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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

ActivityPub came out in 2018, Mastodon in 2016. Twitter got to 1 billion a month in 2010, at about 3 years old: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2010/measuring-tweets

So the Fediverse took ~2 times as long, but in the face of much tougher competition and network effects. Better than I would have guessed!

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Another factor is that protocols propagate much slower than individual pieces of software

Email, the thing with the "@" symbol, was invented in 1971. Most people did not use it until 30 years later.

ActivityPub, the thing with the two "@" symbols, is now 5 years old. If we assume it will propagate twice as fast as email, it will take another 10 years until it hits the mainstream.

This also implies that a future generation social protocol with three "@" symbols will only take 7.5 years to become mainstream.

Calling it now: long-lived assistant personas that hold context for years at a time. "@engineering@orgdomain@openai.com where can I find the Frobber service documentation?"

On the other hand, Twitter basically predated smartphones and tablets. I recall a time when you had to use WAP to read and SMS to send tweets. To avoid absurd fees, most people would only use internet on their stationary computer. Compare it with today when there are supposedly 7 billion smartphones while most colleagues seem to use them 24/7.

it's fair to note that the Fediverse is much older than the AP protocol. It originally came up through a duo of protocols, OStatus and the Diaspora protocol.

Before Mastodon we had Status.net, Identi.ca, and GNU Social.

The Fedi will be celebrating its 15th year soon:

https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-14-years-in-2022/

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