Re-inventing the federated wheel because you don't know that wheels exist
I keep seeing lots of people who are totally giddy about the #Fediverse, who are gushing over it, who want to promote it, who want it to spread.
And who want it to advance. To learn new abilities. To grow new features.
That's all fine and dandy.
But almost all of these people are still fully convinced that the Fediverse equals #Mastodon. And nothing else. At least not until Tumblr and P92 join the fray. Okay, maybe the #WordPress plug-in that's the talk of the town now that it has become official. Okay, maybe a few of them have also heard of #Pixelfed and/or #PeerTube because their makers are all over the Fediverse.
When these people are talking about the Fediverse, they mean Mastodon. And when they're thinking about the Fediverse, they're only thinking about Mastodon. Because that's all they know.
So these people want new cool features or even new cool use-cases in the Fediverse, stuff that Mastodon doesn't have. They want Mastodon to have it, or they want new projects to be launched that have these features.
If only they knew.
If only they knew that everything, literally everything they propose has already been done. Yes, in the Fediverse. In projects which are fully federated with Mastodon. Why don't they know? Because they've never heard of any of these projects, much less what they can do.
So they want "quote-tweets" in the Fediverse. Which means they want Mastodon to introduce them.
Tell you what: Mastodon is the only microblogging project in the Fediverse that doesn't have quotes. Not only will Eugen Rochko never introduce them, but all the other projects have them with Mastodon forks #GlitchSoc such as being the exception. #Pleroma has them. #Akkoma has them. #MissKey has them. #CalcKey has them. #FoundKey has them. #GoToSocial has them. The old heavyweights #Friendica and #Hubzilla have them, and so does Hubzilla's youngest decendant, the #Streams project. Et cetera.
You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".
Or text formatting in posts like bold type, italics, underline, strikethrough, code blocks etc. Would be great if Mastodon had that, in spite of other people saying they don't want it.
Again: Pleroma already has it. Akkoma already has it. MissKey already has it. CalcKey already has it. FoundKey already hasit. GoToSocial already has it. Friendica already has it. Hubzilla already has it (look at this post at its source in a Web browser and weep). (streams) already has it. And so forth. This time, even Mastodon forks have it.
It has been done. It has been done many times. It has actually been done before Mastodon.
Next, long-form blog posting. We need something like #Medium in the Fediverse that isn't Medium itself. Mastodon's 500 characters are too few, and Twitter-like threads are inconvenient.
Except we already have that, too. #Plume and #WriteFreely are about as close to Medium as Mastodon is to Twitter, including clean and distraction-less layouts. Oh, and Hubzilla can do that, too.
By the way: Again, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that can do microblogging that has a 500-character limit. Pleroma, Mastodon's oldest direct competitor, raised it to a default of 6,000. MissKey and its forks have 3,000 as a default. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have character limits of "go ahead, drop your short story in one post in its entirety," so virtually none at all. And yes, Hubzilla has long-form writing on top of that.
Speaking of Hubzilla: Most recently, there has been the idea to uncouple one's online identity from a specific instance. Your online self should no longer be firmly tied to any one server exclusively. Now, this sounds so ambitious, it might just as well be science-fiction.
What if I told you that just this very thing already exists as well?
No, really. No, I'm not making this up. But you should know by now that I'm not.
Better yet: It was conceived as early as 2011. By the guy who launched Friendica in 2010. He invented a new principle named #NomadicIdentity and a new protocol named #Zot. In its early stages already, even with no technical implementation yet, Zot was more powerful than ActivityPub is today.
In 2012, Zot became reality as the basis of a Friendica fork which later became known as #RedMatrix and, upon its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, which is still prior to Mastodon's initial release, Hubzilla. Hubzilla is still being developed and improved, and it has a fledgling but growing "successor of a successor" named (streams) which offers nomadic identity, too.
Now, what does this nomadic identity even look like? Well, not only does it let you move your channel(s) around from instance to instance with ease and, unlike on Mastodon, with absolutely everything on it. No, it also lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once. Identical clones, automagically kept in sync in real-time, all with the same identity, the same content, the same connections.
Your identity is no longer strapped down to one instance. Not only that, but your channel, your posts, your content is no longer hosted on only one server. This means that if one instance with one of your clones goes down, you still have spares.
Okay, so how about community groups/forums? That'd be cool.
Well, for one, there's #Guppe. It's basically bolted on Mastodon, and in practice, it's centralised because there's only one instance. But it's impractical to use.
Besides, this is becoming a running gag here, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have exactly this built-in and open for the rest of the Fediverse.
Better yet: There's also #Lemmy which amounts to a federated #Reddit or #HackerNews clone. So not only does Lemmy offer this, it specialises in it.
Hubzilla alone can provide Fediverse feature suggestions with "has been done" for years to come. Not to mention what else the Fediverse has to offer. Even if someone should want a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated #GoodReads clone in the Fediverse, it has been done: #BookWyrm.
- Fediverse.Party - explore federated networks
Let's make social media free, federated and fun! Fediverse.Party is your guide into the world of decentralized, autonomous networks running on free open software on a myriad of servers across the world. No ads and no algorithms.fediverse.party
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MooMoo the Cat
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •(Thanks!)
serious business :donor: :heart_cyber:
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •LisPi
in reply to serious business :donor: :heart_cyber: • • •Jupiter Rowland
in reply to serious business :donor: :heart_cyber: • • •@serious business :donor: This may depend on how exactly quotes are formatted.
