Gather around children for a little story.
I’ve always been a little wary of proprietary social media. And true to form, like over a decade ago, I was active on a free and open source Twitter-like thing called identi.ca. I was happy there with all the other neck-beards. And, of course, I cross-posted and stored my interactions on this very blog.
Then one day it died, so I reluctantly joined Twitter… and I loved it! Nothing fit my brain like Twitter, and I was happy being silly on there. Basking in likes and retweets for my stupid non-sequiturs. I loved it so much that I stopped tending to this blog or any of my other sites.
But it turns out that identi.ca didn’t die. The dude who made it kept chipping away at it. First rebranding it to StatusNet, then pump.io, while simultaneously iterating on the underlying ideas until it became a protocol specification called ActivityStreams. This in turn was streamlined and evolved into a specification called ActivityPump, which was later renamed ActivityPub. In 2018, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published this as a recommended standard for decentralised social networking.
Now in 2022, when a right-leaning, anti-trans, trolling-happy billionaire took over Twitter, I started to look for more free alternatives. And all signs pointed to Mastodon. So I decided to try it.
The moment I signed in, I had such a feeling of nostalgia and deja vu that I asked the question: “Whatever happened to identi.ca?” This was more of a nostalgic-rhetorical question, but within moments, someone graciously recounted the whole story above to me. It turns out that Mastodon is an implementation of the ActivityPub standard. And the original identi.ca dude, Evan Prodromou, is active on there!
2008 me was so focussed on the free and open source nature of identi.ca, that I failed to see that the key point of all of this was its decentralised nature. I understand this now, so here I am today on Mastadon. It’s easy to get setup. It’s easy to move your presence between servers. It’s got all the decentralisation benefits of web3, without the climate destroying shared-blockchain-as-a-db.