[5][6] At its peak in popularity, GNU social had been deployed on hundreds of interconnected instances,[7] however has since fallen into disuse as competing software like Mastodon and Pleroma have taken its position as the dominant federated microblogging services.

Originally, StatusNet (named Laconica at the time) was launched with a communication protocol designed specifically for the project called OpenMicroBlogging (OMB).

[11] Version 0.9.0 was released soon after in March 3, 2010, with the developers implementing a newly designed protocol dubbed OStatus, with support for OMB being dropped not long after.

Compared to OpenMicroBlogging, OStatus could handle and federate more events and actions than the basic plaintext communication that OMB provided and was based on a variety of other web technologies, allowing for easier adoption of new implementations of the protocol for servers and clients compared to the fully custom architecture of OMB.

[14] New registrations on identi.ca along with the ability to create new status.net instances was disabled in December 2012, in preparation for a migration to pump.io that has since been named by users of StatusNet and OStatus as "the Pumpocalypse".

[15] pump.io was a brand new software package like StatusNet, but with a new protocol designed for general purpose activity streams outside of microblogging and ease-of-use for developers building on the technology, much like the transition from OMB to OStatus.

[19][20] Around the same time, a developer named Mikael Nordfeldth forked StatusNet with the intention of maintaining it as a personal project, dubbing it "Free Social".

However, following identi.ca's transition to pump.io and its developers' sudden abandonment of StatusNet, the projects received more attention from server administrators and other users looking for an actively updated alternative.