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@@reiver ⊼ (Charles) :batman: Mastodon did start out as a full-stack Web application AFAIK. It used the OStatus protocol, the same protocol as what GNU social was based on and what StatusNet was using prior to its merger with its own fork, GNU social.

However, at first, it was not positioned as a fully independent project of its own, much less a federated walled garden that allegedly only connected to itself. It was initially conceived and advertised as an alternative to GNU social proper with a different, "easier-to-use", more Twitter-like GUI being its main selling-point.

I guess it's pretty obvious that what was working underneath was not GNU social proper either. Two examples to prove this:

Neither Identi.ca nor StatusNet nor GNU social had a rigid, hard-coded character limit of 500 characters. Mastodon had it from the get-go.

Also, Identi.ca, StatusNet and GNU social had a summary field. It was part of the OpenMicroBlogging and OStatus protocols. Both Friendica and Hubzilla made use of this summary field as such. Mastodon did not have the summary field implemented because summaries were pointless if all you had was 500 characters.

Fast-forward to 2017. Mastodon had meanwhile repositioned itself on the "market" as a stand-alone microblogging platform, implying to be a "decentralised, federated walled garden" with its own exclusive technology that nothing else used, and that nothing else connected to. Something that just about every last Mastodon newbie takes Mastodon for still today.

At some point in 2017, a Mastodon user from the demo scene with some development experience submitted a pull request to Mastodon's GitHub repository which would repurpose this very same summary field as a content warning field. The pull request was accepted and merged. Ever since shortly afterwards, Mastodon users started believing that Mastodon's content warning field was invented by Eugen Rochko from scratch. And they still do.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Identi.ca #StatusNet #OStatus #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseHistory
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
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@@reiver ⊼ (Charles) :batman: 2008. When @Evan Prodromou launched Identi.ca.

After all, Mastodon started out as an alternative frontend for GNU social. GNU social is a fork of StatusNet. StatusNet, in turn, was the software which Identi.ca used to run on until it was merged into GNU social in 2013. (Evan first launched Identi.ca, and then he open-sourced the technology under the name of Laconi.ca, later StatusNet.)

This also means that the OStatus protocol is part of Mastodon's history as well. OStatus is the protocol that GNU social was based on back in the day and probably still is, that later versions of StatusNet were based on, and that Mastodon was originally based on. It's the successor to OpenMicroBlogging, the protocol that Identi.ca was launched on, and that early StatusNet was based on. But it was gone when Mastodon was launched.

It's also fair to mention Friendica, the Facebook alternative launched by @Mike Macgirvin ?️ in 2010, and Hubzilla, the "federated social content management system" which, in 2015, emerged from something that Mike himself had forked off Friendica in 2012.

Both speak a whole lot of protocols. Hubzilla used to speak OStatus, Friendica still does. And so, when the very first Mastodon test release came out in early 2016, and the very first Mastodon instance was started up, it was immediately able to connect to GNU social, Friendica and Hubzilla.

It's an important part of Mastodon's history that Mastodon has never in its history been an isolated walled garden, that Mastodon has never in its history been connected to only itself.

Speaking of Hubzilla, it should be mentioned once again, namely in 2017.

The very first Fediverse project to implement ActivityPub was Hubzilla in July. Mastodon followed in September. These two were the only Fediverse projects that adopted ActivityPub before it was declared a standard. And so, for quite a while, it was only these two that could use ActivityPub to connect to each other (while still also being able to do so via OStatus, by the way). But since both have vastly different philosophies, actual compatibility was and still is limited.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Identi.ca #StatusNet #OStatus #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #ActivityPub #FediverseHistory
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@cy
The people who wrote the Fediverse

There were no "people who wrote the Fediverse". These was no committee who laid down the standards.

The Fediverse was invented by @Evan Prodromou. In 2008. By first creating a centralised Twitter alternative silo named Identi.ca.

And then open-sourcing the underlying technology as Laconi.ca, later StatusNet (merged into GNU social in 2013).

And then laying the protocol open as OpenMicroBlogging, later superseded by OStatus.

Then, in 2010, @Mike Macgirvin ?️ decided that the world needs a free, open-source, decentralised, secure alternative to Facebook that's better than Facebook. And so he made Mistpark, today Friendica.

