#birdsite — Public Fediverse posts

@mike

Streams is basically an acknowledgement that my work has no value to anybody but me.

The lack of popularity for #Friendica, #Hubzilla, #Zap & Co. never came from nobody caring.

It always came from nobody even knowing that they exist in the first place.

In 2010, people were ready and willing to pump a few hundred thousand US dollars into the development of #Diaspora. They hoped that Diaspora* would be a free, decentralised Social Web revolution. But the development of Diaspora* took an eternity, and out came something lack-lustre and underwhelming that spent several years in public alpha.

Why didn't people save their money and use #Friendika instead which was everything they had dreamed of and then some? Which was vastly more powerful in spring 2010 before Diaspora* was developed than Diaspora* itself would ever become? Why was Diaspora* developed in the first place? Why was the wheel re-invented, but worse?

Because nobody knew that Friendika existed. That's why. Diaspora* made it into all big news because its developers a) announced to mass media that they want to compete with #Facebook and b) asked people for crowdfunding, hence the big publicity campaign. If Friendika had been as well-known as, for example, #Firefox, Diaspora* wouldn't exist.

I myself only found Friendika back in the day by actively searching the Web for decentralised social network platforms. It was a thorough, intense search. And I eventually stumbled upon it.

As for Hubzilla, I happened upon it on Friendica when someone mentioned it.

As for #Osada and #Zap, I think it was you who mentioned them within the Hubzilla dev bubble which I occasionally got a glance into. Someone from that bubble also led me to #Misty a.k.a. #Mistpark2020.

As for #Roadhouse and #Streams, I discovered them on Zotlabs by chance. And their Zotlabs pages were never filled with any information on what they are and what they do.

I didn't find out about any of these projects through any form of advertising or publicity campaign, nor did I learn about any of them through tech media.

Only once do I recall that any of these projects has ever been presented at a FLOSS or hacker event. That was years ago at the #ChaosCommunicationCongress where a panel about Friendica was held. But even that panel was like Friendica devs talking to other devs about developing Friendica and Friendica node admins talking to other LAMP stack admins about installing and running Friendica nodes. What Friendica can do was only mentioned briefly. The first step, namely getting people interested in using Friendica as end users to see what it's good for, was skipped entirely. And there was no info booth, there was no promotional material, there were no flyers, no nothing. Even #OpenStreetMap had flyers.

#Mastodon was just lucky. For starters, it was the first free and decentralised microblogging service that was launched in years. The whole #StatusNet and #GNUsocial things had been so long ago that even those few who had come across it barely remembered, so Mastodon didn't seem like it was aping them. And it must have attracted enough disgruntled #birdsite users already then to gain a critical mass.

Before 2022, we already had a situation in which the vast majority of Mastodon users believed that the #Fediverse was Mastodon, and Mastodon was the Fediverse, and there was nothing else out there. Pleroma was already vastly superior to Mastodon technologically, but Mastodon had the critical mass. Still, Mastodon itself was so obscure that #TimBernersLee had never heard of it, much less of any of your projects or Diaspora*, and therefore decided to re-invent the free, open-source, non-commercial, decentralised social wheel all from scratch once more.

When the #TwitterTakeover started looming on the horizon, people started recommending Mastodon on #Twitter. And pretty much only Mastodon because that was all they knew. Again, critical mass. This critical mass enlarged itself in several waves.

I guess not a single birdsite refugee had ever heard of any Fediverse project beyond Mastodon when they joined it, and I guess over 80% still never have. And they keep wondering how people can toot more than 500 characters, whether their Mastodon instance has different settings and such. I know from personal experience that it often takes several attempts to explain to people that, no, I am not on Mastodon, and Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance.

Mass media don't make it any better. Both general news media and tech media have meanwhile picked up the Mastodon phenomenon, and many have accepted that Mastodon is here to stay. Still, all general news media and nearly all tech media "know" that Mastodon is the Fediverse and vice versa, and that there isn't anything else out there. Some media outlets have joined the Fediverse themselves. They could be way better off with #Akkoma or #Pixelfed or Hubzilla or their own take on Streams. But they're on Mastodon. Why? Because that's all they knew when they got there. Because they've settled with Mastodon before even knowing that there are projects that'd suit them better. And they'll probably never know.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming you personally. I'm not even sure if it's good style for the main dev of a project to go peddling their own work. Making your projects known should have been a task for the whole community. Not only the devs, not only the hub admins, but the users. Because if someone can talk to aspiring users, it's actual users. "If you build it, they will come" has failed, and we should have seen this coming.

