I’m not sure if I would go as far as gp to claim older, but statusnet and ostatus which were early parts of the fediverse date from within a couple years of facebook’s general availability. I would say the fediverse about as old as Facebook (2008 vs 2006, close enough?)
I think they mean that fedi didn’t take social media back because it never left. It’s the users who went back.
Like if we all joined Myspace again we wouldn’t say that Myspace rewound social media. People forget that the fediverse has been around a very long time, it’s not new.
I can’t find the announcement but the kbin API is live on artemis.camp which Hariette has been using to test the API for the Artemis app (now in public beta I believe but the public beta only supports the API instead of web scraping so it only works with artemis.camp). I think I read that the API is on track to be released in the next week or two so by then other kbin instances should start having an API as well.
That makes sense considering that before this update, posts weren’t searchable so you could only find user profiles, hashtags, and your own (& favorited?) posts. It was basically just a hashtag and user search before.