I think it's usually only a case of the formatting being stripped so that Mastodon users can't see what and how much of a post is a quote. For example, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) use good old BBcode, and Mastodon strips off all formatting that comes from BBcode except
[url][/url](ActivityPub actually uses Rich Text to transmit formatting).Other projects may use the even older leading
>. Stripping it makes little sense, but Mastodon doesn't recognise it as a quote yet.Max Leibman has moved!
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Quote posts are under exploration, according to the official roadmap, and Eugen had said publicly that his thinking has evolved on the subject and not to take his previous stance as gospel.
Not that your overall point is at all wrong, as they arenโt here yet but are and have been elsewhere in the Fediverse.
Becca ๐ณ๏ธโโง๏ธ ๐บ๐ฆ ๐ธ๐ฉ ๐ต๐ธ
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •It can become something great, but don't expect people to adopt en masse until it reaches a more mature state.
Same for other projects in similar state.
Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L.
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Jupiter Rowland
in reply to Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. • • •@Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. #ActivityPub. The language which (most of) the #Fediverse speaks.
It is how Mastodon instances talk to other Mastodon instances. And it is how, for example, Pleroma instances talk to Mastodon instances. Or to each other.
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Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L.
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •okay well, how many steps (and which) do you need to take to fav or boost this linked post? chaos.social/@SoniEx2/11002314โฆ
and what if it were posted on something like IRC or email instead, how many/which steps would it take then?
Jupiter Rowland
in reply to Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. • • •@DaywalkingRedhead I've never really seen #PeerTube as a #TikTok replacement. Maybe the devs could say something about it (@PeerTube).
@EamonnMR I'm not quite sure what exactly you mean with "app".
If you mean whether users of different mobile apps for the #Fediverse can stay in contact with users with the mobile app named "Mastodon" that you install from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, that's the wrong question. But the answer is yes.
If you mean whether users of different proj
... show more@DaywalkingRedhead I've never really seen #PeerTube as a #TikTok replacement. Maybe the devs could say something about it (@PeerTube).
@EamonnMR I'm not quite sure what exactly you mean with "app".
If you mean whether users of different mobile apps for the #Fediverse can stay in contact with users with the mobile app named "Mastodon" that you install from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, that's the wrong question. But the answer is yes.
If you mean whether users of different projects (platforms, server apps etc.) in the Fediverse that aren't Mastodon can stay in contact with Mastodon users, then: Yes, they can. Each project I've mentioned is federated with Mastodon, i.e. they all connect to Mastodon, and their users can interact with Mastodon users.
That's the magic of the Fediverse. And that's the actual idea behind the Fediverse. After all, the Fediverse is not only Mastodon.
@{mattl@social.mat.tl} They don't have to put up with all these features.
If they want cool new features, they may move to e.g. Akkoma or CalcKey or Friendica or whatever. If they don't, they can stay on good old Mastodon.
What they won't get, though, is a 100%, 1:1 Twitter clone, just without Elon Musk.
@Phoenix Thank you!
@Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. Do you mean me myself in my specific situation or "you" as in anyone with whichever app is the most popular on whichever hardware/OS platform is the most popular?
Do you mean which steps I personally would take using Hubzilla through Firefox on desktop GNU/Linux? Or which steps a beginner would have to take, e.g. using the official Mastodon app on an iPhone?
I could tell you the former, but it'd be of little use for most here. I can't tell you the latter because I don't have any practical experience with it.
Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L.
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Jupiter Rowland
in reply to Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. • • •@Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. Since I don't have that post in my stream:
Step 1: Copy the URL.
Step 2: Click on the magnifying glass for search.
Step 3: Paste the URL into the search field.
Step 4: Hit Enter. The post should appear now.
Step 5: Do with it as I please. Share, like, reply, save in a folder, whatever.
Basically, interaction with any post is only one search away.
Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L.
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •okay, so from something like IRC or email you have:
1. copy the URL
2. manually switch to the browser, then to the instance
3. click search
4. paste URL
5. finally, hit enter
whereas something like twitter it's just
1. click URL
do you see the problem? do you see why fedi is bleeding users?
Jupiter Rowland
in reply to Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. • • •@Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. Well, if we were to put ease-of-use above everything else for everyone, we should shut down all projects that aren't Mastodon and then turn Mastodon into a 100%, 1:1 Twitter clone with the only exceptions being the name and the fact that Mastodon isn't owned by Elon Musk. Make mastodon.com both the project website and the only instance, make Mastodon one huge centralised monolithic silo owned by a Mastodon, Inc. in Palo Alto, CA (NASDAQ: MSDN).
Hubzilla wasn't launched in 2022 in a reaction to the launch of Mastodon which in turn was a reaction upon Musk's Twitter takeover. Mastodon was launched in 2016 with no mobile app. And Hubzilla had its 1.0 release in 2015, development began in 2012, and the target audience wasn't the tech-illiterate iPhone user, it was the Linux geek.
Mastodon wasn't built to be mainstream. Hubzilla was even less built to be mainstream.
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Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L.
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •so the linux geek should be forced to put up with that crap because demanding better of your tools is too much to ask for?
is it really made for the linux geek, or for the C89 evangelist? because even the modern linux geek uses rust nowadays, complete with borrow checker. but the C89 evangelist will claim turning on -Wall is against the spirit of C. why *not* demand better of mastodon and hubzilla, too?
