Heh. I misremembered the date--thought it was today, but looks like it was October 5. On that day, 10 years ago, I posted a link to Mastodon on Hacker News, with the title "Show HN: A new decentralized microblogging platform". That it made it to the front page ended up bringing the first 5,000 users, setting the project on the trajectory it's on today.
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@Gargron A huge thank you!
@Gargron Congrats! I remember when I first stumbled on to reviewing Mastodon. I had tried building a few socialish networkish things for friends and family, tore them all down, found Mastodon - open source, W3 spec, civil speech focus... it checked all my boxes and haven't looked back since.
Thank you for giving this to the world!
At that point I was 23, freshly graduated from university with a B.Sc. in Informatics, living with my parents, and freelancing on the side (I had a freelancing career in web design since high school and went to university just to get a degree). I was able to save a lot from my student loan as well, so I had the opportunity to experiment with this open-source side project.
The codebase has been about 6 months in the works at that point (the first git commit was dated March 16, 2016) and mastodon.social had been running for a while too, since it was my way of testing how the federation works with other fediverse servers (and software, like GNU social) at the time. The API was the very first thing I worked on, and some of those API methods are still literally unchanged today, but the UI had already gone through multiple iterations by October 5.
@Gargron "the first git commit was dated March 16, 2026"
Surely 2026 must be a typo.
There is a little time capsule of the UI as it was on that exact day, as I recorded a demo video for the Product Hunt submission. You can see how some UI concepts have persisted to this day, even as the details and level of refinement changed. You can also see the original blue accent color... I took that color palette from a website where people posted various color palettes, I do not remember its name anymore.
Mastodon UI demonstration (2016)
YouTube
Thank you @Gargron for all your efforts. Mastodon is the best thing that happened in the social network landscape during the last decade.
@Gargron Oooohhh, the memories...
The UI wasn't very different when I joined in 2018.
@Gargron Tweettodon or Mastodeck?
@Gargron
Colorhunter maybe? That's the one I used to use. Launched by Steve DeGraeve.
It's interesting that my bio as seen in the demo said "Developer of Mastodon, a GNU social alternative". That was the level of my ambition at the time: GNU social had a niche, tiny as it may in the grand scheme of things, and it appealed to me, so I just wanted to make something that would be nicer to use. (My original intent was making a TweetDeck-like app for GNU social, but I quickly pivoted into writing my own backend because GNU social's API was a mess and I like things to be neat).
The mascot was born around November 2016 when I asked my #Dota2 friend @dopatwo for an illustration to put on Mastodon's error page. It was meant to be a homage to Twitter's "fail whale". As you can see, the design of the mascot has changed considerably in ten years. It was cute then, but more realistic, less round. I much prefer the contemporary design, and the fact that it's not a single character.
@Gargron Lovely history! How rewarding and powerful to see how your tiny project has grown up!
The blue may have come from: https://www.colourlovers.com/
@Gargron Same error in the alt-text of the initial image, I reckon? 😄
@Gargron And an even bigger thank you for keeping it open and free and not selling off.