Mike Macgirvin

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 21:54:40 -0700

show all 37 comments

Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum)

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 22:41:54 -0700

#mistpark #gotzot

kris

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 23:25:37 -0700

Good morning

h.ear.t

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 01:15:36 -0700

Wow cool

Oliver ⚡

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 01:33:21 -0700

That was a long time ago

lotfi

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 04:04:49 -0700 last edited: Wed, 30 Oct 2019 05:22:07 -0700

I think I have to get out of my cave, this is the first time I hear about Mistpark.

elmussol

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 04:31:09 -0700 last edited: Wed, 30 Oct 2019 04:37:21 -0700

Mistpark was before Friendika, which was before Friendica, which was before ZOT, which was before Red Matrix, which was before Hubzilla, which was before ZAP.

additional sidenote: I joined the Macgirvin Train at Friendika.

Max Kostikov

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 04:55:45 -0700

What year was it?

Giac El Vecio

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 07:29:19 -0700

What year was it?

before the arrival of the federated-decentralized networks on planet Earth. :))

Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum)

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 07:36:56 -0700

Before 2010 when I joined Friendika with David.

Giac El Vecio

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 07:53:39 -0700

where is the grumpy David now?

h.ear.t

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 09:21:15 -0700 last edited: Wed, 30 Oct 2019 09:46:46 -0700

@Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum) You joined in 2010? Then it took quite a while for us to meet. I recently tried to trace back when I came across this software and settled at late 2011 / early 2012 the latest. It was quite a while before Red Matrix for sure and quite a while before April 2012.
I was looking for an alternative to the established services for a family hub (which is still active) and Diaspora* just wasn't ready and usable (I did not even get it installed), GNU social wasn't what I was looking for due to it's 140 character limitation, I did not really like Buddy Press, Wordpress P2. There was one more tool which was more of a project intranet colaboration tool that I don't remember right now.
Those were the very early days of the federation and Friendica was simply the best as far as I was concerned. Simple to install, easy to get going and ... I just sticked around since then.
I remember creating the event entry for our marriage and being excited I could even include a map after using it for a while.
So much has happened cince then.

kris ⚡

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 10:44:17 -0700 last edited: Wed, 30 Oct 2019 10:44:56 -0700

@Mike Macgirvin @Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum) @kris @h.ear.t @Oliver ⚡ @lotfi @elmussol @Max Kostikov @Giac El Vecio

What will be the successor or #zap in 2022 ?

zap

Giac El Vecio

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 11:00:15 -0700

@Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum)

you mean the other David , of the GNU Sip (? I don't remember well the name of the project in this moment)...

I was thinking about the David B ( Benfeell ? or something like that) :))

elmussol

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 11:10:44 -0700

Not sure about the other, but Benfell snarked off when a dev/beta release of Red Matrix bombarded his email server. He was an arse about it and disappeared.

Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum)

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 12:40:46 -0700

@Giac El Vecio David Sugar of GNU Telephony, we worked on GNU Free Call and GNU SIP Witch together.

Mike Macgirvin

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 12:51:44 -0700

The first public release of Mistpark was on July 1, 2010. There were two different products - Mistpark Personal Edition which was single user (but federated), free and community supported; and Mistpark Server which was more of a pro multi-user version and I hoped to derive income from selling.

Mistpark Server became free within about a month or two. Nobody wanted the single user version and it was dropped and absolutely nobody wanted to pay for anything - ever. There were also plans for a Mistpark Rockstar Edition which was to be a single user high-traffic high performance version supporting millions of followers as another way to derive income. We never had any rockstars or anybody famous join the free web in those days and eventually that went away also. I had federated with StatusNet within about a month, and by around September had federation with RSS feeds and email. Diaspora was still being developed in secret and didn't appear until around November 2010 - which looked nice but barely worked at all for the first few weeks (corrected: years). I'd have to check but the name change from Mistpark to Friendika was probably around October or November 2010 after Mistpark 2 came out. Tobias (aka bavatar) was one of the early developers and around November wrote the Twitter plugin and I wrote the Facebook plugin and we were off to the races. The only thing we didn't federate with (that mattered) in late 2010 or early 2011 was Diaspora - it would be another six months before they divulged any of their secret protocol details; and when they did it was all wrong and I spent a few months figuring out how it actually worked.