Jupiter Rowland
in reply to Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. • • •@Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; Soni L. The Linux geek has different priorities than the tech-illiterate iPhone user. It's all about security, data/privacy protection and efficiency and about definitely not being bullshat by anyone. The latter is one of the reasons why Linux geeks distrust non-free, closed-source software. Efficiency is why Linux geeks have drifted away from the 2000s' easier-to-use KDE and GNOME to nowadays' i3wm. Many only know GUIs from Firefox anymore. "The modern Linux geek" generally doesn't use mice, touchpads or other pointing devices anymore.
And the former two points are why Linux geeks distrust big, corporate centralised silos. Friendica was built to have a powerful social network platform like Facebook, but free-as-in-free-license, open-source, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised and federated. In fact, federated with everything and then some. Still, Friendica's target audience weren't those who used the Facebook app on their iPho
... show more@Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. The Linux geek has different priorities than the tech-illiterate iPhone user. It's all about security, data/privacy protection and efficiency and about definitely not being bullshat by anyone. The latter is one of the reasons why Linux geeks distrust non-free, closed-source software. Efficiency is why Linux geeks have drifted away from the 2000s' easier-to-use KDE and GNOME to nowadays' i3wm. Many only know GUIs from Firefox anymore. "The modern Linux geek" generally doesn't use mice, touchpads or other pointing devices anymore.
And the former two points are why Linux geeks distrust big, corporate centralised silos. Friendica was built to have a powerful social network platform like Facebook, but free-as-in-free-license, open-source, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised and federated. In fact, federated with everything and then some. Still, Friendica's target audience weren't those who used the Facebook app on their iPhones while neither knowing nor caring what happened in the background.
And Hubzilla was made because even Friendica didn't provide enough resilience with its decentralisation yet. Even more than in Friendica's case, the target audience did not include tech-illiterate Joe Average. Hubzilla has always been for people who either know what they're doing or are willing to learn.
The Fediverse was made by tech geeks for tech geeks. Mastodon was launched in 2016 when nobody could even expect Elon Musk to buy out Twitter. When nobody would have expected a mass-exodus of Joe Averages with neither knowledge nor interest in tech from Twitter to Mastodon. And when Friendica and Hubzilla adopted ActivityPub, nobody had in mind if and how these Joe Averages could understand that, although they're on Mastodon, they'd certainly interact with people on entirely different services. And it didn't matter. Other things mattered a whole lot more.
If tech geeks had always put the focus 100% on ease-of-use and neglected everything else, we literally wouldn't have any free, open-source software nowadays because all the commercial software is easier to use. Eugen Rochko wouldn't have created Mastodon because the Twitter mobile app was easier to use than Mastodon would have been in a Web browser. Mike Macgirvin wouldn't have created Friendica, Red Matrix/Hubzilla, Osada, Zap, Misty, Roadhouse and (streams) because the Facebook mobile app was easier to use than either of them in a Web browser.
Linux and XMPP should have taught the Linux geeks that average computer users can't handle having to choose. And yet, Laconica/StatusNet/GNU social became decentral. As did Friendica. As did Diaspora*. As did Mastodon and everything else that uses ActivityPub. As, by the way, did Matrix.
And why?
Because their creators wanted to create online services that don't end up entirely in one hand. A hand that could possibly misuse its own power. They actually wanted to encourage people to run their own private instances. They wanted people to own their own data. Of course, first and foremost, they had people in mind who were fully capable of setting up a LAMP stack on a headless server and maintaining it through ssh. Having to choose between a one-click solution for tech-illiterate dummies and security, they picked the latter.
Also, they, just like their target audience, like to get their hands dirty on techy stuff. They want control. Control over everything that happens. They want to know how stuff works, and they want control over how that stuff works. They want things to happen the way they want it, not the way some developer or even some corporation wants it.
They hate black boxes. They hate closed-source software. They hate it when they have to push a button, and then some magic that's none of their business happens somewhere in the background, well-hidden from them. They don't trust such crap.
They want to KNOW what happens. First-hand, if need be. And, if need be, they want to have an influence on what happens and why it happens. They want to be able to disrupt it if something bad happens. They want to be able to fix it if it's broken. They want to be able to manipulate it until it acts the way they need it to act.
This, by the way, is largely why Hubzilla's UX is as complicated as it is: It isn't made for people seeking the simplicity of WhatsApp. It's made for geeks who want to assume full control over everything their channel can do. People who distrust autopilots, assistants and obfuscated algorithms.
The reason why Hubzilla is both decentralised and nomadic is because it was made by people who prefer security over maximum ease-of-use for people who prefer security over maximum ease-of-use. For people who have seen too much snake oil and security-through-obscurity bullshit in their lives. For people who want to know and be able to verify why exactly something is as secure as it's claimed to be.
However, this entire philosophy and everything that came from it clashes hard with the demands and expectations of 10,000,000 tech-illiterates who have come over from Twitter, initially expecting a 100% Twitter clone, and many of whom now demand their 100% Twitter clone at all costs. Also because they neither know nor care what the costs would be.
If you simplify the Fediverse by forcing everything that isn't Mastodon to shut down in order to no longer confuse tech-illiterates with people who claim they aren't on Mastodon although they seem to be, the Fediverse will lose a whole lot of power and versatility. Of course, the tech-illiterates won't care, they want the Fediverse to be an as-easy-as-possible Twitter clone.
