Interesting take on the past year from Mastodon’s creator. A year which saw possibly the biggest influx of social media migration ever, with a huge chunk of it coming into the #fediverse. I personally have some skin in the game as I learn more about #activitypub and its ability to tie disparate internet projects into an #openSNS mesh web of connected spaces.

It’s my belief that the underpinnings of Mastodon, Peertube, Friendica, and now WordPress, Flipboard and eventually Threads and Tumblr, will form the backbone of a social network protocol that is needed so that one entity can’t just suddenly wall off millions of people.

Rochko’s early toying with XMPP taught him valuable lessons in that branding the protocol is possibly more important than having everyone know what it is really– look at email for example. No one except for us techies knows that email depends on two protocols to shuffle all the mail around the world in near-light speed: IMAP/POP3 and SMTP. (okay 3, but POP is hella obsolete.) ActivityPub is already a W3C spec, just like HTML and CSS. Still no one knows about it completely including the people who should because they touch this stuff all the time. But even my famously tech-allergic brother knew what Mastodon was thanks to his own dabblings on the web and seeing it pop up all over. Being able to say “I can connect my website to Mastodon and you can leave comments on the posts” is an easy thing to say at this point since ‘he gets it’ thanks to publicity.

(Proof is in the pudding; this post is from said WordPress powered blog!)
(PPS, I forgot I can do this: @Gargron @mike to tag them in the response. That’s an old #indieweb trick we do to get webementions to work. Heh)