Sorry I left you on read for a bit – I wanted to do this one justice. And I’ll start with a disclaimer – I’m not a very rememberful person, so some of what I say may be inaccurate.

I joined fedi when the activitystreams spec dropped. I am a software developer by trade, and I follow the work that the W3C (the group that wrote the spec that details the protocol the fediverse runs on) for professional reasons. I didn’t fully grasp the implications at the time, and so I joined in a professional capacity, using my real name, which is the only social media account I’ve ever done that for. I thought of myself as joining a professional community as a open-source developer, so I thought about it more like my github, which also uses my real name since I use it as a portfolio when I’m applying to jobs.

I didn’t really think very hard at all about what instance I joined, because there just weren’t many options. My mastodon host has been fantastic, and has kept the instance running reliably for lo these many years, for which I am very grateful, but if I were to join again, I wouldn’t choose the same instance. I ended up on an instance that has kinda slow federation because it’s a pretty small instance out on the fringes of the fediverse, and we kinda have a reputation for being lightly moderated that lands us on more blocklists than I’d prefer. I don’t really use the local feed because I mostly didn’t think very much about the community I was joining, I was just looking for a portal into the larger fediverse, and didn’t realize that the view changes based on the window you look through.

For the first few years, my experience was pretty limited to technical discussion. I dropped in and out of mastodon because there just wasn’t much of the content that consumes most of my social media attention – sports. Both because I curated my feed to have technical content, and because mostly only technical users could find it or were interested in it, almost all of the discussion was meta discussion about protocols, or discussion of related software projects, with some personal stuff mixed in. There were a couple of times that you got memes (in the older sense – I still don’t get many image macros with text), but broadly it felt very personal – real people talking about the things they were interested in, rather than trying to get clout or boosts or likes. Things have gotten better, but there still really aren’t a lot of people talking about my favorite topics.

The fediverse, though, has always had a particular flavor for me that other social media has lacked. Certainly, there are still some reply guys (I fear that I myself sometimes fall into these habits, despite my best efforts), but the fediverse has had an actively kind streak in it that I haven’t found in a lot of online spaces. I often find myself in discussions where I am clearly out-classed, a hobbyist asking basic questions of some of the smartest people in the field, and I have always been treated with kindness and empathy. Part of what has been disappointing to me about the emergence of the threadiverse is that this streak of active kindness doesn’t seem to have propagated to this corner of the fediverse.

The thing that has been the most fun to watch has been seeing a thousand flowers grow. When I first read about activitystreams, or even once activitypub landed, I didn’t see the whole vision. I thought they were describing a protocol for exchanging micro-blogging messages, and it was only as the other applications started to pop up that I finally felt like I was “getting it.” When I joined Bookwyrm, I got that by introducing data from other sources, you could have richer social media experiences. When I joined FunkWhale, I got that you could exchange social media in other formats than text. When we were watching the women’s world cup, and someone set up a Friendica group that I could participate in from mastodon, that was when the light bulb finally went on for me. I never joined Friendica, because I don’t really enjoy the Facebook/LinkedIn style of social media, but I was participating with the much larger women’s soccer community from my mastodon instance, despite the fact that I never signed up. I was operating on the social graph directly, and what client I used was a matter of personal preference, rather than prerequisite for interacting with another group of people.

And now, I’m seeing posts that are making it look like the fediverse is going to have real relevance. People are posting about Mastodon as a credible replacement for X and Bluesky, Loops as a credible replacement for TikTok, Ghost as one of the best solutions for blogging. It’s an incredibly exciting time for me, because the argument has always been that since we have long been focused on the administration side of things (thinking of instance owners as the primary customers of activitypub), the platform was too confusing or complicated for Joe and Jane End User, and that perception seems to be changing. Seeing projects like the Forkiverse join the fediverse has been awesome because it seems like we’re going to start having normies in the fediverse, and I think that’s what we need here now more than ever.

Idk if that’s helpful, but it’s what I remember.