@luka I'm not sure I understand that question. You were looking for description of the early history of Mastodon, right? This isn't the earliest but it's an important chapter because it covers much of the network's growth.
You mention having heard about "origins in queer/trans furry #poc circles" but it appears to me that that is mostly a fairy tale - there are some interesting minorities in English-speaking Mastodon but they cannot properly be called the originators or "progenitors" of it.
@mattskala @luka On this note, do you have some more information regarding developments on the large japanese instances? I see some pretty nice experiments originating from there, for example https://music.pawoo.net/timelines/public/local is this a commercial service they offer?
@rra @luka Pawoo is closely connected with Pixiv - an an image-sharing site which makes its money by selling a "premium" tier of access on the main site (maybe in other ways too). As far as I know their Mastodon instances are free and simply viewed as a way of promoting and driving traffic to their main, non-Mastodon, services.
@rra @luka I haven't been following the growth on the Japanese side very closely (my own Japanese language proficiency is not great, though more than zero) but there've certainly been a number of conferences and workshops among research and business people on building Mastodon and its use for business purposes. Pawoo is running a forked version but still taking most of the development lead from Gargron's Mastodon.
@mattskala @luka interesting thanks for sharing your insights!
@mattskala @luka I don't think that's strictly accurate, I joined mastodon.social before Pawoo made its debut, and there was a concentration of queer furry trans users already, just not as large as the Japanese instances became
@sonya @luka There's certainly some sort of concentration or nexus. Visible even in the list of people I follow myself on my English-language account, though I don't know to what extent that's a sampling effect. I balk at the claim Mastodon *as a whole* (much less the entire network) was ever well-described as "a queer space" nor that it's a moral obligation to give that community top billing for having "created" this place - which is the demand I've seen circulated from time to time.
@mattskala @luka maybe some of the disconnect is people using "Mastodon" to mean mastodon.social specifically, forgetting that it's a broader thing, and forgetting that the Fediverse is not just Mastodon. I try to always disambiguate that, but I think a lot of people don't, just 'cause they're not plugged into the rest of the Fediverse
@sonya @mattskala @luka Diaspora had the same problem.
At least joinmastodon is an informational website, and not an instance.
no, mastodon "as a whole" is a very strange beast.
I have no contact with that japanese 40%. it's a language thing as well.
so my view and experience of 
has started with witches.town, then cybre.space.. and most of my engagement is with queer, tolerant, marginalized and responsible and conscious folk. yes, i'm aware that it might be a small bubble disconnected from majority. but it doesn't matter, since software enables me to be protected in some way.
@luka ...and it's not responsible to cover the network as a whole without giving a lot of prominence to the Japanese side. The three top Japanese instances *alone* are currently about 51% of Mastodon's population (a smaller percentage of the larger network) and there are many more smaller Japanese-language instances.