#conversationcontainers — Public Fediverse posts

@Chao-c'

Friendica is missing polls altogether and the stunt with language auto-detection is damaging built-in translation feature in Mastodon.

Mastodon has no concept of enclosed conversations which is damaging threaded conversations at least on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, as they were created by Mike Macgirvin for Mistpark (now Friendica) in 2010. Mastodon has no chance whatsoever to implement FEP-171b "Conversation Containers" because it lacks even the bare basics.

This is the very reason why Mike Macgirvin (creator of Friendica and Hubzilla and still maintainer of (streams) and Forte) has introduced yet another server-wide anti-Mastodon countermeasure named FedUp to both (streams) and Forte. Its effect is that it blocks all Fediverse server software that doesn't understand enclosed, one-post-several-comments conversations and the principle of all comments always going directly to the original poster who then forwards them to all other participants in the conversation.

(streams) and Forte already have the server-wide User Agent Filter that can block entire Fediverse server applications by their user channel. It was created and mostly marketed as a way of blocking Threads without a URL list, without constantly having to add new URLs to a list because Threads changed its URLs. But it's just as capable at entirely blocking all present and future Mastodon servers, and Mike even describes it as such.

Also, want to know the reason why Mike still keeps Nomad-based (streams) alive in spite of also having ActivityPub-based Forte with almost feature parity? It's because ActivityPub is optional on (streams) at channel level. The ActivityPub switch can be used as a last-resort anti-Mastodon countermeasure even though its side-effects are tremendous. The most important (streams) group, a support group, by the way, used to have ActivityPub off with the very purpose of keeping obnoxious Mastodon users out. It only turned ActivityPub on when it also became the unofficial support group for Forte.

As I've said elsewhere: It isn't Mastodon that's the ActivityPub reference implementation of ActivityPub with everything that's different being broken. Mike Macgirvin has built all his ActivityPub implementations by the book, and so have Hubzilla developers Mario Vavti and Harald Eilertsen, two months before Mastodon itself had ActivityPub support. In the meantime, Mastodon's developers deliberately and intentionally break compatibility with the rest of the Fediverse to fool Mastodon users like you into considering the non-Mastodon Fediverse broken.

I would also appreciate longer HTML files as kind of "media attachments" and not body of the post. The main problem is perhaps that Mastodon chose to ignore the post title field altogether and does not allow markup in post body (but there is entire huge fork called Glitch, which supports markup, but perhaps markup is what you want in longer texts, kind of attachments - but not short on-wall posts?)

The solution for this would lie in the dichotomy between Note-type objects (tweets are supposed to be this) and Article-type objects (longer posts are supposed to be this).

Mastodon supports both in a way. But it only renders Note-type objects. Even then, it still throws away the title and all attached images except for the first four. Its HTML sanitiser removes half of the text formatting, including embedded images. As for Article-type objects, it shows them as a small "toot" with the title and a link to the original. Only recently, probably also under pressure from commercial players like Ghost, Mastodon added the summary which it otherwise uses as the CW field.

But this is highly inconvenient. Hardly any Mastodon user can be bothered to click or tap the link to the original. They don't understand that there's a Fediverse post behind that link, much less that if they comment on the "toot" with the link, they comment on the post behind the link itself. Besides, what's behind the link won't show up on their Mastodon interface. Instead, if they're on a phone, their browser will open.

From this stems a debate that's as old as Mastodon's participation in the Fediverse. A prime example of culture clash.

The developers and users of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte want Mastodon as well as all its apps to fully render all their contents in the timeline. Including the title, including all text formatting, including as many embedded images as there are, as images actually embedded within the text, of course. The very same thing happens where they are. It's normal for them. It's the standard for them. It's part of their culture. What Mastodon does on their Note-type objects is crippling and defacing, and what Mastodon does on their Article-type objects is silencing to the point of wholesale censorship of several competitors.

On the other hand, the Mastodon devs refuse to add full HTML rich text rendering to Mastodon, and the Mastodon users don't want it anyway. In fact, many Mastodon users are highly disturbed by there being "toots" that are longer than 500 characters, and some are disturbed by there being any text formatting (displaying support for which was only introduced in October, 2022 with Mastodon 4.0, by the way). Their culture is that of purist microblogging in plain text with no more than 500 characters. It's already too much what Mastodon and its apps show already now. Thousands upon thousands of Mastodon users would go and block each and every server that sends anything over 500 characters if they knew that this is an option.

At the same time, hardly anyone on Mastodon even takes into consideration that whatever "long posts" come from has something like a culture of its own in the first place. It can't be culture if it isn't Mastodon's.

As I mentioned in the previous answer, Hubzilla just does too many things differently and focuses on experience of local users of instance - not on federated interoperability.

Seriously?

