#birbsite — Public Fediverse posts

@Jon I guess this has got a lot to do with the demographic change in the Fediverse. It is now mainly populated by people whom it seems to never have really been intended for.

Around the time when #Mastodon started, when even #ActivityPub didn't exist, the #Fediverse mostly consisted of #Friendica and #Hubzilla which tried to federate with as many platforms as possible, microblogging platforms based on #StatusNet which had an open API that Friendica and Hubzilla could connect to, plus #Diaspora which, while federated internally, was a #WalledGarden towards the outside until Friendica cracked its data structure open.

In those days, your typical Fediverse user was an übergeek. The vast majority of people especially on Friendica and Hubzilla had #Linux on all their devices, sometimes including smartphones (Nokia N900 or N9, anyone?), and they were not only familiar with #FLOSS, but they often flat-out refused to use proprietary, commercial, #NonFree, #ClosedSource software. When they looked into the package managers of their Linux distributions, they saw a vast world of free and #OpenSource software spread before their eyes. The primary instant messaging platform of choice was #XMPP.

Not exactly few hosted their own private (or sometimes public) Friendica nodes or Hubzilla hubs. Setting up a #LAMP stack wasn't too big an issue for many. While #Twitter and #Facebook were for normies, and Diaspora* was increasingly turning into a #hipster hive, Friendica and Hubzilla were for the tech-savvy FLOSS nerds. Even the leftist activists who also populated Friendica fell into this category. And when Mastodon was launched, it was mostly targetted at these very same people.

The more popular Mastodon became, the more this changed. And these days are completely over since the #TwitterMigration.

Your typical Fediverse user nowadays uses #Windows and/or an #iPhone, some may use a smartphone with manufacturer-issued #Android. They're largely non-techies who have never in their lives knowingly (or, in the case of many iPhone users, ever) directly used free, open-source software. They don't know such stuff exists, they don't know what it is, and they don't care, also because it's too technical for them to even want to know about it.

They've also only ever used commercial, centralised, monolithic online platforms developed, owned and operated by #GAFAM and other Silicon Valley giants, not simply because it's convenient, not simply because that's what everyone does, but mostly because they neither know nor care that alternatives exist. Or even could possibly exist. The entire concept of online platforms not run by big American corporations is alien to them, the conccept of online platforms split into various instances run by independent entities even more so. Some even seem to be convinced that e-mail is a centralised, corporate service exclusively owned and run by #Google because all they know is #GoogleMail.

This was all nice and cosy and convenient until #ElonMusk came along and bought out the #birbsite. Worse yet, he started gradually turning it into a virtual Führerhauptquartier.

When someone recommended mastodon.social to them as a replacement, they took it for the website of another Silicon Valley-based, commercial, profit-oriented start-up offering another proprietary, centralised, monolithic online service. That was all they knew and all they could possibly imagine. Basically, they expected Twitter without Musk, but otherwise 100% Twitter.

What they found themselves on instead was a world completely alien to them. No corporate monolith, but a platform run by a German non-profit. Not everyone is on the same website. There are more of these "Mastodon websites," all with the same brand on them, most run by private people. They're called "instances." And they're all connected. No corporation that owns and develops and operates everything and issues the only mobile app you're allowed to use. In fact, they were quickly recommended to use Mastodon through an app that is not named Mastodon. They'd never in their lives used an online service through a mobile app with a different name. This, too, was completely alien to them and still is to many.

So this is the Fediverse. Or so they thought. Because it got worse.

It was hard enough to grasp the concept of decentral instances of the same project being united in a network with absolutely no central infrastructure whatsoever. But then the evidence became clearer that there is even more on the Fediverse than all those Mastodon instances. There are instances of entirely different projects that aren't Mastodon at all, but that can still communicate with Mastodon instances.

Not only did they have to cope with thousands of big and small Twitters connected with one another. But on top of that, they basically had posts on their timelines from people who weren't on one of these Twitters at all, but instead on a little Facebook or a little Instagram, and yet, they could post to Twitter from this little Facebook or Instagram. And again, there were many of these as well, not only one each.

However, the old guard hasn't left. They're still there. And their mindset is still the same. And this mindset collides with that of those many for whom Mastodon was their very first step out of their commercial IT bubble, who'd rather stay inside that bubble, but who were chased away by an overt Nazi supporter.

You can actually see how these mindsets clash. Some more recent Fediverse users complain about "too much Linux talk" on their timelines or in their corner of the Fediverse. And not exactly few don't want there to be anything else than Mastodon in the Fediverse. Not to mention those Twitter converts who want there to be more central services in the Fediverse for convenience vs. those FLOSS-loving Fediverse veterans who strongly oppose and even actively combat any centralised structures in the Fediverse for security and data privacy reasons.

