Post #2975703

2022-11-26 15:14 UTC

A couple additional notes: - There were plenty of federated communication platforms before Identi.ca. Usenet, FIDOnet (federated BBSes), IRC networks, and of course, e-mail are examples. The lineage to Mastodon is less direct, but it's there. - The Diaspora social network, founded and crowdfunded in 2010 by four NYU students and inspired by the ideas of Eben Moglen, is another large federated microblogging platform, but uses its own protocol and is separate from the others.

Replies (2)

@f00fc7c8@kind.social 2022-11-26 15:47

- The maintainers of GNU social also worked on the federated music community GNU FM, of which the most prominent instance was Libre.fm (which I also used around the same time I used GNU social). As @mattl@xoxo.zone describes it, GNU social was his effort to redirect use of GNU FM as a social network, to something better suited for social networking. Both projects started around 2009.

Open ##2975704
@daskeit@mastodon.social 2022-11-26 20:00

@f00fc7c8@kind.social this is a complete tangent (thank you for writing up this cool bit of history!) - one of the interesting ideas from Diaspora and that was adopted by Google+ was that it recognised we have different social circles and it allowed users to define distinct circles or groups of friends that you could address posts to. So eg. you could post to everyone who followed you, but you could also post just for your family, or for your hobby/interest group.

Open ##2975747