 as well, just like Diaspora.
That doesn't really have anything to do with the roots of the Fediverse term though.
@f00fc7c8
That doesn't really have anything to do with the roots of the Fediverse term though.
@f00fc7c8
@clacke @jesuisatire thanks for the sources there!
Morrigan@f00fc7c8 @[email protected] @jesuisatire Thank you for sharing this information. I’m not nimble in the digital universe as I came to it later than many. Thus I appreciate this bit of history.
Zorro Notorious MEB 😡Thanks for this! I used to go to the Indie Web conferences when they were here in Portland. I was one of the early users of identi.ca. I'm a hard-core tech guy but I found the technology behind the indie web frustrating to use, so beyond putting a "rel=me" on websites I've never done much with it.
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.
Another note (updated thanks to detailed explanations in a reply by @clacke):
I previously left out Diaspora from this thread because it doesn't directly federate with the social networks I mentioned, but it does, partially. Thanks to common elements in Diaspora and StatusNet software stacks, users of Identi.ca, and StatusNet and GNU social instances, can see posts from Diaspora users. However, the differences mean that Diaspora users can't see their posts, and replies do not work.
I previously left out Diaspora from this thread because it doesn't directly federate with the social networks I mentioned, but it does, partially. Thanks to common elements in Diaspora and StatusNet software stacks, users of Identi.ca, and StatusNet and GNU social instances, can see posts from Diaspora users. However, the differences mean that Diaspora users can't see their posts, and replies do not work.
Friendica also has long had support for federation with Diaspora, and both the OStatus and ActivityPub protocols, plus extensions to read many other social networking and link aggregation services.
Ninja 🦝 
@f00fc7c8 thank you for this excellent thread (and subsequent amendments), there’s a whole bunch I didn’t know on there. But it explains why Mastodon has felt a bit like coming home - I’ve hung out on several of the other open source platforms along the way, makes sense they’re all kinda related!!
Cole LeFavour (they/them)@f00fc7c8
appreciate all the history. Thank you.
appreciate all the history. Thank you.
clacke at libranet.de is my main [mkd]@f00fc7c8 A GNU Social account is still able to follow an account on Diaspora the software (D*).
D* accounts cannot follow OStatus accounts and GS followers of a D* account cannot reply to posts, the D* feed is just a news feed.
Here's why:
OStatus is a stack of protocols:
1. WebFinger
2. Atom
3. ActivityStreams v1
4. WebSub (PubSubHubbub at the time)
5. Salmon
Diaspora of 2010 did these too, but slightly differently. It defined the WebFinger record differently so the Salmon reply endpoints cannot be found by GS. Also GS does Salmon slightly wrong, so they wouldn't be able to talk anyway.
GS is liberal enough that it can follow any Atom+WebSub feed, if it's AS1 then even better.
Diaspora the protocol is now documented and doesn't mention WebSub, it's Salmon for both replies and for updating followers, so GS without ActivityPub cannot follow e.g. a SocialHome account, as SocialHome was developed from the spec rather than imitating the implementation. D* still keeps the legacy WebSub around and can be followed.
@[email protected]
D* accounts cannot follow OStatus accounts and GS followers of a D* account cannot reply to posts, the D* feed is just a news feed.
Here's why:
OStatus is a stack of protocols:
1. WebFinger
2. Atom
3. ActivityStreams v1
4. WebSub (PubSubHubbub at the time)
5. Salmon
Diaspora of 2010 did these too, but slightly differently. It defined the WebFinger record differently so the Salmon reply endpoints cannot be found by GS. Also GS does Salmon slightly wrong, so they wouldn't be able to talk anyway.
GS is liberal enough that it can follow any Atom+WebSub feed, if it's AS1 then even better.
Diaspora the protocol is now documented and doesn't mention WebSub, it's Salmon for both replies and for updating followers, so GS without ActivityPub cannot follow e.g. a SocialHome account, as SocialHome was developed from the spec rather than imitating the implementation. D* still keeps the legacy WebSub around and can be followed.
@[email protected]
@notclacke @clacke thanks for the detailed technical explanation!
Olav@f00fc7c8 I don't remember specifically, so I'll say when I was involved 2 years ago the handful of diaspora* devs were pretty set against expanding beyond their garden.
(Thing is I nuked my ~100 pod and within a year my friend their ~10k pod because diaspora doesn't believe in moderation)
(Thing is I nuked my ~100 pod and within a year my friend their ~10k pod because diaspora doesn't believe in moderation)
Dr. Matt Lee@f00fc7c8 GNU FM is summer 2009, GNU social later that year, using StatusNet code is 2011 and merged project with Free&Social in 2012? There was also a moment when some OTHER project tried to claim the name GNU social and that was after I left the FSF in June 2012.
@f00fc7c8 https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2010/fall is full of interviews I did with people at the time.
@f00fc7c8 oh and the company behind Libre.fm made a monkey movie in 2015, released in 2017.