BTW I had account on identi.ca, which was StatusNet powered (I believe).

Yes, and it should not be implemented in Ruby or PHP or something like that. I have seen one online discussion forum being rewritten from PHP to Rust few years ago, and the improvement in responsiveness of the web platform was amazing. (I do C, not Rust, but C is too oldschool now, and the performance penalty of Rust is minor, probably not noticeable at all)

Friendica and its descendants are written in PHP. They may not be the fastest (even though what bogged down early Friendica were its heavyweight federation connectors to everywhere, especially the one for Facebook that came in 2011). Mike either discarded or rewrote these when he rewrote Red. But they happily run on a run-of-the-mill LAMP stack.

Mastodon is written in Ruby on Rails. Hubzilla runs circles around it in terms of performance per account/channel, and that has to say something. The only thing that managed to top this was early diaspora*, written in Ruby on Rails for Mac with MongoDB as the database system.

The *omas are built in Elixir. Granted, they're utter featherweights, especially considering their features. They're legendary for their low server impact. Then again, Pleroma apparently is spaghetti code straight from hell. Its own devs often don't have a clue where to go look for bugs, much less how to fix them. (Miraculously, the Akkoma devs do manage to get ride of quite a number of them.)

The *keys are built in TypeScript and Vue.js. I guess one reason why Misskey is infamous for having so many forks and forks of forks is because there are tons of people who can code in JavaScript, the primary mobile programming language.

Iceshrimp.NET is a still very incomplete "rewrite" of old Iceshrimp in C#. It was largely tackled to get rid of all those nasty bugs inherited from Misskey that even Misskey doesn't manage to get rid of. I've heard quite some outcry: Iceshrimp.NET is a sell-out to Microsoft. I guess whoever uttered that didn't go check who owns TypeScript.

PieFed is a dead giveaway: Python. And PieFed makes more headlines in the Threadiverse for server politics than for its underlying technology, except that Lemmy pales in comparison.

GoToSocial is a dead giveaway, too: Go. And it was one of the first Fediverse server applications to not come with a Web UI. Those who use it for a single-user server often don't even bother installing one and use some Mastodon app or other instead. Besides, why drag around a Web UI if there are much better third-party Web UIs than whatever you could whip up?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Iceshrimp #IceshrimpJS #Iceshrimp.NET #PieFed #GoToSocial #PHP #RubyOnRails #Elixir #JavaScript #TypeScript #VueJS #C# #Python #Go

The wiki reveals even different timeline:

To me, it seems, that Gargon simply was not as colossal nerd, as others, and somehow managed to create cult following of sufficient number of users, which were not really techies.

I think it was in 2016 already that German tech media got interested in decentralised alternatives to corporate silos. Mastodon caught their interest, being developed in Germany and all. Pleroma didn't, in spite of being developed in Germany, too, not to mention more feature-rich than Mastodon. Friendica was developed in Germany back then already, too, but it seemed like either tech media weren't interested in alternatives to something that needed alternatives much more than Twitter, or Friendica managed to continue to fly under the radar even then.

Anyway, Mastodon got media coverage, and nothing else did.

In 2017, right-wingers started attacking furries and queers on Twitter. They had to escape somewhere. Tumblr wasn't it, having been pretty much killed by being bought out and G-rated. But someone happened to know Mastodon due to the media coverage whereas nobody happened to know Pleroma due to no media coverage at all. So those furries and queers escaped to Mastodon. "Awoo" was briefly part of Mastodon's culture in the late 2010s due to the high furry-to-non-furry rate.

From then on, Mastodon had the two advantages of past media coverage and more users. The rest was like a snowball, essentially. The more users something has, the more users something gains by inviting them.

I guess Friendica and Hubzilla, both of which already existed back then, suffered from the same choice of mindsets: "If you build it, they will come," "We'll first need to get this and that fixed before we're ready for prime time," "Can't someone else take care of that? I'm bad at advertising stuff!" Plus, of course, people who really were bad at advertising stuff to anyone who's neither a developer nor a server admin.

I was thinking about need for decentralized social media since at least 2009, as I was watching the old web to slowly loose any relevance. (My Facebook account was canceled without any explanations as soon as perhaps sometimes like 2010?).

By the way, what killed StatusNet was when Identi.ca changed its backend from StatusNet to pump.io and its protocol from OStatus to ActivityPump, thus becoming incompatible with the rest of StatusNet. What remained was largely unable to stand alone. What kind of helped Identi.ca (OStatus as a profile sucked so badly that Evan and Erin themselves had to whip up ActivityPump) did the opposite to StatusNet. A bit later, the FSF scooped it up, forked it to GNU social and eventually merged what was left of StatusNet into GNU social. It got ActivityPub support later on, but it's gone now, too.

Also, in 2010, Mistpark was around, and so was diaspora* (or what already existed of it at that time). diaspora* had tons of advance publicity due to its crowdfunding stunt, but then the four devs didn't manage to deliver before public interest had faded away, even with Mike's help on the protocol (not even kidding here). And speaking of Mike, he built Mistpark, but almost nobody came because he did nothing in terms of advertising. Even though Mistpark of May, 2010 was more powerful than diaspora* is today. Even though Mistpark took two months for a public alpha and four for a stable point release whereas it took diaspora* years to go beyond alpha, not to mention the entire development team being replaced.

I guess you would have been a prime Friendica user candidate. Particularly, you would have been one of those who were happy on a Friendica node without the performance-hogging Facebook connector in times when everyone was seeking out and piling onto the nodes with that connector, just to see them close registration at not even 150 accounts.

I was thinking about basing it on bunch of combined RSS feeds, the publicly compatible vs. the activity stream, which is not so different from from like ActivityPub is made today, except that signing of content with public keys is more advanced concept, that what I was able to imagine.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Pleroma #StatusNet #Identi.ca #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #OStatus #ActivityPump #ActivityPub

Let's see what platforms are responding to this year's Social Web survey, the annual questionnaire to see how #FediAdmin and #FediMod folks are doing:

#Mastodon 54
#Matrix 17
#PeerTube 15
#WordPress 10
#Pixelfed 9
#ATProto platform 8
#Lemmy 8
#Pleroma 8
#Bookwyrm 6
#GoToSocial 5
#Bonfire 4
#Gancio 4
#Sharkey 4
#Writefreely 4
#Akkoma 3
#Friendica 3
#Ghost 3
#Mobilizon 3
#Nostr platform 3
#Funkwhale 2
#Hometown 2
#Misskey 2
#NodeBB 2
#Hubzilla 1

Alt...

Social Web Survey cover page "2026 Social Web Operations Survey IFTAS' annual environment scan and needs assessment for the platform admins, moderators, and social web community builders safeguarding the open web."