Hubzilla has had full-blown nomadic identity since almost four years before Mastodon came out.

Hubzilla is almost as much an omni-federational monster as Friendica.

• It has optional ActivityPub support, unlike Mastodon almost strictly by the official W3C specification, and it has had ActivityPub support before Mastodon had it.
• It used to have optional StatusNet support which is how Mastodon federated with it immediately.
• It can optionally federate with diaspora*; Mastodon can't do that.
• It can optionally federate via ActivityPump, the protocol that replaced StatusNet on Identi.ca; Mastodon can't do that.
• It can optionally cross-post to Dreamwidth, Libertree, LiveJournal and WordPress. It has been able to do either years before WordPress got its ActivityPub plug-in. Mastodon can't do either.
• It still has the optional technology to bidirectionally connect to 𝕏; Mastodon doesn't have that.
• It still has an optional built-in XMPP client; Mastodon doesn't have that.

Mastodon is simply lights years ahead.

I sincerely hope that you only mean that Mastodon is ahead of others in terms of easy on-boarding of clueless newbies. And not that Mastodon is generally ahead of Hubzilla technologically and in features.

If the latter, I'll gladly prove you wrong.

I would prefer moderation to be more collective responsibility, so posts can receive perhaps kind of negative points, and people can choose to join shared blocklists and so, instead of relying of some superhero capabilites of moderators (which I don't have).

The problem with this is blind faith in those who maintain the blocklists.

Big blocklists tend to be automatically generated from smaller blocklists, letting everything from each one of these blocklists in, only weeding out double entries, if at all. Single persons have unlimited power over who is allowed to interact with thousands upon thousands of Mastodon servers and who isn't.

Now imagine that someone who maintains a popular blocklist is too disturbed by non-Mastodon content. It's too long, it doesn't follow Mastodon guidelines, it goes against Mastodon's culture, so it has to go. And then they start adding every single server URL from which obvious non-Mastodon content comes to their blocklist. Or they even use a script to harvest FediDB and Fediverse Observer for URLs of servers of certain non-Mastodon Fediverse applications and automatically add them to their blocklist.

And all of a sudden, almost entire non-Mastodon Fediverse server applications are completely blocked from thousands upon thousands of Mastodon servers just because they aren't Mastodon, just because they don't act like Mastodon. Essentially, just because one individual wants the Fediverse to be only Mastodon "again" (which it never was).

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Conversations #FEP_171b #ConversationContainers #Blocklist #Blocklists #BlocklistMeta #CWBlocklistMeta

@Scott Jenson

The "can't see all replies" is a deeply hard federation problem but we have an incoming fix for that!

You mean the kind of "fix for that" that Friendica when it was launched into the Fediverse 15 years ago? Namely full awareness and support of threaded, one-post-many-comments conversations?

Or, better yet, Conversation Containers as created by Friendica's creator in his own streams repository, then inherited by his own Forte, then backported to his original creation Hubzilla as per FEP-171b?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Conversations #ThreadedConversations #FEP_171b #ConversationContainers

@Ben Pate 🤘🏻 Allow me to take a look at this from a Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte point of view.

The Sin of Overwhelming Complexity: Instance Selection Paralysis

The only way to really combat this effectively is by hiding the whole concept of servers/instances at first, railroading everyone to a server and only letting them know about decentralisation and servers/instances after the fact.

In theory, this could be doable with Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, and even better than with Mastodon with its themed servers. It wouldn't make sense to offer Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte servers for certain topics or target audiences, seeing as the whole thing would become moot the very moment when you make your first clone on another server. Simply build a kind of "automatic on-boarder" that sends everyone to the geographically closest open-registration server.

In practice, that'd be a bad idea, but for a different reason than on Mastodon. And that's how these servers tend to be very different. Not in topic. Not in target audiences. Not in rules. But in features. Hubzilla is modular, (streams) is modular, Forte is modular, and each admin decides differently on which "apps" to activate. Then you want to join Hubzilla for one cool feature, but the on-boarder railroads you to a server where that very feature isn't even activated.

Sure, the on-boarder could include the option to select certain features that you absolutely must have in your new home and then pick a server that has them. But that'd be extra hassle and extra confusing.

Besides, where'd you put that on-boarder? On the official Hubzilla website? Haha, no can do. The official Hubzilla website is a webpage on a Hubzilla channel itself. It's all just dumb old static HTML with a CSS. If it's even HTML and not Markdown or BBcode, that is. You couldn't add scripts to it if you tried.

Oh, and (streams) and Forte don't even have official websites. And (streams) will never have one, seeing as it's officially and intentionally nameless, brandless and totally not even a project. Their "websites" are readme files in their code repositories on Codeberg.

