@
cy The people who wrote the Fediverse
There were no "people who wrote the Fediverse". These was no committee who laid down the standards.
The Fediverse was invented by @
Evan Prodromou. In 2008. By first creating a centralised Twitter alternative silo named Identi.ca.
And then open-sourcing the underlying technology as Laconi.ca, later StatusNet (merged into GNU social in 2013).
And then laying the protocol open as OpenMicroBlogging, later superseded by OStatus.
Then, in 2010, @
Mike Macgirvin ?️ decided that the world needs a free, open-source, decentralised, secure alternative to Facebook that's better than Facebook. And so he made Mistpark, today
Friendica.
But the features he wanted Friendica to have were impossible to achieve with
any existing protocol. OStatus wasn't even that good for microblogging, much less Mike's ambitious plans. Besides, he's an experienced protocol designer. So he created a whole new protocol, DFRN, and built Friendica on top of it. Friendica did adopt OStatus as an extra protocol, though, because Friendica's goal was and still is to federate with everything and then some.
In 2011, Mike had seen many public Friendica nodes shut down with or without warning and people always losing everything and having to start over from scratch. So he decided to do something against it.
He invented
nomadic identity. And built a new protocol around it, Zot, because there was no way DFRN could take care of this, let alone OStatus.
In 2012, he forked Friendica into Red and rewrote the whole backend against Zot, which, however, required the creation of yet another identity scheme.
For one, one login could now have multiple fully separate and independent identities on it. For example, my Hubzilla channel URL is
https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/channel/jupiter_rowland.
Besides, one identity could now reside on multiple server instances which is what nomadic identity means.
Red was later renamed Red Matrix and, in 2015, refactored, redesigned and renamed into
Hubzilla.
Mastodon and Pleroma started in 2016 as OStatus-based alternative UIs for GNU social. Mastodon was the first to be turned into a stand-alone project with not much interest in connecting to anything outside, all in spite of already being federated with Pleroma, GNU social, Friendica and Hubzilla via OStatus.
ActivityPub came out in 2017. No, not 2018. It was standardised in 2018. But it came out in 2017.
In July, 2017, Hubzilla was the first Fediverse project to integrate ActivityPub. Next to its own Zot, next to diaspora*, next to OStatus etc. On the one hand, Hubzilla tried to stay as close to the ActivityPub spec as possible and feasible. On the other hand, Hubzilla had to make its ActivityPub integration, which has always been an optional add-on, compatible to its own technology, to its own Zot protocol, to the way it works.
In September, Mastodon was the second Fediverse project to adopt ActivityPub. But Mastodon was more interested in doing its own thing and being as close to Twitter as it could than in sticking to a protocol spec, much less connecting to non-Mastodon stuff such as Hubzilla with which it already shared two protocols now.
Mastodon was the one that added Webfinger. ActivityPub doesn't even require Webfinger. The ActivityPub spec doesn't contain Webfinger. But Mastodon requires Webfinger. It can't live without Webfinger. So everything that wants to properly federate with Mastodon needs to implement Webfinger.
After ActivityPub had become a standard, more projects adopted it. But as lax a specification as ActivityPub is, it allowed for a lot of liberties.
Some devs looked at how Mastodon had integrated ActivityPub, decided it was rubbish and did it their own way.
Some devs looked at how Mastodon had integrated ActivityPub, decided they couldn't do it the same way because what they did was too different from Mastodon and did it their own way.
Some devs didn't look at what anyone else did and did it their own way.
Probably none of them looked at how Hubzilla had integrated ActivityPub because none of them even knew that Hubzilla existed. Except for those who were maintaining Friendica now. And Friendica had to make it compatible with DFRN and with the way it had been working since 2010.
Fast-forward to 2023. Mike's current piece of work was
the streams repository which contains an intentionally nameless fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork) of Hubzilla, slimmed down from Hubzilla, but modernised and technologically even more advanced.
It was then that @
silverpill, creator and maintainer of
Mitra, got into contact with him because he wanted to add nomadic identity to Mitra. Something that's built on ActivityPub and only supports ActivityPub. A first. No-one had ever done nomadic identity with nothing but ActivityPub before.
So the two started working on how to implement nomadic identity using only ActivityPub. Mike had a vision of a Fediverse with nomadic identity all over and Fediverse identities cloned beyond server application borders. Like, a (streams) channel cloned to Mitra, Mastodon, PeerTube and Mobilizon, all with the same identity.
This, however, required another, brand-new way of identifying Fediverse actors. And so
FEP-ef61 "Portable Objects" was created.
We're probably in the middle of xkcd 927 now.
Mike set up an experimental branch of (streams) to develop and test nomadic identity via ActivityPub, also since (streams) already had nomadic identity anyway.
Around summer, the "nomadic" branch (for nomadic identity via ActivityPub) seemed reliable enough to merge it into "dev". And in July, "dev" was merged into "release", complete with nomadic-identity-via-ActivityPub code.
It was shortly after that merge that I created my two (streams) channels. The channel URL of my channel for Fediverse memes is
https://streams.elsmussols.net/channel/fedimemes_on_streams. But its DID, which all channels created on accounts registered after that merge got, is
https://streams.elsmussols.net/.well-known/apgateway/did:key:z6Mkf2dhUa65zBYCNVqs3AHyt8uPixauZ7bPzEJn15LJANsd/actor. And that's only two IDs of the same channel. There are also others for (streams)' native Nomad protocol, Hubzilla's Zot6 protocol, ActivityPub, OAuth, OAuth2 and probably also OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on, another one of Mike's creations. Not to mention that (streams) channels, like Hubzilla channels and Friendica accounts, can also optionally be group actors.
In fact, this blew up into (streams) users' faces because (streams) confused the various IDs to such degrees that it wouldn't federate at all anymore. It took Mike a whole lot of work to iron this out again, so much that he officially retired from Fediverse development on August 31st.
And in the middle of this, he even created yet another fork, Forte, which is (streams) minus Nomad, minus Zot6, based on and supporting only ActivityPub. My guess is still that one of the reasons to create Forte at that point was to get rid of the Nomad and Zot6 IDs to sort the ID mess out.
Even if nomadic identity via ActivityPub should ever become stable and start spreading, I don't expect DIDs to become the one norm in the Fediverse. Not with all those barely or unmaintained projects and those devs who refuse to acknowledge that devs of other projects do great stuff, too.
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