If you simplify the Fediverse further by axing all mobile apps except for one official app that's non-free and closed-source in order not to break its own license by its mere presence in the Apple App Store, you subject all its users to not only potential spying, privacy breaches and all kinds of private data going where at least some of us don't want it to go. Again, tech-illiterates won't care as long as the app is easy to use.
If you simplify the Fediverse even further by turning it all into one big, centralised, monolithic data silo operated by the same company that also develops everything, just so that people don't have to put up with having to choose an instance (or learning what instances are), you take "somewhere else to go" away from people. And it'd become possible for one individual to take over the whole Fediverse. With nowhere else to go, people will have to leave the Fediverse as a whole, and their only alternatives would be other corporate silos.
Because developing resilient alternatives is out of question. Because they wouldn't be easy enough to use.
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flere-imsaho
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Jupiter Rowland
in reply to Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. • • •@Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. It's basically the same as "If #Linux wants to take over the desktop, it'll have to become identical to #Windows, just free-of-charge and without malware. No more distros, one Linux for everyone, one desktop environment, one graphical toolkit, only one of each, whatever it is."
Linux never wanted to take over the desktop.
Marc "Blackie" DuQuesne
in reply to Genders: โพ๏ธ, ๐ชโฌ๐ฉ; Soni L. • • •@jupiter_rowland
Jupiter Rowland
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Funny how, in spite of the rising number of likes, many people seem to misunderstand what I've written.
Here's a short explanation.
People: We want bold type and italics and stuff in the Fediverse! And quote-tweets! And more than 500 characters! Please, #Mastodon, include it!
Me: Join #Akkoma (
https://akkoma.social/
Join an Akkoma instance today to start expressing yourself alongside a community of like-minded people.
Or if you don't like Akkoma, try #
... show moreFunny how, in spite of the rising number of likes, many people seem to misunderstand what I've written.
Here's a short explanation.
People: We want bold type and italics and stuff in the Fediverse! And quote-tweets! And more than 500 characters! Please, #Mastodon, include it!
Me: Join #Akkoma (
https://akkoma.social/
Join an Akkoma instance today to start expressing yourself alongside a community of like-minded people.
Or if you don't like Akkoma, try #Pleroma (
https://pleroma.social/
Or #MissKey (
ใMisskeyใใญใธใงใฏใๅ ฌๅผใMisskey Hub: https://misskey.page/
ใใใผใใงใฒใใใใใใใฏใผใฏใๅๆฃๅSNS Misskeyใฎๅ ฌๅผใตใคใใMisskeyใฎใฏใใใใใใตใผใใผไธ่ฆงใชใฉใMisskeyใซ้ขใใๆ ๅ ฑใๆบ่ผ๏ผ
Or #CalcKey (
Codeberg.org: https://calckey.cloud/
MOVED REPO: https://firefish.dev/firefish/firefish
Or #GoToSocial (
https://gotosocial.org/
Or if you don't mind something bigger, #Friendica (
Or if you don't mind a hard-to-handle feature monster, #Hubzilla (#^hubzilla.org/).
And all of them let you stay in contact with your friends on Mastodon.
#MastodonIsNotTheFediverse. Nor is Mastodon the best the #Fediverse has to offer.
Akkoma - Magically Expressive Social Media
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f4grx Sebastien (OLD ACCOUNT)
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •LittleRedCanary
in reply to f4grx Sebastien (OLD ACCOUNT) • • •James Dreben :mw:
in reply to LittleRedCanary • • •DaywalkingRedhead ๐ท
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •EamonnMR
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •DHeadshot's Alt
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Dr. Matt Lee :verified:
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Phoenix
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Kermode
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •It also has a markdown option, but I haven't turned it on until that feature is upstreamed in mastodon itself. Presumably friendica et alia will follow (or already have?)
Jupiter Rowland
in reply to Kermode • • •@Kermode The different projects use different markup languages for formatting.
Some microblogging projects use Markdown, some HTML in addition. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) use an extended variant of BBcode.
ActivityPub turns everything into Rich Text afterwards.
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Kermode
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •I use joplin for notes, so I know md to some extent. Joplin also has 'extended' the md, so... I don't really know how much I know is actually transferable. Like tables for example. No idea, but they're handy.
basisbit ๐ฆ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •basisbit ๐ฆ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ
in reply to basisbit ๐ฆ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ • • •People want something differently - well, it probably already exists, you just have to migrate to another corner of the #fediverse.
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Jupiter Rowland
in reply to basisbit ๐ฆ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ • • •@basisbit There may be a few who were given the choice between multiple projects (e.g. Mastodon vs Akkoma vs Friendica etc.) right away, also being told that they'd have the exact same people to connect to, regardless of what they choose, and who chose what appeared as the closest to Twitter.
But for each of them, you have thousands upon thousands who were only told about Mastodon, who were told that Mastodon is the Fediverse, either on Twitter or by mass-media. Including thousands to whom mastodon.social was sold as "Twitter without Musk" because nothing more fit into 280 characters.
It's them I'm talking about.
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basisbit ๐ฆ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Jupiter Rowland
in reply to basisbit ๐ฆ๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ฆ • • •@basisbit I've already seen it before replying. And I think my previous answer already covers it.
Yes, a few people were shown the whole Fediverse before joining. Out of all projects, they picked Mastodon because it seemed the most simple and the closest to Twitter to them.
Others were shown the whole Fediverse before joining, and they picked something that isn't Mastodon because they found Mastodon to be too lacking.
