@eshep

No, that's not what #ActivityPub is for, the whole idea is to allow communication across different services. There seems to be quite a few people who do not want non-Mastodon things in the #fediverse. I'm not so sure that it's simply a matter of ignorance, although that probably has a bit to do with it.

Mostly, I think people didn't realize what they signed up for. They thought that they signed up for a Twitter replacement and they got an open network instead. Since they thought Mastodon was Twitter without Elon Musk, the whole concept that other stuff can connect to Mastodon wasn't something they anticipated or could comprehend in the beginning. Now they are freaking out that other people are connecting to a network that was always open.

Plus I see a lot of vocal people complaining about the "privacy" of their public posts on a public network.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
-- Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

Some people don't seem to understand what public means. And they don't realize that their public posts are already being indexed by search engines and scrapped by all sorts of people, some unsavory. And that is before Threads and Bluesky connect. They haven't learned that they need to be careful what they post online.

I do understand people's concerns, and there are valid concerns. But the most vocal people who object to others joining the network don't really understand what an open network is or that they signed up on one by creating a Mastodon account.

The people who have concerns, but understand the nature of the fediverse and ActivityPub, talk about specific issues and how to solve them instead of calling for bans of entire platforms.

@eshep There were another two threads about Bridgy Fed creating a bridge to Bluesky. And again, people loudly demanded the Fediverse be ActivityPub only.

Thing is, the Fediverse has never been ActivityPub only. Mastodon started in 2016 with OStatus because, like Pleroma earlier the same year, it started as an alternative frontend for GNU social. So GNU social was based on OStatus, and both Friendica and Hubzilla already knew it, too. At that point, the term "Fediverse" was already some four years old.

It was only in September of 2018 that Mastodon announced the introduction of ActivityPub as an additional protocol. Hubzilla had done so two months earlier, so Mastodon has never even been the only ActivityPub project.

But the vast majority of Mastodon users seems to think that Eugen Rochko invented a) Mastodon, b) ActivityPub and c) the Fediverse and d) did so in 2022 as a reaction upon Musk's announcement to take over Twitter. And literally everything else in the Fediverse was made after Mastodon.

Not only that, but the Bluesky bridge threads made it painfully obvious that a two-digit percentage of Mastodon users is still fully convinced that the Fediverse is actually nothing but Mastodon. Because they clearly want to fight for it remaining that way, unaware that is isn't that way.

I think when Hubzilla and Friendica users joined the threads and started commenting, these folks either ended up deeply disturbed with their worldviews shattered to rubble upon the revelation that there's more in the Fediverse than Mastodon already now. Or they didn't even notice that these posts a) talked about non-Mastodon Fediverse projects which are reality now and b) came from outside of Mastodon, no matter how blatantly obvious it was that these posts could impossibly have been sent from Mastodon.

The rest might be aware that there's more to the Fediverse than Mastodon. But this "more" is limited to Pixelfed and PeerTube and what they think must essentially be Mastodon with a different UI.

It was just as painfully obvious that just about none of the Mastodon users who posted on these threads and railed loudly against bridges of any kind knows that stuff is bridged to Mastodon already now and has been bridged to Mastodon since Mastodon's own launch. This stuff currently is Hubzilla and (streams), none of which are based on ActivityPub.

Granted, in these cases, we aren't talking about one big third-party bridge for everyone. The bridge in question is named "PubCrawl", it's a first-party add-on to both Hubzilla and (streams) that comes with the server application itself, so while not firmly baked into their cores, it's an official part of them, and there's one individual bridge for each channel. But yes, there are bridges.

This is one thing I'd like to explain in such a "snippet". Other things would be, for example:

• Mastodon was launched in 2016. Hubzilla was both launched and had its first stable point release in 2015, and it's a fork of the now-defunct Red Matrix from 2012 which is a fork of Friendica from 2010. Also, Mastodon announced ActivityPub integration in September, 2018; Hubzilla did so in July. In both cases, Hubzilla was there first. It is not an intruder. Deal with it.
• Mastodon generally has a 500-character limit; its whole culture is built around this limit. Hubzilla doesn't have any character limit; its culture doesn't know any character limits.
• Mastodon has a dedicated content warning field. But that content warning field is actually a re-appropriated summary field because nobody needs a summary for 500 characters. On Hubzilla, it still is a summary field. And Hubzilla does content warnings reader-side and automatically by detecting keywords in posts, and optionally so. Thus, writing Mastodon-style content warnings is not part of Hubzilla's culture. But giving summaries for long posts in what Mastodon perceives as a content warning is part of Hubzilla's culture.
• An explanation why Hubzilla can't add Mastodon-style content warnings to replies which includes a description of Hubzilla's conversation model in comparison with Mastodon's.
• Hubzilla has always had full-text search with no opt-out. This is, of course, limited to whatever any given hub knows, but it does never exclude Mastodon toots.
• Hubzilla has always had text formatting. It has always been part of its culture. And large parts of its text formatting capabilities aren't even shown on Mastodon.
• Hubzilla's weird-looking mentions and hashtags are hard-coded and have been since six years before Mastodon.
• "Quote-tweets" have always been part of Hubzilla's culture because Hubzilla does that instead of "retweeting" or "boosting" because it can't boost (again yet). It always links to both the original post and the original poster. There will never be a way for anyone on Mastodon to opt out of it.
• Hubzilla can quote anyone anywhere in the Fediverse with no resistance whatsoever. It has always been able to do that. There will never be a way for anyone on Mastodon to opt out of it.

Now, this is not meant to be advertisement. It's more like a series of public service announcements to raise Hubzilla awareness.

I'm well aware that it could also have the effect of triggering or increasing anti-Hubzilla campaigning on Mastodon. I mean, most Mastodon users probably don't even know that Hubzilla exists, and most of who do don't know what Hubzilla can do. And large parts of what it can do fall under "atrocities" and "breaking the Fediquette" from a Mastodon point of view. Mastodon doesn't riot against that stuff because it doesn't know about that stuff.

But if such riots broke out because Hubzilla is so not like Mastodon and even refuses to be more like Mastodon, that'd tell a lot about Mastodon.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla