I started building @pixelfed in April 2018, just weeks after the ActivityPub spec was published.
I delayed federation support in light of some fediverse meta that happened in the summer of 2018, and someone even made a doespixelfedfederateyet website that said "No." until Dec 2018.
People joked about Pixelfed a lot, then the vibe changed when I shipped ephemeral Stories using LitePub + Bearcaps in 2019.
8 years later, we're still here and thriving!
