I have a feeling that other people likely think Mastodon invented the fediverse and we all magically came out of nowhere the day Mastodon became mega viral, so I just want to say this:
Mastodon was invented in 2016, StatusNet [now known as GNU social] was invented in 2008, of course you can abuse me just saying it by telling me "there is no definitive evidence that it was invented before Mastodon". Well, Wikipedia has an article on gnu social which shows updates from 2010, there is your definitive evidence. "But Wikipedia can be edited by anyone", is disproven by Wikipedia logs [which cannot be modified in any way] showing a page creation date of 2008 [ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=GNU_social&action=history&dir=prev ].
It was also not just a community of people from the left that shared the same opinion like some sort of herd of zombies, there were shitposters that the left all seem to fear. [ Images 5, 6, 7 and 8, alt text explains some more about these ]
Anyone attempting to argue against these proven facts after these have been shown to them are being purposefully ignorant and you should probably not be talking to them.