Hacker News Reader

Mastodon itself isn't a new network, it leverages existing networks (OStatus and ActivityPub).

ActivityPub is only two years old though in its current form, and the previous ActivityPump protocol really wasn't used at all so it can be considered a new protocol in the grand scheme of things.

I only just found out about these. What are they and how long have they been running?

OStatus is a collection of protocols, which was known for powering StatusNet (now known as GNU Social) since 2010.

ActivityPub is a lot more recent, and is a "consolidated" protocol designed to replace OStatus. It's fairly recent, so Mastodon is one of its first implementations, and Gargron (the main dev of Mastodon) contributes to the W3C Working Group in charge of the spec since ActivityPub support was added to Mastodon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com