So, fun story. In the middle of ActivityPub’s standardization, the Social Web Working Group nearly got shut down because we couldn’t get the big corporate players to pay attention to us, and the W3C’s membership structure required paid membership participation.
We tried *desperately* to get Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc to look at us. They weren’t interested. What I heard was that they had written off the idea that decentralized social networks could exist or work by then.
Luckily, management agreed that the SocialWG’s work was interesting enough that we should continue. And later having seen what happened when big players entered a standards group… ActivityPub was probably a better spec for being written by people passionate about it instead.
But anyway. That’s all to say… it’s so *weird* now to be in the present moment, as you can imagine…