[1] The standard describes how a suite of various standards, including Atom, Activity Streams, WebSub, Salmon, and WebFinger,[2] can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to communicate status updates between their users back-and-forth, in near real-time.

[4] As of June 2013, a number of other microblogging applications and content management systems had announced that they intended to implement the standard.

Following the first official release of GNU Social, a number of microblogging sites running StatusNet and Free Social began to transition to it to receive new updates to the software.

But frustrations with the technology underpinning GNU Social and its complexity led a number of new server packages that aimed to be compatible with GNU Social using OStatus to shift focus to ActivityPub, including Mastodon,[6] Pleroma[7] and postActiv, a fork of GNU social.

In January 2012, a W3C Community Group was opened to maintain and further develop the OStatus standard.