But the features he wanted Friendica to have were impossible to achieve with any existing protocol. OStatus wasn't even that good for microblogging, much less Mike's ambitious plans. Besides, he's an experienced protocol designer. So he created a whole new protocol, DFRN, and built Friendica on top of it. Friendica did adopt OStatus as an extra protocol, though, because Friendica's goal was and still is to federate with everything and then some.

In 2011, Mike had seen many public Friendica nodes shut down with or without warning and people always losing everything and having to start over from scratch. So he decided to do something against it.

He invented nomadic identity. And built a new protocol around it, Zot, because there was no way DFRN could take care of this, let alone OStatus.

In 2012, he forked Friendica into Red and rewrote the whole backend against Zot, which, however, required the creation of yet another identity scheme.

For one, one login could now have multiple fully separate and independent identities on it. For example, my Hubzilla channel URL is https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/channel/jupiter_rowland.

Besides, one identity could now reside on multiple server instances which is what nomadic identity means.

Red was later renamed Red Matrix and, in 2015, refactored, redesigned and renamed into Hubzilla.

Mastodon and Pleroma started in 2016 as OStatus-based alternative UIs for GNU social. Mastodon was the first to be turned into a stand-alone project with not much interest in connecting to anything outside, all in spite of already being federated with Pleroma, GNU social, Friendica and Hubzilla via OStatus.

ActivityPub came out in 2017. No, not 2018. It was standardised in 2018. But it came out in 2017.

In July, 2017, Hubzilla was the first Fediverse project to integrate ActivityPub. Next to its own Zot, next to diaspora*, next to OStatus etc. On the one hand, Hubzilla tried to stay as close to the ActivityPub spec as possible and feasible. On the other hand, Hubzilla had to make its ActivityPub integration, which has always been an optional add-on, compatible to its own technology, to its own Zot protocol, to the way it works.

In September, Mastodon was the second Fediverse project to adopt ActivityPub. But Mastodon was more interested in doing its own thing and being as close to Twitter as it could than in sticking to a protocol spec, much less connecting to non-Mastodon stuff such as Hubzilla with which it already shared two protocols now.

Mastodon was the one that added Webfinger. ActivityPub doesn't even require Webfinger. The ActivityPub spec doesn't contain Webfinger. But Mastodon requires Webfinger. It can't live without Webfinger. So everything that wants to properly federate with Mastodon needs to implement Webfinger.

After ActivityPub had become a standard, more projects adopted it. But as lax a specification as ActivityPub is, it allowed for a lot of liberties.

Some devs looked at how Mastodon had integrated ActivityPub, decided it was rubbish and did it their own way.

Some devs looked at how Mastodon had integrated ActivityPub, decided they couldn't do it the same way because what they did was too different from Mastodon and did it their own way.

Some devs didn't look at what anyone else did and did it their own way.

Probably none of them looked at how Hubzilla had integrated ActivityPub because none of them even knew that Hubzilla existed. Except for those who were maintaining Friendica now. And Friendica had to make it compatible with DFRN and with the way it had been working since 2010.

Fast-forward to 2023. Mike's current piece of work was the streams repository which contains an intentionally nameless fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork) of Hubzilla, slimmed down from Hubzilla, but modernised and technologically even more advanced.

It was then that @silverpill, creator and maintainer of Mitra, got into contact with him because he wanted to add nomadic identity to Mitra. Something that's built on ActivityPub and only supports ActivityPub. A first. No-one had ever done nomadic identity with nothing but ActivityPub before.

So the two started working on how to implement nomadic identity using only ActivityPub. Mike had a vision of a Fediverse with nomadic identity all over and Fediverse identities cloned beyond server application borders. Like, a (streams) channel cloned to Mitra, Mastodon, PeerTube and Mobilizon, all with the same identity.

This, however, required another, brand-new way of identifying Fediverse actors. And so FEP-ef61 "Portable Objects" was created.

We're probably in the middle of xkcd 927 now.

Mike set up an experimental branch of (streams) to develop and test nomadic identity via ActivityPub, also since (streams) already had nomadic identity anyway.

Around summer, the "nomadic" branch (for nomadic identity via ActivityPub) seemed reliable enough to merge it into "dev". And in July, "dev" was merged into "release", complete with nomadic-identity-via-ActivityPub code.

