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.

Logo

The era: 2022

By November 2022, work on turning GreatApe into Fediverse software was on its way — Farzaneh Amini was working on the GreatApe UX & UI, Meysam Mousavi was working on the GreatApe back-end technology, Mehrdad Mirsamie, Muhammad Zaid Ali, & Benyamin Azarkhazin were working on the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology, and Charles Iliya Krempeaux and Massoud Seifi were sponsoring and managing the work.

GreatApe needed a logo.

Charles Iliya Krempeaux asked Chet Earl Woodside to create a logo for GreatApe — and so he did.

UX & UI

The era: 2022 to Present

On Thursday June 30th, 2022, Farzaneh Amini join GreatApe. She is the person most responsible for GreatApe's look-and-feel, through her work on GreatApe's user-experience (UX) and user-interface (UI).

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 technology was first invented — the technology that would later be called “logjam” — it wasn't yet possible to accomplish this. The web-browsers of the day lacked the necessary lower-level technologies to enable it. 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.

Although the research-and-development was started by Charles Iliya Krempeaux back in the late 1990s — in this era of research-and-development, Charles Iliya Krempeaux with Massoud Seifi managed and sponsored the research-and-development.

One of the first people to join the research-and-development team was Sal Rahman. Sal Rahman didn't work on the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology, but instead explored full-mesh networks, using WebRTC in the web-browser. Through his work we learned about many of the limitations of full-mesh works, and when they should be used and when they shouldn't. Later Sal Rahman left the research-and-development team.

Later Mehrdad Mirsamie joined the research-and-development team. Mehrdad Mirsamie successfully recreated the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology, using WebRTC in the web-browser.

Later Muhammad Zaid Ali and Benyamin Azarkhazin joined the team and, working with Mehrdad Mirsamie, further developed the tree-stream (“logjam”) technology.

Their work is ongoing.

Industrial-Research

The era: 2018 to Present

Hiatus

The era: 2010 to 2018

Show in a Box

The era: 2007 to 2010

Back then, video on the Internet and the Web was just starting to be practical — it wasn't before.

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

In this era, both decentralized social-media networks and centralized social-media networks were popular.

The centralized social-media network Twitter was not popular yet, and was just getting started — at the time it was mainly populated by very early adopters. MySpace was the 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 (as an embed on MySpace) — because it was the only free video hosting website that supported playing video in (a non defunct technology known as) Flash. MySpace's decline later led to the rise of yet another cenralized social-media network: Facebook.

A popular decentralized social-media network, in this era, was what was then called the blogosphere — the distributed 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”.

Many people had wanted to do video over the Internet, and then the Web for years (if not decades). As blogs rose as a popular form of social-media, some people wanted to do video over blogs. A community was formed around this idea via a mailing-list — the VideoBlogging Mailing List. The mailing-list attracted many people interested in video on the Internet and the Web.

Someone from the VideoBlogging Mailing List shoterned “video blog” to “vlog”.

A conference related to the VideoBlogging Mailing List was created — Vloggercon. (More on that later.)

And a small number of people from the VideoBlogging Mailing List created Show in a Box (SIAB):

• Adam W. Warner
• Charles Iliya Krempeaux
• Cheryl Colan
• Devlon Duthie
• Enric Teller
• Jacob Redding
• Jay Dedman
• Jen Simmons
• Markus Sandy
• Michael Verdi
• Milt Lee
• Ryanne Hodson
• Rudy Jahchan

From that list of people who created Show in a Box (SIAB) — Charles Iliya Krempeaux later went on to create GreatApe. His experience with SIAB influenced GreatApe.

Vloggercon

Vlog

VideoBlogging Mailing List

HTML5 video

The era: 2006 to Present

Invention

The era: late 1990s to mid-2000s