I started developing Mastodon when I was studying computer science at uni. It was around March 2016, and it was sort of a throw-away project for me at the start, because I was just curious to play around with the technology, and I wasn’t really sure it would go anywhere.

The situation around Twitter was a little bit different at the time. It wasn’t so obvious where things were gonna go, to put it that way… It was less about how bad Twitter was and more about principles and interesting technologies.

I’ve been aware of the existence of federated social networks for a few years. Back in 2010 I think was the first I heard of them from a friend. We used to discuss that technology and we used to even post on Identi.ca, which was the federated network at the time (that’s what it was called).

Back in 2010 it was kind of a promising technology actually, because they had support from Google; Google was developing their own social network, which was the predecessor of Google+, and it was, I think, called Google Buzz. They actually had a hand in developing some of the protocols that were later used in Identi.ca, which was later renamed to StatusNet, which would later become GNU social.

[ ] In March 2016 I just wanted to check, “Well, how is that GNU social thing doing right now?” I saw that it was still alive, but it obviously looked kind of awful visually… So I was like, “Yeah, I like using TweetDeck; I kind of wanna make an interface for it that works like TweetDeck, and that looks good, and maybe people will switch.” But I didn’t have any big ambitions about that; I just I’d make something that people who really used GNU social would just switch to. I wasn’t expecting anyone from outside that circle to make a jump.

I soon found that GNU social had a rather arcane codebase, and very old-style PHP. I kind of decided to try starting from scratch… And so I started. The UI became kind of like a secondary thought; I started developing in Ruby, and I started with an API-first approach. The first few months that Mastodon existed, I was using it from the terminal, using Curl. That’s quite a long story about just March, isn’t it…?

When I graduated from university, I had the opportunity to just sort of have a break and do whatever I wanted for a while, before I needed to start searching for a new job… Because I actually had a freelance gig at the time. So I decided to make an interface for Mastodon and finish it and see where it goes, and start a Patreon for it.

In the first few months of that, the Patreon was really low, but it was more than I expected… It was like, I don’t know, 20 bucks…

Then in November 2016 is when the interface was ready enough that I posted a link to it on Hacker News, and that was the first time Mastodon actually got users. To be fair, there were users before that, just because Mastodon was part of the OStatus network, which was also part of GNU social, Friendica etc. It’s that protocol that unites all those platforms… But Mastodon itself had (I think) one or two users at the time… Probably my friend, Trev, who just made an account… He didn’t think it would go anywhere; he just wanted to - what do you call it…? Just to play along with me.