one time i tried to find @holly 's account on here by searching but i gave up because i kept finding her old accounts and getting jumpscared by the different ages in the bios and being reminded that mastodon has been around for like nearly a decade now.
@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 @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.)
@alyssa @monorail wikipedia says the first release was march 16, 2016 fwiw