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 Danke schön für die ganze Arbeit!
@Gargron How far we've come.
Thank you!
@Gargron Danke for Mastodon!
@Gargron всё правильно сделал [x]
mastodon is 10 years old?!?!
Right oh. And thank you!
![[empty]](https://files.mastodon.social/accounts/avatars/106/887/462/825/018/571/original/52e5d4364f73668f.jpg "[empty]")
@Gargron So awesome!
Happy Invention Birthday!
@Gargron I remember you talking about your project on GNU-Social... congratulations, Mastodon is your legacy
@Gargron yes I noticed I missed marking my decade here. Earliest Mastodon related email I could find
@Gargron I have been deed longer than I have been here . Gid tho 👍
@Gargron I don't read the orange website so I'm not certain where I heard about Mastodon, it might have been on GNU Social. I decided to give it a shot and it immediately stuck. People have told me every year since then that it can't last and is destined to fade away. Here's to another ten!
Did you see what Elon just posted? 👀
@Gargron Happy to have found you in that first year!
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.
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
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).
@Gargron Thanks so much. All your work on this is highly appreciated. Believe me.
There will be a tiny birthday celebration @DFN cloud services next month together with @mellifluousbox looking back on 10 years Mastodon. Stay tuned…