The non-techy newcomers on their pre-installed Windows laptops and iPhones who'd rather have a full-blown Twitter clone (minus Nazis) are the vast majority, especially on Mastodon. However, the tech-savvy, security-aware, FLOSS-loving übergeeks who run Linux on second-hand, sticker-bombed ThinkPads still have the last word. For it's them who build and run the Fediverse, and it's them who have the competence to do so.

Imagine Microsoft messing Windows up so much that a mass exodus of users towards Linux starts, users who, like so many before them, expect desktop Linux to be identical to Windows, just free-of-charge and with no malware and without whatever Microsoft messed up. Or imagine a mass exodus from #WhatsApp and/or #Discord to #Matrix. In both cases, the situation would be pretty much the same.

@Ada @defcon42/Mirko @[email protected] To me, it sounds more like some #Mastodon users, especially those who came in through the #TwitterMigration, actually can't stand there being something else in the #Fediverse than their beloved Mastodon. When they caught their first glimpse of the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, they reacted much like the people of Krikkit when they caught their first glimpse of the universe beyond Krikkit: "It has to go!"

They make themselves and each other believe that Mastodon is superior to any other Fediverse project in just about any regard imaginable while apparently completely refusing to learn about those other projects. They're supported in their belief by mass media only ever writing about Mastodon and the number of Mastodon users.

However, mass media only write about Mastodon because they simply don't know a thing about the rest of the Fediverse, and they didn't know a thing about Mastodon until the #TwitterTakeover had actually happened, and the second wave of former #birbsite users had come flooding into Mastodon in such numbers that it was impossible to ignore even for those who act as if #FLOSS doesn't exist.

As for the numbers of Mastodon users, they're so high because I guess more than 90% of all Mastodon users still don't know that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, because they have never heard of anything else in the Fediverse. Mastodon was pretty much the only Fediverse project advertised on #BirbSocial when this was still possible.

There are various reasons why Mastodon users don't spread across the Fediverse in masses. None of it is because Mastodon is superior to everything else because, truth be told, it isn't. I'll come to this later. One reason is, again, that the vast majority of them still don't know anything else. Another one is because it was hard enough to get used to Mastodon after years of using #Twitter, and they don't want to get used to yet another platform. And another one is that it's hard to move from Mastodon to something else and take your account or at least your connections with you.

Another reason may be because people don't need anything beyond microblogging, and that's what Mastodon does. Now, sorry for all those of you who fight tooth and claw to defend Mastodon against the competition, but #Akkoma does microblogging, too. With extra features beyond Mastodon, some of which Mastodon users have been pestering Eugen Rochko to include in Mastodon for ages (e.g. "quote retweet"). All while being more lightweight and requiring fewer server resources than Mastodon. Oh, and it federates with Mastodon.

Other Fediverse projects aren't even competition for Mastodon because they specialise in something else. @Pixelfed specialises in posting pictures, much like #Instagram. @PeerTube specialises in video upload and streaming, not too dissimilarly from #YouTube. #Plume and #WriteFreely specialise in distraction-free traditional blogging, much like #Medium. #Lemmy specialises in groups and posting and discussing news, much like #Reddit or #HackerNews. You can't claim that Mastodon is better at each of these things than these platforms.

And then there are the jacks-of-all-trades which are usually filed under either "macroblogging" or "like #Facebook ". They weren't launched to have something that goes beyond Mastodon because their history reaches far back before Mastodon. Mastodon was launched in 2016 (and not 2022 like many believe). #Friendica was launched in early 2010, even before the crowdfunding campaign for the development of #Diaspora started. And in that early stage, Friendica, then still named #Mistpark, was vastly more powerful than Diaspora* ever got and also vastly more powerful than Mastodon 13 years later.

#Hubzilla, created by the same man as Friendica, is the most extreme one of them all. For starters, it eliminates the need for multiple accounts by having multiple independent channels with separate identities on the same account. Each channel can have multiple profiles like on Friendica so you can present your channel differently to individual contacts or groups of them and differently again to the general public.

It can do micro- and macroblogging with 50,000 or more characters and just about everything that can be done with #BBcode (italics, bold type, underline, lists with bullet points or numbers, quotes, code blocks), and you can embed as many pictures as you want in your posts where you want them instead of them automatically being attached to the end of the post.

Group handling in Hubzilla is much easier than list handling in Mastodon. You never have to type the name of a contact to find them. You can edit contacts and add them to groups or remove them, and you can edit groups and add or remove contacts, all with a few mouse clicks. And while Mastodon shows a maximum of four lists on the main page, Hubzilla will give you easy access to all your groups.

