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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] rigatti@lemmy.world 17 points 22 hours ago (5 children)

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.io 21 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

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)

UPDATE from @drspod@lemmy.ml

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”)

I think you've retconned a little bit here. LeWeb3 was named as a sequel to the previous conference which was called LeBlogs2. Remember, at that time Web 2.0 hadn't really taken off yet - browsers had only just implemented the XMLHTTPRequest API - so it wouldn't have made sense to already be talking about Web 3.0.

Here is an original document containing some history of LeWeb3: https://web.archive.org/web/20070704054929/http://www.loiclemeur.com/LeWeb3executivesummaryv1.pdf

[–] drspod@lemmy.ml 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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”)

I think you've retconned a little bit here. LeWeb3 was named as a sequel to the previous conference which was called LeBlogs2. Remember, at that time Web 2.0 hadn't really taken off yet - browsers had only just implemented the XMLHTTPRequest API - so it wouldn't have made sense to already be talking about Web 3.0.

Here is an original document containing some history of LeWeb3: https://web.archive.org/web/20070704054929/http://www.loiclemeur.com/LeWeb3executivesummaryv1.pdf

[–] youronlyone@piefed.social 1 points 14 hours ago

Ahh, thank you for that! It is much appreciated!

I'll add it to the original post.

[–] queselevaaser@app.wafrn.net 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

@youronlyone @rigatti

#wait-a-minute #laconica-as-in-statusNet??? #i-thought-that-had-died-off!

[–] youronlyone@fedia.io 3 points 15 hours ago

Yep!

Laconica was renamed to StatusNet. Then later when Evan started working on PumpIO, he agreed to have it transferred to GNU. GNU then later merged StatusNet with another project and called it GNU Social.

There are still GNU Social instances around, but they are still running on the OStatus protocol. IIRC, there was work to implement ActivityPub in it but it seems it wasn't finished. Other than that, GNU Social instances are still around.

load more comments (2 replies)