Ngā mihi harikoa ki a koutou, mo te rā whakatā ā-ture o Matariki.
Happy Matariki public holiday everyone.
In Te Reo Māori, #Matariki is the name of a star cluster known in English as the Seven Sisters. Subaru to the Japanese. Pleiades to astronomers, and ancient Greeks and Romans.
For Māori, seeing Matariki in the night sky marks the start of a new year. As winter solstice passes, a time to reflect on the year ended, and envision the year to come.
In that spirit, a little #TechHistory ...
From the founding of the GNU Project in 1983, through the 1990s and into the 2000s, the main goal of Software Freedom activists was to replace proprietary software on people's computers, with software compiled from Free Code.
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But by the mid-2000s, more and more software was being delivered in a web browser. The Affero variant of GPL (AGPL) was proposed to address this, applying copyleft to client apps delivered from their servers, rather than installed locally.
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So even before the release of the first iThing in 2007, which began the move to mobile computing, it was becoming clear that a new strategy was needed. Replacing proprietary services, instead of just pieces of software.
This led to the 2008 meeting that produced the Franklin St Statement, named for the address of the FSF office where it was drafted;
https://www.franklinstreetstatement.org/
See also;
https://freedomdefined.org/Franklin_Street_Statement_on_Freedom_and_Network_Services
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One of the people at that Franklin St meeting was Evan Prodromou, now a cofounder of the Social Web Foundation.
(Anyone know of a canonical list of co-authors and others who signed on in support? @evan? @mako?)
Months later Even cofounded identi.ca, the first service in what became the fediverse. Federating over OStatus protocol, using the StatusNet software that later became GNU social.
Identi.ca still exists, but ironically the pump.io software it now uses only federates with itself.
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@lukeshu
> the FSF's announcement of the statement has a list of names
Ae, that's the core members of autonomo.us. I imagine the overlap with the framers at the Franklin St Statement meeting is pretty high ; ) But even if all the autonomo.us folks were in attendance, I imagine there were others.
I'm looking for a canonical list I could confidently copypasta and link to for a blog post or wiki page about the FSS.
It matches my sense that the main authors/organizers were myself, @evan and @mlinksva.
Mastodon, like Pleroma, was originally designed to federate with GNU social servers over OStatus. Later, it was the first fediverse software project to implement the W3C standard that connects most of the fediverse today; ActivityPub. Which was partially based on approaches tested in OStatus implementations and pump.io, as well as other federation pioneers like Diaspora and Friendica, both launched in 2010.
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There are many stories to be told about the origins of the fediverse. This is just one of them, and only gives credit to a handful of people and projects, a few of the older patches in the quilt of the fediverse we have today.
What it shows though, is that it takes many different contributions, from many different kinds of people, to make a heterodox social network that communities can adapt to their needs.
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A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
