Gregory's Server@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?
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3 comments
 @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! 😅 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... |
@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.