Identi.ca

» see identi.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

identi.ca was the federation experiment that should have worked and did not, and the architecture lesson that took ten more years to land. by the time most people had a vocabulary for ‟fediverse" or ‟instance" or ‟federation," identi.ca had already lived through its peak, its rebranding, its philosophical breakup with its own creator, and its absorption into something nobody recognized.

evan prodromou launched it on july 2, 2008 as the public instance of his own server software, then called laconica, later renamed statusnet. the pitch was that microblogging should work the way email works: anyone could run their own server, your account lived on a server you trusted, and your follows could cross server boundaries through an open protocol. for the next four years prodromou and a small team turned that pitch into a working protocol called ostatus, gluing together pubsubhubbub for push, activitystreams for the message format, salmon for replies, and webfinger for address resolution.

i was on twitter by 2008 and never moved. that is the same answer almost everyone in the world gave. twitter had the network, identi.ca had the architecture, and architecture lost. the eight thousand sign-ups in the first day were mostly free-software developers and identica was for years the place you would find free-software people from the linux kernel and debian orbits talking shop in public.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it built ~

the legacy that survives is the protocol family, not the site. ostatus put together the pieces that mastodon's eugen rochko later picked up and refined into activitypub, which is now the protocol that the entire fediverse runs on: mastodon, pleroma, pixelfed, peertube, lemmy, mobilizon. the credit list for activitypub names prodromou as one of the spec editors. without the identi.ca years there is no fediverse in the shape we currently have it.

~ the actual end ~

in late 2012 prodromou announced that identi.ca would migrate from statusnet to a new server called pump.io that used a different protocol, activitypump, which he believed was a cleaner approach than ostatus. new sign-ups were closed in december 2012. the migration completed july 12, 2013. the existing statusnet users were furious. the protocol break meant the federation graph identi.ca had built no longer worked with the new server, and most of the statusnet community forked off into gnu social and free social, which were later merged. identi.ca itself ran on pump.io for several more years with a vastly reduced active population before quietly going dormant.

~ the long tail ~

mastodon launched in 2016 and reached the audience identi.ca had been built to reach, on the back of activitypub becoming a w3c recommendation in 2018. activitypub is the descendant of the activitypump protocol that broke identi.ca's community in 2013, which is the descendant of the ostatus protocol identi.ca itself ran for four years. nothing about the federation idea is new. identi.ca is the part of the genealogy that ran the experiment with real users and was right about everything except the timing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »