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I've joined the Fediverse August 2008 as @Tobias Diekershoff, after a report in one of Germans IT-News portals. I never was on Twitter before, but had a, more or less dormant, Facebook account. Microblogging was fun, in contrast to organizing study groups at FB ;-) and when Laconica (the software that ran identi.ca back then) got a first release to host your own instance, I set mine up and became one of those early pioneers stepping into the void starting to form the bubble that today is called the Fediverse.

And maybe I should some grayish strands into my profile picture ;-)

Time for a campfire story // Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

And while Microblogging was fun, for me one thing missing were private postings. Postings I only shared with friends, or with the people from my study group or with family members. So when diaspora* got a first alpha version released I got really excited about the self-hosted alternative to FB. So, I tried to set-up diaspora* on my server at home and failed after two weekends struggling with the requirements and the stable version of Debian :-)

So I looked for an alternative to the alternative and found Mistpark. A small one-man project to build a social media platform with Facebook like features. And one big plus point, it was written in PHP, same as Laconica/StatusNet, and was installed within minutes on the Debian box. I don't know exactly when that was, but it should be around December of 2010.

The last ten years went by in the blink of an eye. Friendica was the 1st multi protocol project in the Fedivers & Federation, speaking with IMAP, RSS feeds and both the OStatus and the diaspora* world. (And picked up ActivityPub along the way at some point.) It got my central spot of personal communication streams.

I've met many great people, we got friends and mourned together when some of us passed away. We had our ypots collected and drank our cup of coffee together in the morning. We celebrated birthdays and child birth. We saw monoliths struggle and fall. Islands in the void growing. Slowly but steadily that what got the Fediverse of today was formed. A diverse bunch of projects with a diverse group of communities connected through space and time. Slowly at first but every now and then a wave of newcomers was washed ashore the banks of the Fediverse and Federation.

Today we can celebrate another birthday. Ten long years ago, @Mike Macgirvin did the initial commit to ~friendica . Thank you Mike cheers! I wish I could share a home-brew with you. Have a great party today--all of you, being new or old to the Fediverse. Keep your physical distance as appropriate but get more closer socially :-)

Happy BDay Friendica by @lostinlight

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