Comment

Comment on Eight years on, Mastodon stubbornly survives

hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Arguably, the first federated social media is email from 1981. A more “social networking” type system is IRC from 1988.

Sort:hotnew top

brisk@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
How about Usenet (1980)?

source
- hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Oh, yeah, that even predates email!
  
  source
rysiek@szmer.info ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Yup. Up until roughly the times of early Twitter, federated, decentralized communication systems were the obvious norm to any engineer designing one.

Twitter was even meant to be federated and decentralized. I had interviewed one of their first engineers (this piece is about BlueSky, and in Polish; the Twitter thing is important background), who was there and working on that in the very early days. They had a proof of concept. But then the VCs got involved and the decision was that it would be harder to make money on a decentralized service. Rest is history.

source