Most were only shown Mastodon, usually only one instance. They didn't get to choose because they didn't know they had a choice, much less what their choices would have been.
Some of the latter actually don't want there to be anything else than Mastodon. They want the Fediverse to be as simple as possible. Multiple Mastodon instances are already too complicated. Multiple different projects in the Fediverse, each with multiple instances, now, that really goes too far. Everything that isn't Mastodon has to go, also because everything that isn't Mastodon is too complicated all in itself.
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mnemonicoverload
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •@Jupiter Rowland
Edge case "technically inclined" non-tech Frendica user reporting in. Perpetually disaffected genXer, product of the BBS -> CompuServe -> Internet 1.0 pipeline. Don't really consider myself a techie though, I use Windows and haven't written any code since a VBScript I whipped up over a decade ago. I understand tech, but I'm not immersed in it. Literally no one "showed" me anything about the Fediverse.
As a Twitter user from the days when the killer feature was posting via SMS I had heard of the Fediverse, Diaspora*, etc bubbling away in the background, but it never rose to the level of something I needed to give serious consideration before. When rumblings of Elon possibly buying Twitter started I knew I needed to be ready to jump ship if the worst occurred and I felt I should be ready to help others who might need to do the same.
I literally just hit up Wikipedia, looked up the entry on the Fediverse and started resear
... show more@Jupiter Rowland
Edge case "technically inclined" non-tech Frendica user reporting in. Perpetually disaffected genXer, product of the BBS -> CompuServe -> Internet 1.0 pipeline. Don't really consider myself a techie though, I use Windows and haven't written any code since a VBScript I whipped up over a decade ago. I understand tech, but I'm not immersed in it. Literally no one "showed" me anything about the Fediverse.
As a Twitter user from the days when the killer feature was posting via SMS I had heard of the Fediverse, Diaspora*, etc bubbling away in the background, but it never rose to the level of something I needed to give serious consideration before. When rumblings of Elon possibly buying Twitter started I knew I needed to be ready to jump ship if the worst occurred and I felt I should be ready to help others who might need to do the same.
I literally just hit up Wikipedia, looked up the entry on the Fediverse and started researching the various platforms from there. I landed on Frendica ironically because it offered Twitter cross-integration and I knew that could be helpful for some of my Twitter friends who couldn't afford to just leave there cold for various reasons like relying on it to promote their business or art or sex work, organizing mutual aid, organizing protests, etc.
When I did jump ship in October it was clear Twitter integration wasn't a priority for me anymore, the platform was a lost cause for me by then (and I stopped visiting Twitter at all by early November). Never did end up convincing anyone who was looking to leave Twitter but relied on it in ways that made other parts of the Fediverse untenable to them that Frendica was a viable alternative though. In the end it was all just too opaque and confusing to them despite my best efforts to help them navigate it all.
@basisbit
RockyC
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Jupiter Rowland
in reply to RockyC • • •@Rocky Carr Good to know it takes only one afternoon to read my stuff.
Also explains my number of followers...
Slyphic
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Many of these sound very cool, but at least in the US and English I'm finding most instances (Pleroma, hubzilla) throwing errors and empty of users.
I come from a networking background. I've seen so many 'better' protocols fail while TCP and IPv4 just keep chugging along doing consistent adequate work. And I feel like I'm seeing this pattern yet again.
MiKlo:~/citizen4.eu$๐๐
in reply to Slyphic • • •After all, we are not talking here about having to change the protocol for a better one. What we are talking about is that the perception of the fediverse is skewed by one #dominant #platform and applications for it. This platform and its applications will never meet all the requirements of all users because this is against decentralisation and diversity, what is we need here.
Alien (A23P) reshared this.
Haelwenn /ัะปะฒัะฝ/ :triskell:
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Yeah, the fediverse should be explored more, it gets quite tiring over the years to see even implementers wanting things that had prior art and so could benefit from at least being studied so you could make better designs or simply be compatible.
btw slight corrections:
- Pleroma currently doesn't really supports quotes except inline via blockquotes. And while we do want to support MissKey-style quotes, implementing it on our side has been enough of a mess to get abandoned, hopefully it will get revisited at some point.
- Pleroma's default character limit is 5 000 not 6 000, and that configurable limit is given to clients via reusing what glitch-soc added in MastodonAPI
like this
Jupiter Rowland and Mark like this.
acb
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •dpflug
in reply to acb • • •acb
in reply to dpflug • • •Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Functionally, the Fediverse seems to be roughly old email (SMTP) minus a few vital features. One of them is the mandatory "subject" line, so that when you check your "inbox" in the Fediverse you get the whole messages, rather than just a list of sender/subject lines that you can choose whether to open or not.
>>
HawkWolf
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •from a user perspective, not only do I then have to find an instance of something that supports those features and move to it, I also may need different client software.
Which I think IS confusing (echoing the complaint that mastodon is more confusing than twitter, for example.)
Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •But that is BAD, VERY BAD! So the Fediverse is split into a myriad platforms -- and hence communities -- with incompatible features.
That may be great for the computer nerds who will join a dozen platforms just to revel in the features. It is terrible for those who only want a platform to communicate with other people...
#Fediverse #FediverseFragmentation
Mark doesn't like this.
Charlie Stross
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •Scifijunkie likes this.
Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Charlie Stross
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •@Jorge Stolfi @Jupiter Rowland @Charlie Stross
out of curiosity, what do you see if I use italic or bold text on my platform?
Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •@Jorge Stolfi @Jupiter Rowland @Charlie Stross
that's what I expected: I don't know whether it's my platform (friendica) that sends stuff that knows that the target can read (plain unicode text) or mastodon that specifically ignores the bbcode (yeah, friendica uses bbcode for markup, for historical reasons I believe).
mnemonicoverload
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •like this
Flittermouse ๐๐ฉ :ablobbass: :ablobdrum: :ablobkeyboard: and Elena ``of Valhalla'' like this.
eshep
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • •LisPi
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •#Email has supported different content-types since at least 1992 (rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1341) with no guarantee any given client supports any given content-type, none of this is new.
#Usenet & #Fidonet also had ways prior to #MIME, such as via extension headers (with flaws that MIME addressed).
RFC 1341: MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions): Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies
www.rfc-editor.orgCharlie Stross
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •Flittermouse ๐๐ฉ :ablobbass: :ablobdrum: :ablobkeyboard:
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •It strikes me as weird that we're able to have this discussion on a number of different federated ActivityPub servers, using a growing variety of front-ends, and still there are people complaining that it's not working as well as it should, because reasons.
I still don't know what I'm supposed to make of fact that some people don't know the difference between Mastodon and Hubzilla. Well if it comes to that, they don't need to know. It all works just fine anyway, as long as you can grasp that users are identified by at username at instance instead of at username.
Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Flittermouse ๐๐ฉ :ablobbass: :ablobdrum: :ablobkeyboard: • • •Are we indeed able to dicuss Fediverse-wide? Or just among those who use a particular prootcol (ActivityPub?)?
And even within the latter, there seem to be obvious problems. I don't see any markups in other people's messages (e.g. cant tell block quotes from the sender's own text). And I am limited to 500 byte posts, so I cannot quote 1000 chars from a post that someone else sent me.
CouncilsInExile
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •I've seen the occasional mention of NomadicIdentity but never been able to find any details, implementations etc. Search engines just pull up lot's of stuff about digital nomads instead.
Any idea where to start with #NomadicIdentity ?
lotfi
in reply to CouncilsInExile • • •Hubzilla | Hubzilla - hubzilla@hubzilla.org
hubzilla.orgAnthony Sorace
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •๐ถMark Nicoll 3.5%๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ฅ๓ ฎ๓ ง๓ ฟ๐ฌ๐ง๐ช๐บ๐บ๐ณ
Unknown parent • • •People on platforms capable of displaying the original content, should not be effected by your platforms ability to interpret that content.
Flittermouse ๐๐ฉ :ablobbass: :ablobdrum: :ablobkeyboard:
Unknown parent • • •I get the italics, bold, and block quotes, too. If somebody isn't getting that, and it's important enough to them, they can easily migrate to an instance that will provide the markup. I actually did that myself a couple of weeks ago, but for reasons unrelated to the capabilities of the social media server. My old account was on a Mastodon instance called musician.social, and my new account is running Akkoma, a hard fork of Pleroma.
Despite running a completely different implementation, Akkoma was capable of migrating my Mastodon followers, followed, and other settings over. My old posts couldn't be migrated, but I find this limitation acceptable. I can understand why some may be wary of migrating.
Musician.Social
Mastodon hosted on musician.socialJorge Stolfi
in reply to Flittermouse ๐๐ฉ :ablobbass: :ablobdrum: :ablobkeyboard: • • •ActivityPub
www.w3.orgJorge Stolfi
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •In this regard (apart from interaction model), ActivityPub is more like old FTP, rather than SMTP+MIME, NNTP, the WWW, and the "social networks".
That is, AP does not try to ensure that a message sent by a user from a compliant server can be read faithfully (apart from non-semantic layout and looks) by recipients in every other server. Because the sender may use a message format that the receiver can't properly handle.
Is this correct?
Flittermouse ๐๐ฉ :ablobbass: :ablobdrum: :ablobkeyboard:
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •I'm not an implementer, but it's my understanding that the recipient can tell the sender what it can handle, while the sender may include a source attribute containing the original content, as well as the transformed content that complies with the recipient's stated requirements.
I think somebody above referred to the notion of degrading gracefully, and that's certainly possible using such mechanisms.
Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Flittermouse ๐๐ฉ :ablobbass: :ablobdrum: :ablobkeyboard: • • •Yes, but that is still not good. Within ActivityPub, one cannot write a *message* that, a priori, is known to be correctly readable by any of the intended recipients -- unless it is a short (< 500 bytes) text in plain ascii, with no italics, boldface, or other markup, and no embedded images... >>
#Fediverse #ActivityPub #FediverseFragmentation
Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •>> For the ActivityPub network to be a better alternative to social networks, or even to WWW, the ActivityPub standard should specify a *message* format -- such as HTML 3.0 -- that is rich enough for modern expectations (embedded images and hyperlinks, tables, etc.), but that every compliant implementation is required to handle and display properly, on any minimally powerful platform.
#Fediverse #ActivityPub
#FediverseFragmentation
Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •Sorry. I have been using ">>" to indicate continuation in threads. A habit I carried over from the birdโซโซโซโซdogecoin site. My mastodon instance limits posts to 500 bytes.
Would "๐งตโ>" be the proper way here?
eshep
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • •Jorge Stolfi
Unknown parent • • •@eshep
I wish someone had warned me of that 4 months ago, when I joined through mas.to. Oh well.
