@taylorlorenz My name came up in a non-public subthread.

A lot of what I would have to say has been documented in the "people's history" type articles written about a decade back by Robek and Strypey, about the early, pre-Masto Fediverse from a user and social perspective, but I could be helpful with clarifications. (I'll try to locate those articles)

Like many others have pointed out, I would say Evan, CWebber and Gargron have key perspectives not to leave out from a history, protocol, development and hosting perspective, and for modern hosting perspectives and broadness of software and ways of running communities, I'd talk to Jerry and Darius.

I think all of these people have been at-mentioned elsewhere in the thread and I won't spam them further here.

Another interesting branch of the Fediverse historically is the one with Quitter, En Kompis Kompis, Freesocial and the Umeå Hackerspace, but I'm not sure where to find mmn, pettter and peer2hannes these days. If I @ them here, my server gives me the defunct Umeå Hackerspace server.

Oh, and I hope someone digs out that beautiful fedi software landscape poster from that workshop a few years ago.

@taylorlorenz
@_elena has been been doing tremendous work in this area.