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