Benfell and I had a number of public fallouts. He was militant vegan and I was a beef producer. He was a die-hard communist and I didn't see any problem trying to find ways to get paid for my work and feed my family. But also like myself he also tended to post often while quite drunk and uninhibited. While mostly this produces amusing conversations, with two people that are polar opposites it can get quite nasty - and it did. He stuck around on Friendica for a while after leaving RedMatrix.

Giac El Vecio

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 15:58:44 -0700

I was an unsatisfied user of diaspora ( and status.net) , where, however, I had good contacts, like Tazman and a Spanish boy (quite religious - Catholic - but I don't remember the name) who introduced me to friendica, rightly when the federation with diaspora begun ..
and immediately I had the impression of becoming part of the USS-Enterprise, while before it seemed to me to be in a leaping twin-engine... ;)

Einer von Vielen

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 16:07:18 -0700 last edited: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 07:26:12 -0700

Interesting.

@h.ear.t I can't remember when I joint the club. I had an account on Diaspora when it came out. After a while I discovered Friendika and set up a private instance as virtual host. Eventually I started to install a server at home. Can't remember exactly the year. I had an instance of Friendica (Friendika?) at home, then I replaced it with Hubzilla and now I replaced it by a ZAP instance. I started to run a second ZAP instance to clone my channels (This will be up and running again when I get physical access. Probably next week.) Ah, yes when I run Hubzilla at home I had second instance at my mothers home running on a Raspi 3B. The Raspi performed astonishingly well for our family use case and was very reliable.

It is a real joy to see these things evolving over time.

My family got really used to it. I get complains when a server is not running. The calendars on our mobiles do not sync in this case for example.

So we are a kind of addicted to ZOT, at least my wife and my mother.

Ah, yes, all family members know @Mike Macgirvin , @Mario and some other devs and Hubzillians by name. In the discussions with my kids you serve often as role models when it comes to topics of how to live our live, our ideals we should follow, what society we want, what we can do for it, that WE have to do it and not leave it to companies... and, and, and...

/update/ I forgot to list the RedMatrix instance at home.

Einer von Vielen

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 16:12:18 -0700

I miss Thomas Willingham.

Oliver ⚡

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 16:29:55 -0700

@Einer von Vielen Yeah, so do I. Strange kind of humor, strange kind of world view, strange guy. I like him.
A lot of people didn't get along with him. But that doesn't surprise me either. Diplomacy was not his thing.

Bob Mottram

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 01:12:57 -0700

@Einer von Vielen @Oliver âš¡ Any idea what became of Thomas Willingham? I vaguely remember he was living in the bitcoin economy.

Giac El Vecio

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 16:23:18 -0700

...my first friendica account was in the bavatar hub, then I started to connect quickly with all the most active users and devs ...

I miss Thomas too, he helped me a LOT..
but he got lost with his paranoia and fixations .. unfortunately.

Marshall Sutherland

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 17:02:35 -0700

I abandoned Facebook in 2013 and soon, either before or after, I started using Diaspora. After a while, I was ready to give running my own pod (that's what they call them, right?) a try, since that was one of the big draws of it to me. It didn't take long to realize that I was going to be totally on my own trying to do that on a Windows server.

@Seth Martin invited me to his RedMatrix instance and I soon tried to to set up my own. Running under Windows wasn't really supported (especially Win2003), but Mike and Thomas humored me, pointed me in the right direction as I fumbled through the process, and submitted the needed patches to get it to work for me. It became clear I could make it work in Windows, but not Win2003, so I built a whole new Windows 7 computer to replace my old server because I would soon have 100 of my friends using it. No such luck pulling my friends out of the orbit of FB and after a couple years of running what may have been the only Windows hub in the world (or at least the only one that lived any substantial time), I converted my server to Linux.

