clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy πΈπͺππ°ππOn Saturday, the Fediverse is celebrating it's 16th anniversary!
How are you celebrating?
Tonight when I should have been sleeping or writing some stuff for work, I accidentally took a walk down fedi memory lane. Someone posted on their profile which accounts they had when, and I was inspired and made yet another attempt to locate some fragments of posts on servers long gone.
This time I was successful!
RE: libranet.de/objects/0b6b25a8-1β¦
A brief timeline of Fedi and my life on it:
2008-05-18 @evan fires up identi.ca, the beginning of it all:
web.archive.org/web/2008061816β¦
This is my first post.2008-10-14 I joined identi.ca. I don't know what my first post was.
2011-11-29 I joined parlementum.net. What's the point of being on a federated network if you're on the same server as everyone else?
web.archive.org/web/2013030121β¦
Parlementum was run by encyclomundi, who after a while would come down with life-threatening illness and disappeared off the net for several years. When he resurfaced we said hello on Twitter, but I never met him in person before he left this world for good.
This loss was the point at which I decided I should travel to meet more fedis, so if you meet me in Portland, OR in August this year, it will be partly because Charles "encyclomundi" Roth, his generosity and his kindness made such a deep impression on me.
π₯° GNU encyclomundi π₯°
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/2013050608β¦
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
It was becoming clear that Qvitter was the future of the Fediverse. It was being called the Fediverse now, at least by some people, since around May 2012 if I remember our fedi archaeology accurately.
GNU Social / StatusNet was looking old-fashioned and Qvitter was the new and cool web application that looked like Twitter 2013 instead of Twitter 2008. Unfortunately it also broke the Wayback Machine, so today I'm grateful to the sites that retained the old-school UI as their default.
Early on quitter.se seems to have kept old-school the default, so we can see my profile page and that I joined on 2013-07-21.
2016 was a tumultuous year. A Twitter exodus led to @sun and others first joining quitter.se and other Qvitter sites, then setting up their own servers where they didn't have to follow quitter.se rules. quitter.se admin Hannes helped them with this, you can read more about it in Robek's web.archive.org/web/2022110718β¦ . This changed Fediverse social dynamics forever.
A few months later @Gargron launched Mastodon and mastodon.social. *This* changed Fediverse social dynamics forever. Again.
2016-10-11 I joined mastodon.social to try it out, but quitter.se was still my main.
The Nexus of Privacy@clacke great thread. It would be great to know more about the word fediverse was getting used in 2012, the The Federated SNS (Fediverse) Historical Timeline likes to a Twitter archive that doesn't show usage really picking up until early 2013. But then again that's usage on Twitter ... what about actually on the (proto-)fediverse?
@thenexusofprivacy That's a cool timeline! And you actually have a receipt for "fediverse" in 2012-05, that's awesome.
I agree that it wasn't in general use. The skilledtests group "fediverse", e.g., wasn't created until 2013-07.
My timeline is based on people who were there agreeing that by the time Katsma was using it on Twitter in 2013-01, it had an established meaning.
The term was in use before identi.ca left OStatus, as people were creating more servers and moving away ahead of time. I haven't been able to find a hard source for that claim though, sorry.
@clacke thanks, that's great info! And yeah, very hard to find hard sources for stuff from back then.
I'm not sure about the 2012-05 reference, it might be talking about the fediverse in the sense of "the network used by the feds" (aka US government employees).
(BTW the timeline isn't mine, it was done by @youronlyone )
@thenexusofprivacy Yes, after looking again I'd want better evidence that the first mention there was actually related to the free social web.
Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta μ¬μνπ¦£As far as I remember, βfediverseβ was actively used in identica groups. But, unfortunately, after a thorough search of web.archive.org for instances around that time, none were archived. The only ones archived were the Twitter ones, users who crossposted to Twitter.
T_T
Some of those Twitter posts with βfediverseβ, came from Laconica/StatusNet instances. Some of them were very familiar. It started as βidentiverseβ before it turned into βfediverseβ. I remember there was a discussion about it. Someone raised how βidentiverseβ no longer fits as there are other instances besides identica already (not to mention, other software, and identica is attached to Laconica/StatusNet).
So, yeah, sadly, that's history that can no longer be βverifiedβ. I don't even trust what I remember, LOL. It was a time when everyone was just cool about it, agrees easily, and then poof, it's done. It didn't register well in our memories.
morph@clacke R.I.P. Charlesπ―οΈ
@clacke Yeah! Parlementum / Encyclomundi. I miss him. He was one of the earliest host who simply provided various services without asking for anything in return.
He's still around, using Hubzilla I think, but not that active anymore, I think?
EDIT: I just read, he went ahead. T_T Rest in peace!
(I guess someone's pretending to be him recently.)
Laurel L RusswurmOh, I am so sad to hear of Charles' passing. He was such a lovely person...one of the friends I made through Identica, and one of the people I have hoped to reconnect with in the Fediverse.
Yep. He's kind, approachable, committed to innovation and a sharing culture. I miss his insights. T_T
Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}I think I briefly had a Parlementum account. I felt like I didn't have the resources to help support Charles' dream, so I didn't want to consume the limited resources he had available.
elmussolWhen Charles got too ill to give Parlementum the love it deserved, he moved his fedi presence to my (at the time Red Matrix) elsmussols.net instance and then came along for the ride when we went Hubzilla.
We were the same age to within a couple of weeks and I miss him a lot and think of him often. A privilege to know him.
We were the same age to within a couple of weeks and I miss him a lot and think of him often. A privilege to know him.
@elmussol Did you meet Charles in person?
Painfully no. He was desperate to come to els Mussols to see our mountain and our olives. We talked of (pipe-dream) meetings in Jamaica to watch cricket and baseball in Havana.
@[email protected] came to visit us irl and if iirc it was not too long after he died. We talked of Charles whilst harvesting olives and just being happy and sad at the same time, knowing he would've absolutely loved that.
@[email protected] came to visit us irl and if iirc it was not too long after he died. We talked of Charles whilst harvesting olives and just being happy and sad at the same time, knowing he would've absolutely loved that.
And self-professed fediverse nomad @[email protected] keeps the name alive.
And the Pickwick Club still exists as a Telegram thing.
Giac El Vecio