 Sixteen years ago tomorrow I published the first post on the fediverse. https://web.archive.org/web/20080618164355/http://identi.ca/notice/1 It's still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that. https://identi.ca/evan/note/Y0QwGyc1QYilqqawkDrQlg Thanks to everyone who made identi.ca a great place to be, and thanks to everyone who's expanded the fediverse since then. 31 comments
 Thanks especially to people building software, making art, telling their personal stories, inviting friends or organizations, joining groups, making jokes, thinking hard, making connections, liking, reading, listening, watching, administering, moderating, supporting, sharing, being kind, making friends, answering questions, and otherwise laying down the careful and intricate network of connections between people, software and content that is slowly but surely changing the world.  @evan My first identi.ca post : 09/25/2009... https://web.archive.org/web/20090601075957/http://identi.ca/nizarus  @evan Also thank you to everyone who pumped their lives in and out of their friends.  @evan thank you for all of your tireless work on making the fediverse happen! Did you imagine when you started that it would take 16 years to get to where we are currently? @jesseplusplus Probably not. I think I had a very romantic idea of how powerful Open Source and open standards were at that time -- that they would inevitably wash away proprietary, siloed systems. It's also worth noting that there were hundreds of Twitter-like services, and Facebook-like services, and so on during that period. So the idea of federating them made a lot of sense. @jesseplusplus I had a much more pessimistic feeling about federation by the early 2010s, when that ecosystem had collapsed into a few dominant players. It wasn't until we started the Social Web Working Group at the W3C in 2014 that I started feeling optimistic again -- and even then, I expected the social web to be mostly enterprise social networks, small open source networks, etc. The entry of major commercial social networks has been a big and welcome surprise. @evan what a rollercoaster of emotions! π I really appreciate that you kept working on it even when it didn't seem like open standards would win over proprietary stuff. That takes serious dedication! I remember feeling the same idealism each time I encountered a new federated social network I thought was going to take over (diaspora, then mastodon) and then the ensuing disappointment when it didn't happen right away. Seeing threads + bluesky has helped buoy my hopes again! Now for instagram...  @evan for the first moon landing it was more clear to those involved that they'd have to have a historical message at hand :)  @evan Mang, I tried using identica a bunch of times back in the day, but it had a UI so confusing I literally couldn't figure it out even tho I'm a web developer myself. Very glad Fedi saw lots of development since then, because I still see the concept as *extremely* relevant. Thanks for starting that journey. :)  @evan Your work is a huge inspiration for me, and I can't believe how far we've come.  @evan I made an identi.ca account back in 2009 I think? I strongly wish I'd participated more -- it felt good right off the bat somehow, life just pulled me away. It is so cool to think the fediverse was around all that time ago.  @evan I really wish I had stuck with it the whole time! Here are some of my posts from 2008.  @evan huge thanks back to you Evan, for laying the groundwork for identi.ca and everything that came afterwards ... you're one of the giants on whose shoulders the fediverse is standing today πͺ  @evan amazing really. why did the world not know about this until the elongate twitter implosion?   @evan thanks Evan for these first steps to the Fediverse π€  @evan does it still federate? I pasted the identi.ca url into my Mastodon instance's search bar but it wasn't able to find it @aburka identi.ca as of July 2013 runs the pump.io protocol. The standardized ActivityPub ("AP") protocol the Fediverse of today runs on was based on the pump.io protocol, but is not compatible. For starters pump.io uses ActivityStreams 1 but AP uses ActivityStreams 2, which was developed alongside AP. Here's hoping that one day pump.io will implement ActivityPub and identi.ca will join the Fediverse once again!  |
Gregory's Server
@evan thank you, loved identi.ca and all that followed