Okay here's a real toot that you can actually boost without people looking at you like you're crazy.
https://medium.com/@alliethehart/gameingers-are-dead-and-so-is-mastodon-705b535ed616
The past few weeks (okay, ever since the schism) I've felt kind of disenchanted by Mastodon and especially its development environment, and I wrote an essay about why that is. It's long, but if you're interested in Mastodon's history or politics you should give it a read.
I briefly go into detail about a lot of history stuff that we don't really talk about anymore, although it's not necessarily the focus and there's more to say. Mastodon's history has been one of a LOT of turmoil and I swear it seemed like every two weeks there would be shit going down and people complaining and either leaving or getting run off the site. Nobody talks about that so much anymore, or ever really did.
@u2764 also fwiw, masto the project has been around since at least april, though it was only october that the features started coming with the big influx of queer users.
at first garg couldn't see the point of wanting your posts to be unlisted, and the day i arrived the sensitive content toggle wasn't there – that was two days after (idk if i was the one who got it going, but i asked "is there a sensitive content toggle" and he said "soon, so pls just hotlink lewd for now")
@u2764 your article was good, and i'm glad that you sort of brought it all togther. a lot of my circle talked about these problems a lot during the first few months so it's nice that, like. someone from not-this-circle brought them up too
@u2764 yeah, i def appreciate that. i only know that there was a v small number of ppl using the service at least as far back as april bc you could scroll back to conversations that long ago on garg's account when i joined (no one seemed to use it very often at that point though)
@dolljoints October is the date that I've seen cited in articles, so that's kinda what I've been using as the de-facto starting point, although I knew at least the Github project went back way earlier.
It's really interesting hearing about developments from before I got on the platform, though—most of what I wrote was just my own personal experiences. Part of the reason I wrote the essay was to help prevent that history from being totally lost.