Large-scale migration away from proprietary, commercial projects and towards free, open-source, non-commercial alternatives only happens under pressure from outside and even then not always. Large-scale adoption of Firefox in Germany happened when the most widely-used browser was #InternetExplorer 6 which was not only hopelessly outdated but so insecure that the malware spread through it alone caused millions upon millions of Euros in damage. And it only happened because the reaction upon this was our Mother Of The Nation, Federal Chancellor #AngelaMerkel, herself telling the Germans to move from IE6 to Firefox.

And the mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon only happened for two reasons: One, Twitter was threatening to get more and more hard to take. Two, Twitter didn't and still doesn't really have a commercial, corporate-owned, centralised competitor. All possible Twitter alternatives are decentralised #FLOSS. There was nowhere else to go than down the Fediverse route.

Right now, however, I don't see a #Facebook takeover that'd turn it into yet another Nazi hive and cause people to flee to Friendica and/or Hubzilla. Nor does #OlafScholz tell people to quit Facebook and join Friendica/Hubzilla instead. He doesn't even tell people to join Mastodon.

No, growth for Friendica, Hubzilla and Streams still has to come from within. And again, this won't be a task for the core devs. All they'll have to do is tell the community what there is to advertise. But I don't expect anything really new to come anytime soon, seeing as Streams seems to be a be-all, end-all project that can be turned into anything without involvement by the core devs. So we already know what there basically is to advertise. And when it comes to cool new features, we learn about them quickly when new versions come around, and the devs do talk about these beforehand.

So the first step would be to get these projects known outside the #DFRN, #Zot and #Nomad bubble. This would lead us into two different, bigger bubbles. One is the Fediverse which, as I've already mentioned, the vast majority of its own users still sees as synonymous with Mastodon. Granted, we'd have tough competition there, for if someone desires more than 500 characters per post, maybe they're better off with Akkoma or a different Mastodon instance. And federation with Diaspora* is no longer a unique selling point because hardly anyone uses Diaspora* exclusively anymore, so I guess hardly anyone misses the Diaspora* connector on Streams. But maybe a "federated social Swiss army knife" like Friendica or even Hubzilla or a "federated social construction kit" like Streams is exactly what some people are looking for. Remember that the Fediverse alone covers millions of people. 1% of them is slowly but steadily closing in on being 100,000.

The other bubble is the FLOSS scene. This may be more difficult because, curiously, the FLOSS scene barely knows about the Fediverse, even about Mastodon, and thus has barely adopted it. This will be somewhat tougher. Some people in that scene reject social media altogether because they associate social media with corporate spyware, and they've convinced themselves that they don't need any social media (or their social media hub is either a git repository hoster, ironically often a #Microsoft property, or a mailing list). Others have a general dislike towards GUIs, only using ultra-minimalist #i3wm and no pointing devices themselves. Or they cling to the UNIX philosophy that each tool has to be able to only do one thing which gets to the point that they actually use different tools for receiving, composing and sending e-mails. Even Friendica can do too much for their tastes.

Still, I think that other people in the FLOSS bubble may be more welcoming, also because the Fediverse is yet another rather successful attempt at competing against corporate monopolies with FLOSS, with decentralised FLOSS à la #XMPP or #Matrix even. Also, while the #GAFAM bubble sees us as a bunch of idealistic but ultimately successless basement-dwelling nerds, the FLOSS bubble will see us as some of their own ilk doing more cool stuff in addition to all the cool stuff that has already been done. Not to mention that the FLOSS bubble has its own news outlets. We just must not repeat the mistake of only trying to talk to potential devs or potential instance admins. We have to reach out to aspiring end users first and foremost. Devs and admins will come in their wake. FLOSS people aren't keen on developing something they've never even tried using.

Media coverage outside the FLOSS bubble might give us an even wider audience. Sure, it may appear like even specialised tech media aren't interested in anything that isn't commercial. And some outlets do flat-out refuse to publish anything about anything FLOSS, or they only write about whoever pays them to write about them. But generally, they don't have an aversion against FLOSS alternatives to commercial products. Mass media helped Firefox spread. Mass media helped Diaspora* exceed their crowd-funding goal buy suggesting it'll be a Facebook killer. And mass media are right now accepting Mastodon and the Fediverse as the next big thing instead of some wacky nerd stuff. It may actually happen that media outlets which still reject the Fediverse in favour of Twitter will be seen as not only backwards-oriented, but outright right-wing.