On top of that, you can have

• very fine-grained access rights control with pre-definable contact roles
  
• forums (just like Friendica, Hubzilla has #Guppe built in)
  
• more elegant macroblogging with articles which, in addition to BBcode, support #Markdown
  
• simple webpages (or not so simple if you're the admin of a hub, and you can expand it further)
  
• wikis (I'm not even kidding)
  
• a public calendar
  
• a virtually unlimited number of private calendars with #CalDAV connection
  
• a virtually unlimited number of address books with #CardDAV connection
  
• a file server with #WebDAV connection with its own access rights management which also ties in with the Photos and optional Gallery app (Mastodon drops your pictures somewhere, Hubzilla lets you upload them to your personal cloud space where you can access them whenever you want)

All with one run-of-the-mill Hubzilla account. And once per channel, separately.

And as if that wasn't enough, Hubzilla introduced the #Zot protocol and with it a concept named #NomadicIdentity.

Mastodon and Friendica let you have multiple accounts, even on separate instances. They also support migration from one account to another, and unlike Mastodon, Friendica lets you take all your content with you. Hubzilla (and #Streams, the successor of its slimmed-down successor, still created by the same guy) goes even further: Not only can you easily move from one hub to another, you can have channels on multiple hubs and automatically keep them fully in sync! If one hub goes down, it doesn't matter because you've got everything on all your other accounts.

Last but not least, both Friendica and Hubzilla federate with almost everything that moves, even far beyond the #ActivityPub Fediverse. This could be Diaspora*, this could be #GNUsocial, this could be #Wordpress blogs with or without the ActivityPub add-on, this could be RSS feeds (and they both generate feeds themselves, so this is bidirectional, too), this could even be Twitter until the API is shuttered. Friendica even used to federate with Facebook until Facebook put rocks in the way; this is the only connector that Hubzilla didn't take over.

The obvious downside is that for someone who just came in from the #birdcage, all this is utter overkill. In fact, people who are used to Mastodon may find Friendica borderline unusuable due to its many features. And Hubzilla is so infamous for its own clumsy UI capitulating before its sheer power that even Friendica users find it hard to use, fresh converts from Twitter to Mastodon even more so.

Some design decisions may be hard to understand for outsiders. Converts from other Fediverse projects to Hubzilla regularly fail at something as seemingly similar as connecting to users on other ActivityPub-based projects until you tell them that ActivityPub is an optional app on Hubzilla that has to be activated first because Hubzilla concentrates on Zot with its Nomadic Identity.

Also, just because these projects offer so much power, that doesn't mean that everyone needs it. If you do, it can be convenient to have it all under one login. But if all you're looking for is a bit of microblogging and online socialising, you don't need to drag a CMS and a full-blown cloud server with all bells and whistles along with you that just clutter up the UI. In that case, projects like Mastodon and Akkoma win because they're more approachable.

And while Friendica, Hubzilla & Co. can do threaded discussions and even have something like forums, Lemmy can do this more elegantly because it specialises in it. While you can use Hubzilla's private calendar feature for event planning, it's easier to do the same with #Mobilizon which, again, specialises in it. Or you can host podcasts on Friendica, Hubzilla & Co, but you can host them better on #Funkwhale and even better on #Castopod.

Wanting the Fediverse to be only Mastodon hinders development, namely the development of new projects within the Fediverse that may be able to do all-new things that we haven't seen in the Fediverse yet. Things that, sorry to say again, you'll never be able to do with Mastodon.

P.S.: For extra kicks, don't just read this on Mastodon. Open my original post; there you can see what Hubzilla is capable of, and what Mastodon strips away.

@[email protected] @Ada I can relate to your last paragraph.

For the vast majority of #Mastodon users, Mastodon and #TheFediverse are one and the same. It was hard enough for them to comprehend that Mastodon isn't one website for everyone and everything, a monolithic service like the #birbsite. And they won't get #Pixelfed or #PeerTube into their heads until their timeline is being bombarded with posts from these; probably not even then.

It gets even worse with other microblogging or macroblogging services which, unlike #Plume or #WriteFreely, don't mimic classic blog platforms. It's too easy for the average Mastodon user to take them for Mastodon as well.

I'm on #Hubzilla. Something which, I guess, even the majority of #Friendica users has never heard of, even though it's the direct successor to Friendica, and both had the same creator. For typical Mastodon users, especially those who came in from #BirbSocial, it's just as incomprehensible as Friendica.

Generic example of a dialogue between a typical Mastodon user and me (look at my original post for more text formatting):

"Oh wow, how can you write such long toots?"

"I'm on Hubzilla."

"Oh cool, so their admins must have raised the limit."

"I'm not on Mastodon, I'm on Hubzilla."

"Still cool to have such a liberal instance."

"Listen. I'm not on Mastodon. I'm on #Hubzilla. An entirely different project than Mastodon which is also four years older than Mastodon. You can read my posts on Mastodon, but I am not on Mastodon."

"Buh... but... how..."

"The magic of the #Fediverse. It doesn't only connect Mastodon instances with one another, it also includes wholly different projects."

The same people may have had posts from #Pleroma, #Akkoma or #MissKey in their timelines without noticing, at least not if these posts were short enough.