Twitter's demise is ActivityPub’s future
Earlier today, I deleted all of my tweets and left Twitter forever. While I plan on leaving a nightlight thread for a while, I will eventually close my account, assuming Elon doesn’t do it for me.
The past week has been an emotional rollercoaster for me as I have watched everything play out.
I was one of the original fediverse users when Indymedia UK stood up the indy.im StatusNet instance at the end of 2010. After some time, Evan Prodromou got bored with the StatusNet code base and started Pump instead, with the network losing the largest instance at that time, identi.ca. With the network fragmented as a result of that switch, I got bored of it and started using Twitter instead.
Eventually StatusNet was forked by Matt Lee and a few other FSF staffers and became GNU Social. I was not really around during this time, but it was around that time that GamerGate happened, which created a network where half of the users were Indymedia contributors and the other half were the initial seeds of the alt-right.
While I was not heavily involved from a development perspective in the early days of what we now call the fediverse, this began to change in late 2016 when Eugen Rochko started Mastodon. I was an early adopter of Mastodon, deploying Mastodon 0.6 on Heroku, using the mastodon.dereferenced.org domain for my account. But running Mastodon on Heroku (and later Scalingo) was expensive. I did not want to manage a Rails application by hand, and I hadn’t started using Docker or Kubernetes yet.