I’ve been around since before the Internet was available to most folks. Seen it grow, lived through Eternal September, watched all the technology revolutions co

I’ve been around since before the Internet was available to most folks. Seen it grow, lived through Eternal September, watched all the technology revolutions come and go. It’s fun reading predictions like this some times. In the late aughts FB was only getting started. xkcd drew a map of the Internet at the time where FB became a huge land mass and all of the other popular sites at the time were beginning to dwindle as little islands and archipelagos. Funny how from then until 2016 or so that FB continued to dominate and take over. Google, Twitter, etc joined the fray too and the idea of centralized social networks taking over everything became the new normal. Businesses replaced their websites with Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. Developers stopped hosting their vanity sites and wrote Medium articles instead. But before all of that got going, before VC money and HN and the current crop of IPOs took hold, there was a period in the early aughts when much of the foundations of what we know the Internet today was built… by hobbyists, hackers, and the OSS community. Some of us worked at company’s that funded our efforts, some of us built things to satisfy our own needs and communities. But many predicted it would all go away under the pressures of capital and an influx of non-technical, casual users. In a sense it did. But I think Mastodon and ActivityPub’s continued existence and thriving communities wouldn’t have been predicted by someone in 2016-2017. Doomed? We’ll see.