@alyssa @monorail wikipedia says the first release was march 16, 2016 fwiw

@holly @alyssa @monorail depends what you mean by release. november 2016 is when most of the early adopters showed up and i think eugen used to celebrate the birthday in october. it was live for a while before that but i think federation was half broken and nobody used it, so it wasn’t really “in production” to my knowledge

@Lady @holly @monorail ah good to know. so arguably not quite a decade

@alyssa @holly @monorail they haven’t been called toots for a decade at least, which is probably the date i would count from :P

@Lady @alyssa @holly @monorail This but even less ironically if any of it was.

Mastodon can be recognized as "having been able to operate and grow in relation to itself, not purely reactive/implementing externally-sourced concepts", by when it (the community building Mastodon) started using and normalizing its own terminology to describe the thing they were building and what context they were building it in.

(Using their own word, "toot", doesn't UNIQUELY DEFINE when that happened/is happening, but it's a very useful and visble sign.)

@holly i think at some point you changed yr avvy over on noterook to this one and i was like "that's familiar. wait haven't i seen her on masto". and then i went searching and was like "come on i'm pretty sure i saw other holly be like 'hey holly look at this' so surely this instance should know about the account???" but i did not succeed

@alyssa federation works in mysterious ways