Somewhere along the way, I gave up on ever getting my IRL friends to use it and I actually shut down my hub. But I found I just couldn't quite leave the community and delete my final clone, so I ended up starting up a new hub using Hubzilla.

zudn

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 18:23:39 -0700

I came in at Friendika, not sure at what stage. Have hung around since.

whistlewright (zap)

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 18:47:56 -0700

@Mike Macgirvin @Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum) @kris @h.ear.t @Oliver ⚡ @lotfi @elmussol @Max Kostikov @Giac El Vecio @kris ⚡ @Einer von Vielen @Marshall Sutherland @zudn I, too date from the Friendika days. Yes, with a k. Not sure of the year at all but we've been here for a while

Bob Mottram

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 01:05:49 -0700

@Mike Macgirvin @Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum) @kris @h.ear.t @Oliver âš¡ @lotfi @elmussol @Max Kostikov @Giac El Vecio @kris (zap) @Einer von Vielen @Marshall Sutherland @zudn @whistlewright (zap)
I first ran Friendika after trying the first release of Diaspora and failing to install it. That was probably 2011. Since then I've run redmatrix, hubzilla and zap. After LetsEncrypt happened I also ran gnusocial. There were also various backup disasters along the way but now I think I'm on top of that. Maybe at some point all the systems using activitystreams will merge into one big federation, but that could be a way off and attempts at standardization have been half hearted.

h.ear.t

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 01:46:18 -0700 last edited: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 01:47:12 -0700

The way I remember it that he was in disagreement with Mike on how to proceed with the project, which lead to him doing a fork for himself.
The domain beardyunixer.co.uk is claiming to run

<meta name="generator" content="redmatrix 2017-04-27.1746R" />

That's all I know.

h.ear.t

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 02:04:47 -0700

Oh, and by the way the very first connection I made on Friendica was @Hubzilla @ sasiflo.
Sigh.

Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum)

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 02:51:38 -0700

Thomas' sites beardyunixer.com and modestpenger.com is up and running, and runs several solutions on subdomains, including Zap, Friendica etc. The RedMatrix variant on the main domain name stopped its background process two years ago, the subdomains have SSL issues. Given Zap, Thomas is paying attention, if not communicating.

Jake Moomaw

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 05:18:24 -0700

David Benfell is still blogging, at the very least. I get his updates in my RSS feed. I miss Thomas, too. He walked the very fine line between the good kind of crazy and the bad kind with a dexterity that I've never seen since.

Giac El Vecio

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 05:47:09 -0700

another that helped me a lot at the beginning and that now, in this case, completely disappeared, English who lives in Germany..maybe Martin the name? my same age, about 50 ...

Oliver ⚡

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 06:32:02 -0700

@Giac El Vecio Martin Farrent! He helped me a lot in the early days after a db-crash of my first server

Einer von Vielen

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 07:28:15 -0700

@Haakon Meland Eriksen (Zap Dog) What is the ZAP presence of Thomas Willingham? I would try to connect.

whistlewright (zap)

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 15:34:37 -0700

@Mike Macgirvin @Haakon Meland Eriksen (Parlementum) @kris @h.ear.t @Oliver ⚡ @lotfi @elmussol @Max Kostikov @Giac El Vecio @kris ⚡ @Einer von Vielen @Marshall Sutherland @zudn @whistlewright (zap) @Bob Mottram @Jake Moomaw

Last I knew Willingham was on Friendica somewhere.

Alexandre Hannud Abdo

Sat, 02 Nov 2019 12:51:40 -0700

I had been out of Facebook for a while by then, as it became physically perceptible to me that it was mostly about sucking all your time and life, and had tried statusnet and diaspora on other people's hubs, while surprisingly not being much aware of friendika. But when I found real need for privacy enabled decentralization for a work project and realized those two were insufficient, I started digging deeper, which led me to install my first redmatrix server at about the time that was first released. Years later I cloned my channel onto a personal hubzilla server, keeping it on both. And years after that I finally deactivated the good old redmatrix hub that had served the health care community for the duration of my research project. I'm still very much enjoying the ride ;)

Andrew

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 04:05:32 -0800

This stroll down memory lane is great. I jumped on board around 2012 with RedMatrix. I really wish I could find the RedMatrix landing page I made for the project as my way to contribute since I barely knew how to even make a web page. It had parallax and some molecular matrix-y translucent background that I thought looked modern and engaging. Mike humored me and I think he actually used it for the project page for a short time at least. I was proud of that.

Oliver ⚡

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 07:42:40 -0800

After some unsuccessful Friendica installation experiments and a steep learning curve, I started the german Friendica Wiki in 2013, because there was no German manual at all. First as a docu for me, later for everyone. It's still alive