Gregory's Server
@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.
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2 comments
 @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 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.