It was shortly after that merge that I created my two (streams) channels. The channel URL of my channel for Fediverse memes is https://streams.elsmussols.net/channel/fedimemes_on_streams. But its DID, which all channels created on accounts registered after that merge got, is https://streams.elsmussols.net/.well-known/apgateway/did:⁠key:z6Mkf2dhUa65zBYCNVqs3AHyt8uPixauZ7bPzEJn15LJANsd/actor. And that's only two IDs of the same channel. There are also others for (streams)' native Nomad protocol, Hubzilla's Zot6 protocol, ActivityPub, OAuth, OAuth2 and probably also OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on, another one of Mike's creations. Not to mention that (streams) channels, like Hubzilla channels and Friendica accounts, can also optionally be group actors.

In fact, this blew up into (streams) users' faces because (streams) confused the various IDs to such degrees that it wouldn't federate at all anymore. It took Mike a whole lot of work to iron this out again, so much that he officially retired from Fediverse development on August 31st.

And in the middle of this, he even created yet another fork, Forte, which is (streams) minus Nomad, minus Zot6, based on and supporting only ActivityPub. My guess is still that one of the reasons to create Forte at that point was to get rid of the Nomad and Zot6 IDs to sort the ID mess out.

Even if nomadic identity via ActivityPub should ever become stable and start spreading, I don't expect DIDs to become the one norm in the Fediverse. Not with all those barely or unmaintained projects and those devs who refuse to acknowledge that devs of other projects do great stuff, too.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #OStatus #DFRN #Zot #ActivityPub #Nomad #Laconi.ca #Identi.ca #StatusNet #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Mastodon #Pleroma #Streams #(streams) #Forte #FEP_ef61
joinfediverse.wikiFriendica - Join the Fediverse

Something I miss about the old is how weirdly well it ranked on Google. Like I could dent something like "The factory service manual doesn't mention it, but when removing the passenger-side CV axle on a 2000 you need to unbolt the support bearing (part 22 in the diagram) from the support bracket (part 23)" and somehow that dent would suddenly be in the top 5 results for "2000 infiniti i30 cv axle". On sharing such information feels like shouting into the void.

Das Fediverse hat jetzt eine Organisation!

Das Prin­zip des Fedi­ver­se ist dezen­tral. Eigent­lich kön­nen alle tun uns las­sen, was sie wol­len, solan­ge sie sich an das Acti­­vi­­ty­­Pub-Pro­­to­­koll des W3-Con­­sor­­ti­ums hält. Die Social Web Foun­da­ti­on will sich jetzt aber dar­um küm­mern, dass das Netz­werk wächst und gedeiht.

https://kaffeeringe.de/2024/09/25/das-fediverse-hat-jetzt-eine-organisation/

kaffeeringe.de · Neugründung: Das Fediverse hat jetzt eine Organisation!Das Prinzip des Fediverse ist dezentral. Eigentlich können alle tun uns lassen, was sie wollen, solange sie sich an das ActivityPub-Protokoll des W3-Consortiums hält. Die Social Web Foundation will sich jetzt aber darum kümmern, dass das Netzwerk wächst und gedeiht.

I used #Identica and #Diaspora back in the day, Tw was just way more practical, the API was almost like a protocol, you could build anything on top of it.

No service at that scale could afford losing money like Twitter. The glorious days of tw were subsidized by VCs.

As simple as that, any instance trying to replicate the current Tw will fail because that model was never real tbw.

#Cohost is a joyful blip bc how much we learned first hand instead of just theorizing about that type of sites.

Since I found my old Identi.ca account a couple of days ago, I searched for and found a few of my old follows.

Hello old friends from 15yrs ago – we probably didn't really get to know each other much back on that platform, but we were pioneering some stuff, right?

Stumbled across my avatar pic for Identi.ca - Looks like I was on there in 2009 based on time stamp.

Vaguely recall a nice person I enjoyed interacting with, but further connections didn't really take, in spite of a bit of effort.

I would have already been on the birdsite for a year or two by then.

Discovered Mastodon in 2019 and connections built nicely here. Glad I jumped in before the bird died. Mastodon stands nicely on the shoulders of what came before.