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@mpjgregoire That's only about 1/10th of the story. The original ostatus specification was a joint effort by Evan, Brion Vibber, Zach Copley, and James Walker.
It was originally designed essentially as a semi-centralized product to be sold, the full decentralization actually came later and we'll get to that. What's important at this point is that it wasn't a decentralized network per se at this point - it was essentially a web app service. You paid a fee and could spin up a statusnet instance on their server (or you got a free one with advertising, though the community pushed back so hard against advertising that didn't last long)
Full decentralization came much more painfully - Evan basically had a falling out with other contributors and decided to start over from scratch with pump.io - an endeavour that failed. What made it fail is that they forcefully split the network: the flagship instance (identica) was converted to a pump.io node.-
@mpjgregoire pump.io didn't speak to StatusNet, it didn't federate, and thus this made the meganode of the Fediverse into it's own walled garden. This made a lot of people upset and is generally regarded as a bad move. Hitchhiker's reference aside, I would say it was a good thing for the Fediverse in the long term because ultimately, people banded together to create a truly decentralized solution. Matt Lee had taken up old StatusNet and Mikael Nordfeldth had forked it into what he called Free Social. Eventually the two collaborated, and submitted it to the FSF to be under the GNU Social banner. GNU social was born.
Meanwhile all of this, StatusNet had a plugin infrastructure like Wordpress, and a lot of extended functions were developed for it as plugins. Even hashtags as we know them now, are a plugin (just one enabled by default). -
@mpjgregoire Indeed, ostatus itself was developed originally as a plugin, to allow the created nodes to communicate with identica and vice versa.
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@mpjgregoire Examples of extended functions include the NSFW filter, Events posts, Polls, the web interface itself. There's all kinds more, but those are the popular ones.
Hannes Mannerheim's "Qvitter" interface which was then used on the Quitter nodes was what drew several Twitter migrations, because it represents an earlier Twitter design placed on the GNU social backend, in much the same way that Mastodon's UI is basically a TweetDeck clone. It's also a famous plugin, as another example. -
@mpjgregoire In any case, the pump.io hard network split created a hotbed of activity. pump.io essentially languished after a lot of negativity created by the identica split, but it still is actively developed. It still doesn't talk to ostatus, incidentally, all this time later.
It created something of a knowledge that there's a larger federated network out there though, and now we have software like Friendica and Hubzilla bridging a lot of the gaps. This is also what I aspire to in postActiv. The more federated protocols we speak the more of the network we bring together. -
@mpjgregoire When it comes to ActivityPub, a lot of the controversy surrounding it comes from two places: Evan's baggage with the Fediverse after the hard network split surrounding identi.ca - something I don't think he ever apologised for and a lot of people were upset by and some still are, and secondly, they made a lot of promises about things they'd include that they didn't. Technically, it's an inferior specification to ostatus, being more vague and with less security. It is the kind of specification that basically anything can say they are following and this causes no small manner of headache for those of us hacking on the Fediverse.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't think ostatus is honestly all that great, but "OStatus but with JSON instead and less strict source verification and no built in authentication standard" isn't an improvement in my opinion. -
@maiyannah btw, Brion Vibber has created an account in the fediverse recently: http://qttr.at/21p4
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