But the problem is not what kind of text **I** can read and write. It is **lack of interoperability**. It is the fact that, no matter in which server I am hosted, I cannot be sure that everyone who gets my posts will be able to read them correctly -- unless I write only 500 chars of plain ascii.
eshep
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • •neue medienordnung plus
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •Jupiter Rowland
in reply to eshep • • •@eshep I guess that @Jorge Stolfi was a) told that #Mastodon is the #Fediverse and b) given mas.to as the URL to go to instead of joinmastodon.org.
So whoever guided him to Mastodon either didn't know better themselves or wanted to make it as easy for newcomers as possible, short-cutting the instance selection process by directing them immediately to one instance and not even telling them that such a thing as instances exist.
It happened on Twitter all the time, also because there's only so much you can explain in 280 characters. That's why you have people who joined in November during the #
... show more@eshep I guess that @Jorge Stolfi was a) told that #Mastodon is the #Fediverse and b) given mas.to as the URL to go to instead of joinmastodon.org.
So whoever guided him to Mastodon either didn't know better themselves or wanted to make it as easy for newcomers as possible, short-cutting the instance selection process by directing them immediately to one instance and not even telling them that such a thing as instances exist.
It happened on Twitter all the time, also because there's only so much you can explain in 280 characters. That's why you have people who joined in November during the #TwitterMigration, who didn't find out about instances and Mastodon's decentral nature until February, and who didn't find out that there's more to the Fediverse than only Mastodon until March.
They were guided by tweets such as
or in this case
like this
eshep and clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy ๐ธ๐ช๐ญ๐ฐ๐๐ like this.
eshep
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • •@Jupiter Rowland, to be fair, Mastadon is about as twitter as AP gets. :D It almost feels like the twitteriness of mastodon is there intentionally to give people who've been directed to it as an alternative a bad taste for it so they either head back or persist in their dislike of that system.
It really burns my ass when I see posts like those. People pushing things they know nothing about. It's really quite sad how few people understand the "federation" part of FediVerse.
Jorge Stolfi
in reply to eshep • • •Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •๐งตโ> It seems that for the Fediverse, maybe even for Mastodon, the only message format that can be read by everybody is 500 chars plain Unicode without any markup. Plus maybe one poll and a few images -- but only at the end of the post and with fixed size.
I will probably move to some other instance soon. However, the above constraint applies *no matter where I have my account.* That is the problem...
eshep
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • •Jupiter Rowland
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •@Jorge Stolfi @eshep @Elena ``of Valhalla'' @๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ผ๐ฏ :๐ณ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ: ๐ฆ๐น โ @Charlie Stross For example, instead of pointing you straight at one instance, someone could have pointed you here (for Mastodon only):
https://joinmastodon.org/servers
Find where to sign up for the decentralized social network Mastodon.
Now, choosing a project rather than an instance of one set project is more difficult without knowing anything about any of them other that they're probably not owned by Elon Musk.
Servers
joinmastodon.orgFlittermouse ๐๐ฉ :ablobbass: :ablobdrum: :ablobkeyboard:
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •I'm no longer on Mastodon, but when I used musician.social sometimes a longer post would show up. I think it was split up into 500-character chunks somehow. You're right about the interoperability problem.
But the upside is that we can just move to a different server and take our followers with us. I'm sorry if people think that's irrelevant, but it's a really good selling point for me. The degree to which I can communicate with people is in my own hands.
Musician.Social
Mastodon hosted on musician.socialScifijunkie likes this.
Jupiter Rowland
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •@Jorge Stolfi @eshep @Elena ``of Valhalla'' @𝗝𝗮𝗸𝗼𝗯 :𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮: 🇦🇹 ✅ @Charlie Stross Nope.
People on mastodon.social which may be the most vanilla of Mastodon instances can read 6,000-character rants written by me with no problems, with nothing cut off.
And everyone on Pl
... show more@Jorge Stolfi @eshep @Elena ``of Valhalla'' @๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ผ๐ฏ :๐ณ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ: ๐ฆ๐น โ @Charlie Stross Nope.
People on mastodon.social which may be the most vanilla of Mastodon instances can read 6,000-character rants written by me with no problems, with nothing cut off.
And everyone on Pleroma, Akkoma, MissKey, CalcKey, FoundKey, GoToSocial, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), certain Mastodon forks, the last remaining Redmatrix/Osada/Zap/Misty/Roadhouse instance etc. etc., pretty much everywhere that isn't vanilla Mastodon, can see each other's posts with rich-text formatting all right. It's just vanilla Mastodon that's left out.
The compatibility issues we have mostly come from Mastodon flat-out refusing to cooperate with other projects and, as it seems, deliberately staying incompatible to make everything that isn't Mastodon look bad to Mastodon users. How good can e.g. Friendica be if posts coming from there look so weird on Mastodon?
Mastodon can get away with it for two reasons. One, 99.99% of all new arrivals in the Fediverse land on Mastodon and "know" that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. Once they learn about other Fediverse projects, they believe that these were all created after Mastodon, after the Twitter Migration even, and that they're Mastodon add-ons.
Two, the ActivityPub standard can be stretched to kingdom come. It leaves a lot of things undefined. And this is unlikely to change because nobody is there to maintain and develop ActivityPub anymore. Nothing that Mastodon does goes against the ActivityPub standard.
