identi.ca was a free and

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

social networking A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...

and

blogging A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

service based on the

pump.io Pump.io (pronounced "pump eye-oh") is a general-purpose activity streams engine that can be used as a federated social networking protocol which "does most of what people really want from a social network". Started by Evan Prodromou, it is a fo ...

software, using the Activity Streams protocol. Identi.ca stopped accepting new registrations in 2013, but continues to operate alongside several other pump.io-based hosts provided by E14N which continue to accept new registrations.

Features

Identi.ca running on pump.io is similar to social networking sites like

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...

and

Google+ Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google p ...

, allowing unlimited length status updates, rich text, and images. The Activity Streams protocol supports many kinds of activities such as games. OpenFarmGame is a prototype application for an Activity Streams-based game.

Hashtag A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...

s, groups, and global search are not supported.

History

StatusNet

The service received more than 8,000 registrations and 19,000 updates within the first 24 hours of publicly launching on July 2, 2008, and reached its 1,000,000th notice on November 4, 2008. In January 2009, identi.ca received investment funds from

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which h ...

group Montreal Start Up. On March 30, 2009, Control Yourself (since renamed StatusNet Inc) announced that Identi.ca was to become part of a hosted microblogging service called status.net to be launched in May 2009. Status.net offers individual microblogs under a subdomain to be chosen by the customer. Identi.ca will remain a free service. All notices will be published under the

Creative Commons Attribution A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

3.0 license by default, but paying customers will be free to choose a different license. Formerly based on StatusNet, a micro-blogging software package built on the

OStatus OStatus is an open standard for federated microblogging, allowing users on one website to send and receive status updates with users on another website. The standard describes how a suite of open protocols, including Atom, Activity Streams, WebS ...

specification (and earlier based on the

OpenMicroBlogging OpenMicroBlogging is a deprecated protocol that allows different microblogging services to inter-operate. It lets the user of one service subscribe to notices by a user of another service. This enables a federation of new communities,Stay, Jesse ...

specification), Identi.ca allowed users to send text updates (known as "notices") up to 140 characters long. While similar to

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

in both concept and operation, Identi.ca/StatusNet provided many features not currently implemented by Twitter, including

XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, originally named Jabber) is an open communication protocol designed for instant messaging (IM), presence information, and contact list maintenance. Based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), it ...

support and personal

tag clouds A tag cloud (also known as a word cloud, wordle or weighted list in visual design) is a visual representation of text data, which is often used to depict keyword metadata on websites, or to visualize free form text. Tags are usually single word ...

. In addition, Identi.ca/StatusNet allowed free export and exchange of personal and "friend" data based on the

FOAF FOAF (an acronym of friend of a friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe themselves. FOAF allows groups of people to describe soc ...

standard; therefore, notices could be fed into a Twitter account or other service, and also ported in to a private system similar to

Yammer Yammer () is an enterprise social networking service that is part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. It is used mainly for private communication within organizations but is also used for networks spanning various organizations. Access to a ...

pump.io

Developer

Evan Prodromou Evan S. Prodromou (born 14 October 1968) is a software developer and open source advocate. His major contributions have been Wikitravel (with Michele Ann Jenkins), Identi.ca, and StatusNet. In 2015, he launched Fuzzy.ai, an artificial intell ...

chose to change the site to the

software platform in development, because pump.io offers more features making it technically more advanced. Registration on Identi.ca was closed in December 2012 in preparation for the switch to pump.io software (the popularity of Identi.ca and "official" Status.net hosting were considered a hindrance to the creation of a

federated social network A distributed social network or federated social network is an Internet social networking service that is decentralized and distributed across distinct online service provider, service providers (similar to email, but for social networks), such as ...

). The conversion was completed on 12 July 2013. The 140 character per post limit was removed (in StatusNet, it was a setting, not an inherent limitation); now the blog posts can contain formatting and images. Groups,

hashtag A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...

s, and page listing popular posts are not yet implemented in pump.io.

Footnotes

References

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External links

* {{Microblogging Blogging Internet properties established in 2008 Internet services supporting OpenID Domain hacks Web applications Free software 2008 software