this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Federated social media has been around for a long time; the oldest one that I know of was identi.ca from the late 2000s. ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon have since breathed a lot of life into the federated ecosystem and I'm excited to see what the future holds for it.
Arguably, the first federated social media is email from 1981. A more “social networking” type system is IRC from 1988.
How about Usenet (1980)?
Oh, yeah, that even predates email!
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.
Yeah, I had an account on identi.ca. I even wrote about this: https://rys.io/en/168.html
Ah yeah, I remember reading that post awhile ago. I was quite surprised to find out how old Friendica is (first release in 2010); if that doesn't demonstrate longevity, then I dunno what does.