Someone asked me a great question this morning about why it wasn’t Meta (formerly known as Facebook), who invented the fediverse.
I linked to a 2022 article published on thenewstack.io that talks about how Blaine Cook, one of the founding engineers at Twitter, “had tried, unsuccessfully, to convince his bosses […] to create a decentralized version of the service”. It’s a great read, and really makes you wonder what the internet and social media in particular would look like if the effort went through. The impact on politics here in the US and around the world.
Well, not to dwell on that now. The fediverse is here, growing, and getting better, while tech giants and startups continue their decline.
@chris Funny enough, the fediverse actually could've started with Twitter. One of the early engineers there did start to look into a standardized way of how social media could work together, but that effort did not pick up.
https://thenewstack.io/why-a-twitter-founding-engineer-is-now-all-in-on-mastodon/
My guess, for both why this happened, and why no other big tech company worked on this: user lock-in. Same, probably, why Twitter abandoned public RSS feeds, which they did have at one point.