# GreatApe story

GreatApe — live audio and video conversations for the Fediverse.

This is the story of GreatApe!

I am going to tell this story in reverse.

## Fediverse

The era: 2020 to Present

## Research-and-Development

The era: 2019 to Present

At the beginning of this era, in 2019, GreatApe wasn't called “GreatApe” yet.
But the idea of it being a form social-media platform, with rooms that people joined, where they had video or audio conversations, was already there — and had been there since 2017.

In actuality, we had thoughts on a number of different for applications for the technology we were developing —
but for the sake of telling a story about _GreatApe_ we will focus on just this one appication.

We had some constraints for the application —

* it must to work in a web-browser,
* the user should must _not_ have to install anything to use it,
* it must be privacy-protecting (from people outside the conversation),
* it needs to make the cost of streaming video in real-time negligible.

These constraints came from the industrial-research we had done prior to the start of this research-and-development.
(More on that later.)

Back in the late 1990s to mid-2000s, when the core tree-stream technolgy was first invented — the technology that would later be called “logjam” — it wasn't yet possible to accomplish this.
But, decades later — with the addition of the WebRTC technology to the web-browser, all of a sudden it looked like it might be possible.

The goal was to recreate the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology which invented in the late 1990s to mid-2000s — but to this time re-create it to work within a web-browser.
Thus started the research-and-development.

## Industrial-Research

The era: 2018 to Present

## Hiatus

The era: 2010 to 2018

## Show in a Box

The era: 2007 to 2010

**Show in a Box**, often initialized to as “**SIAB**”, was the first open-source social-media software for video.

In this era, both _decentralized_ social-media networks and _centralized_ social-media networks were popular.

MySpace was a popular _centralized_ social-media network in this era — it had a lot to do with why another _centralized_ social-media network, YouTube, initially got popular.
Although, back then, YouTube was mainly used as a way of sharing videos on MySpace — because it was the only free video hosting website that supported playing video in (a non defunct technology known as) Flash.

A popular **decentralized** social-media network, in this era, was what was then called the **blogosphere** — the network of **weblogs** (often shorterned as “blogs“).
Although during this era, there was still some debate (that began in the late 1990s) over whether to call these “**web-logs**”, or “**web-journals**”, or “**web-diaries**”.
As the story goes — “**web-log**” won, got concatenated as “**weblog**”, someone (not knowing “**weblog**” = “**web**” + “**log**”) thought it was a concatenation for “**we**” + “**blog**” and shortened it to “**blog**”.

## Vloggercon

## Vlog

## VideoBlogging Mailing List

## HTML5 video

The era: 2006 to Present

## Invention

The era: late 1990s to mid-2000s