On 2008-05-18 15:49:33, the father of the #Fediverse and creator of #ActivityPub, Evan Prodromou, sent the first ever message in what was later called the “Fediverse” social network (not Mastodon® social network).

  • The first software was called Laconica.
  • The first instance was Identica.
  • The first prototol was OpenMicroBlogging.
  • The first label/name was Identiverse social network.

Here is the archived post: This is my first post.

The network never went down. From the first protocol, OpenMicroBlogging, it switched to the protocol OStatus (also by Evan), then to ActivityPub as most know it today. It’s exactly the same social network since 2008!

Happy 17th Year Anniversary Fediverse network!

#FediverseDay #FediverseMonth #MayIsFediverseMonth

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    10 minutes ago

    The network never went down.

    You say that but, everything I ever posted on identica (and also on Evan’s later OStatus site Status.Net, which i was a paying customer of) went 404 just a few years later. 😢

    When StatusNet shut down I was offered a MySQL dump, which is better than nothing for personal archival but not actually useful for setting up a new instance due to the OStatus having DNS-based identity and lacking any concept for migrating to a new domain.

    https://identi.ca/evan/note/6EZ4Jzp5RQaUsx5QzJtL4A notes that Evan’s own first post is “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.” … but for whatever reason he decided that most accounts (those inactive over a year, iiuc, which I was because I had moved to using StatusNet instead of identica) weren’t worthy of migrating to his new pump.io architecture at all.

    Here is some reporting about it from 2013: https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/

    As an added bonus, to the extent that I can find some of my posts on archive.org, links in them were all automatically replaced (it was the style at the time) with redirects via Evan’s URL shortening service ur1.ca which is also now long-dead.

    screenshot of Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in the 1982 film Blade Runner, during his "Tears in rain" monologue. (no text)

    imo the deletion of most of the content in the proto-fediverse (PubSubHubbubiverse? 😂) this was an enormous loss; I and many other people had years of great discussions on these sites which I wish we could revisit today.

    🪦

    The fact that ActivityPub now is still a thing where people must (be a sysadmin or) pick someone else’s domain to marry their online identity to is even more sad. ActivityPub desperately needs to become content addressable and decouple identity from other responsibilities. This experiment (which i learned of via this post) from six years ago seemed like a huge step in the right direction, but I don’t know if anyone is really working on solving these problems currently. 😢

  • rigatti@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    7 hours ago

    It’s too bad it didn’t take off in the early days of social media. I wonder how the world would look today if that were the case.

    • youronlyone@fedia.ioOP
      13·
      6 hours ago

      Yeah.

      Although there were already discussions about it as early as 2005 (and earlier), Loic and company had been hosting a Web3 conference in France (“Le Web3”) for a few years back then. (The real Web3, not the crypto-Web3. < this is why many, if not most, Fediverse devs don’t like crypto, the crypto enthusiasts stole “Web3”)

      The discussions revolved around: #LinkedData #SemanticWeb #SocialWeb and Federation. It was how Web2 was actually envisioned by Tim, father of WWW, to be a federated social network but big corps took over and Web2 became closed social networks.

      Lastly, the first approaches were through tech that existing networks were encouraged to implement. For example, few people remember the “Open Social” set of technologies. The SNS platforms who applied Open Social were Hi5 and Google+ to mention two.

      In addition, before the #Bluesky “Open Social”—to promote #ATproto —there already was an #OpenSocial. Before the current Social Web came to be, the label was already being used in the early 2000s for similar purposes but larger and more inclusive.

      (Note: trying to remember things from back then)

  • ThorrJo@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    Thanks for calling out that it’s not The Mastodon Network™, no matter how much Gargron wishes ot were so.

  • Psythik@lemm.eeEnglish
    7·
    6 hours ago

    Seventeen years!? God dayum!

    And here I thought the Fediverse was 6-7 years old tops. Wild that the concept is just now starting to gain traction.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      5 hours ago

      I only heard of it a year ago.

      I still hate the name “fediverse”. I love the concept, hate the name.

      • nasi_goreng@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        It’s okay to create your own name :) Some people refer the place as social web, some others create original name in their own language.