The fediverse is a strange place to be sometimes. It's an open network where progress happens in fits and starts in random, often hidden, pockets. And the rest don't often hear what's really going on. In the 6 years I've built on #ActivityPub, we've all had to fight for some kind of coordination.
Especially re: the new #SocialWebFoundation (which I've backed as an outside supporter via my tiny company @write_as), you can see something new is happening.
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E.g. the days of every fedi platform needing to be open source (as you'd get dogpiled for back in 2018) are gone. Proprietary platforms and major corps like Meta are joining, and they're collaborating with other major fedi platforms behind the scenes to take this all mainstream.
But that's what's happening right now, just so everyone knows.
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And there should probably be some more transparency. And it can absolutely be alienating, especially to long-time fedizens.
But it doesn't exclude similar efforts from everyone building this space. It doesn't crush those fighting for what has made this place great in the first place.
The fediverse is everyone's, and we should all recognize that. Don't lose hope. Keep on building the web we all want to see.
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@matt very well said. This thing is bigger than all of us, including meta.
I was once a lone engineer building software in the world of the walled gardens of AOL and Microsoft and it sucked. It was a super constrained world where success meant having to convince a few people at Egghead to distribute your software or you were relegated to oblivion.
Then the web happened. AOL tried to bring the web into their walled garden and died. Microsoft fully embraced the web and thrived. But the web was an unstoppable force and even with the big players fighting for position, legions of independent developers built and shipped great things reaching hundreds of millions of people.
For too long, building anything that connects people in new and interesting ways has seemed futile because of the dominance of today’s walled gardens. That is all changing before our eyes because of the creativity, labor and persistence of lone engineers like you and Evan and Eugen and Dan.
Human connection is finally becoming an integral part of the open web during a time when those connections are more important than ever. This is bigger than all of us, including meta, and the future is bright for the developers building here.
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@mike absolutely.
And there are so many unnamed moderators, community builders, devs, tinkerers, policy experts, etc. around the world that have helped the fediverse get to where it is today.
I think so far it's built a strong foundation to sustain past any large player entering the space, just like the web itself. And that's no reason to despair.
Obviously there's always more work to do, but we're not playing a zero-sum game, like the walled gardens of the web have been.
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@matt @mike It is fascinating to live through the start of the social web. I remember when email broke out of the walled gardens and, at the time (1980s), it was similarly unclear to most users what was actually going on until we could reflect on it years later.
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@underlap I joined the Internet well after that, just before Google existed. I'd love to hear more about the uncertainty of email from that time.
@matt @mike
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@wordsmith @matt @mike This is a pretty good summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email
My own experience at the time was that it was exciting to be able to email anyone with an email address, but I knew hardly anyone with an email address (outside my employer's, IBM's, network). So similar to the social web today - building up your network takes a while.
This may also interest you: https://underlap.org/early-internet-access
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