It's hard to say how easy it'd be in 2023 to even only get tech media to write about Friendica, Hubzilla or even Streams. On the one hand, there may still be an attitude of, "Nobody wants to read about it if it wasn't launched with venture capital." On the other hand, the Fediverse itself has more than one foot in the door, what with journalists joining Mastodon and entire media outlets launching their own instances. All we have to do is get the knowledge into their heads that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Maybe they'll find this discovery so amazing that they'll write about it.

I think Friendica would be the easiest case. Okay, it'll be hard to treat something as cool new stuff if it has been around for 13 years or so. But it isn't so modular, it's more like an all-in-one "black box" of the kind that non-techy types prefer, and it concentrates on social networking and doesn't overwhelm its users with features, at least not that much. Also, it's the closes to being "to Facebook what Mastodon is to Twitter."

Hubzilla could mainly score with its sheer, all-encompassing power. It's certainly the most powerful, most versatile Fediverse project. This, however, may make it too powerful for casuals. It's also more modular than Friendica which means that many cool features, even including #ActivityPub support, have to be activated by the user. That said, Hubzilla's main issues, its user interface which capitulates before its vast amount of features, its documentation which reads more like a technical spec than a user manual and its outdated and less-than-welcoming representation on the Web, are being tackled as we speak (or rather type). Thanks to @Scott M. Stolz, Hubzilla may soon have one or multiple user interfaces that make it much easier to harness its vast power and flexibility.

Streams, or (streams) as some spell it, is still the odd one out. I must admit that even experienced Hubzilla veterans often have a hard time understanding what it actually is, much less Mastodon users, not to mention the GAFAM-only bubble. While bone-stock Streams itself is easier to use than Hubzilla, partly thanks to a reworked UI, partly thanks to lots of features having been cut and therefore no longer cluttering the UI, the whole concept may be confusing to many. It's not only even less of a "black box" than Hubzilla, it isn't a project or even a platform like Mastodon or Friendica at all; it's only a code repository which you can yoink and make something nice out of. Streams says, "Fork me!" It wasn't made to be run vanilla as a Zap successor which is a rather subversive idea. In fact, running Streams as-is is subverting the subversion again; it doesn't help that vanilla Streams makes for a decent Fediverse server already.

So Streams will be difficult to explain even to tinker-happy FLOSS people, its main target audience, and even more so to those who have only just left the commercial, corporate software bubble they had called their cosy home for many years and managed to wrap their minds around Mastodon. What Streams needs more than Hubzilla is reference implementations that show in practice rather than in theory what can be done with it. I mean, it's hard enough to grasp that Hubzilla can serve as a macroblog or a wiki until you've seen it happen with your own eyes.

A typical Hubzilla reference implementation would be a regular instance with all bells and whistles with open registration (until it's full, that is). People can join it, play around with it and make it their social homebase. Along with it, there could be Hubzilla instances that aren't social networking platforms but something different, yet still "powered by Hubzilla" as would be written on them. These could show Hubzilla's versatility. Something you were told is "something like Facebook" suddenly powers a blog. Or a community webpage, including a public event calendar. Or a wiki. Or a personal website with a personal DAV cloud server silently running in the background. Things that make Hubzilla get away with ActivityPub being optional, especially if these websites have nomadic clones. In this case, #Zot only serves to keep the clones in sync.

With Streams, the focus should be vice-versa. It'd be more important to show off what can be done on top of Streams or by forking Streams and making something nice and "unexpected" with it, preferably with multiple identical nomadic clones to show off what #Nomad can do, but still with a "powered by Streams" badge on it. A social networking platform or two could come later and mainly to demonstrate that Streams can do that, too. If this came first, Streams would be reduced to being "the next Friendica" or the next attempt at a Facebook competitor, and nobody would try to use it for anything else. Rather than that, Streams deserves a reputation as "nomadic WordPress" at the very least.

There's a lot that can be done to help these projects gain popularity. Some of it is already being done, especially for Hubzilla. And Streams can be given some time to take off, new as it is. Sitting around and waiting for people to come only gains us those who came from Twitter to Mastodon and then happened upon Friendica or Hubzilla through posts with over 500 characters.