Thus, everything that isn't Mastodon has to put up with Mastodon's shenanigans and build itself against them, even if it's older than Mastodon and requires a plug-in to understand ActivityPub like Friendica and Hubzilla, or become fully incompatible in the long run. Or at the very least, its instances will be Fediblocked by Mastodon instances because "some weird shit" is coming from them due to increasing incompatibility.
Jorge Stolfi
Unknown parent • • •Thanks for the patient advice!
Here on mas.to I cannot read your long messages directly on the timeline. Only the first 500 chars show. I must click on the post and then it is displayed whole in a separate sub-window. Still without markup etc.
๐งตโ>
Jorge Stolfi
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •๐งตโ> But I must dispute "They all can interact together as you are used to interact only from twitter to twiter..." Again, even if I move to friendica, but want my posts to be correctly readable by anyone on the Fediverse, I must still stick to the small Mastodon format...
That is worse than what I had on Usenet or email, 35 years ago.. โน๏ธ
Any chance that Mastodon and the other instances can agree to support a common HTML-3 like message format?
Jupiter Rowland
in reply to eshep • • •@eshep That's what I do. And it's always the same.
"How can you possibly write more than 500 characters in a toot?"
I'm on Hubzilla.
"Oh, is that a special Mastodon instance with a higher character limit?"
No, it's a different, fully separate Fediverse project that not only is not Mastodon, but that's four years older than Mastodon with next to no character limit and features that exceed your wildest dreams. #^hubzilla.org
[beat] "You're not on Mastodon?"
No.
"But how can I read your posts then if you aren't on Mastodon?"
Because Hubzilla, like many other projects that aren't Mastodon, connects to Mastodon. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. There are many many other projects out there. All of them can talk to Mastodon, and Mastodon can talk to all of them.
https:/
@eshep That's what I do. And it's always the same.
"How can you possibly write more than 500 characters in a toot?"
I'm on Hubzilla.
"Oh, is that a special Mastodon instance with a higher character limit?"
No, it's a different, fully separate Fediverse project that not only is not Mastodon, but that's four years older than Mastodon with next to no character limit and features that exceed your wildest dreams. #^hubzilla.org
[beat] "You're not on Mastodon?"
No.
"But how can I read your posts then if you aren't on Mastodon?"
Because Hubzilla, like many other projects that aren't Mastodon, connects to Mastodon. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. There are many many other projects out there. All of them can talk to Mastodon, and Mastodon can talk to all of them.
https://fediverse.party
Let's make social media free, federated and fun! Fediverse.Party is your guide into the world of decentralized, autonomous networks running on free open software on a myriad of servers across the world. No ads and no algorithms.
[Worldview-shattering noises] "HOLY SWEET JOHN MASTODON ON A POGO STICK, BATMAN! WHAT THE EVER-LOVING FUCK?!?!?!"
- Fediverse.Party - explore federated networks
fediverse.partymnemonicoverload likes this.
mnemonicoverload
in reply to Jorge Stolfi • • •@Jorge Stolfi
I can't tell you exactly how it works as I'm relatively new here, documentation seems sparse, and I'm unwilling to dig through source code to find out, but my understanding is ActivityPub absolutely supports passing along whatever kind of markup you could possibly want.
The common practice implemented for most of the Fediverse seems to be to translate whatever local markup is being used (eg BBCode on Frendica) into Markdown (I think?) to pass formatting along to other parts of the Fediverse which seems to be well supported by basically everything except Mastodon. It's a choice by the Mastodon devs alone not to adhere to the established convention and turn that back into whatever markup format is needed on their end.
@
... show more@Jorge Stolfi
I can't tell you exactly how it works as I'm relatively new here, documentation seems sparse, and I'm unwilling to dig through source code to find out, but my understanding is ActivityPub absolutely supports passing along whatever kind of markup you could possibly want.
The common practice implemented for most of the Fediverse seems to be to translate whatever local markup is being used (eg BBCode on Frendica) into Markdown (I think?) to pass formatting along to other parts of the Fediverse which seems to be well supported by basically everything except Mastodon. It's a choice by the Mastodon devs alone not to adhere to the established convention and turn that back into whatever markup format is needed on their end.
@๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ผ๐ฏ :๐ณ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ: ๐ฆ๐น โ
neue medienordnung plus
in reply to Jupiter Rowland • • •I suggest, instead of presuming, and fellow humans who develop Mastodon, to assume
Then, in the next step, to waste infinite time in discussions about technical details, simply to try to reach through some channel the people who develop Mastodon and try to clarify whether the thesis, whether the assumption
is correct.
Do we agree - the compatibility problems are not caused by technical issues, but by human ones? It does suggest that there is a better chance of solving these compatibility problems on a human level, rather than spending time in discussions that go round and round in circles of "Which technical features of a particular platform
... show moreI suggest, instead of presuming, and fellow humans who develop Mastodon, to assume
Then, in the next step, to waste infinite time in discussions about technical details, simply to try to reach through some channel the people who develop Mastodon and try to clarify whether the thesis, whether the assumption
is correct.
Do we agree - the compatibility problems are not caused by technical issues, but by human ones? It does suggest that there is a better chance of solving these compatibility problems on a human level, rather than spending time in discussions that go round and round in circles of "Which technical features of a particular platform are better".
Do we agree - the age of a protocol, a platform, a standard - whether this is ActivityPub, Hubzilla or any other platform, is no proof that this platform is better than a younger platform - e.g. Mastodon?