The Sin of Inconsistent Navigation: Timeline Turmoil

The streams on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are quite a bit different from Mastodon timelines.

First of all, what you usually don't have on public servers is the counterpart to Mastodon's local timeline and Mastodon's federated timeline. On all three, this would be only one stream, the "public stream" or "pubstream". It can be switched by the admin to either what'd be local or what'd be federated. However, public servers usually have it off entirely. Unavailable even to local users. That's because the admins don't want to be held liable for what's happening on the pubstream.

Technically speaking, you only have one stream on a public server, and that's your channel stream. It's much more efficient than a Mastodon timeline because it always shows entire conversations by default instead of detached single-message piecemeal, and because it has a counter for unread messages which even lists these unread messages for you to directly go to the corresponding conversation. But that's another story.

However, your channel stream can be viewed on your channel page, conversation by conversation, or it can be viewed on the stream page as an actual stream with all conversations shown in a feed/timeline-like fashion, one upon another, and with its own set of built-in filters such as "only my own messages" or "only conversations started by members of one particular privacy group/access list" or "only conversations from one particular group actor". It's actually much more convenient than any Mastodon timeline, but for those who want a Twitter clone for dumb-dumbs, it can be very overwhelming.

Yes, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are much more complex in handling than, say, snac2. But they're also much more complex in features than snac2. That power is their USP. And that power must be harnessed somehow.

The Sin of Remote Interaction Purgatory: Federation Gymnastics

Sure, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte have some of the best built-in search systems in the whole Fediverse. They can pull almost everything onto your channel stream just by searching for it. And if it has replies, chances are they pull these in as well.

But still, they're geared towards desktop users. They still require copy-paste. Phone users don't copy paste. Most of them don't even know the very concept of copy-paste. For most of those who do, copy-paste is much too fumbly if the input device available to them is a 6" touch screen.

You can't blame them, though. This is next to impossible to do any differently. I mean, you won't see a button magically appear with which you can pull in just that one post or comment you want to pull in.

Rather, the issue is that they can only reel in almost everything. Sometimes the search returns nothing, like a void. Sometimes the search runs indefinitely without any kind of result. This may be because someone has blocked your channel, because someone has blocked your entire server, because the server someone is on has blocked you or your entire server, because Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte doesn't understand the URI pasted into the search field or whatever.

So this is made worse by Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte not knowing what they can search for, what they can't and why not.

Connecting with someone whom you encounter on your channel stream is fairly easy. Connections can be initiated with only two clicks. Either you click their long name, and you're taken to a pretty much distraction-less local "intermediate page" with a striking green button that's labelled "+ Connect". Or if you don't want to leave the channel page, you hover your mouse cursor over their profile picture, click on the little white arrow that appears, and you get a small menu that offers you the "Connect" option as well. Granted, even some veterans don't know the latter trick because it isn't immediately advertised on the channel page.

Also, sure, you don't simply follow them right off the bat with nothing else to do like on Mastodon. You're taken to your Connections page, and you have to configure the connection (you don't have to do that on Mastodon because you can't configure connections on Mastodon).

Following accounts/channels from the directory is a bit easier. The green "+ Connect" button is there right away (unless you're already connected). However, Hubzilla's directory only lists channels based on the Nomad protocol, i.e. Hubzilla and (streams) channels, because ActivityPub is only implemented in an optional, off-by-default-for-new-channels add-on whereas it's in the core and on by default on (streams) and the only available protocol on Forte.

Importing contents or following actors when seeing them locally on other servers without copy-pasting and searching can be done. It requires OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on, however, and it requires it to be implemented on all servers of all Fediverse server applications from Mastodon to WordPress to Ghost to Flipboard. Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are the only Fediverse server applications with full (client-side and server-side) OpenWebAuth implementations. But that's of little use if the rest of the Fediverse doesn't have server-side implementations, and Mastodon has even silently rejected a mere client-side implementation already developed to a pull request two years ago.

The Sin of DM Disasters Waiting to Happen

I think this is less of an issue on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte because they handle DMs differently from Mastodon (which "the Fediverse" actually refers to in the article).

On all three, DMs are integrated into their extensive, fine-grained permissions system in which everything is only public if it's really public. The difference between a post and a DM is not just a switch.

If I want to DM you, I can either tag you @!{[email protected]} rather than @[url=https://mastodon.social/@benpate]Ben Pate 🤘🏻[/url]. Then you're a) the only one to whom the message is sent (it literally doesn't even go out to any other server than mastodon.social plus my clone on hub.hubzilla.de as can be seen in the delivery report) and b) the only one who is granted permission to view the message.

Or I can use the padlock icon and select you from the opening list as the sole recipient. The very moment that I select certain recipients, the post I'm composing quits being public, and the padlock icon switches from open to closed. This isn't a one-click or two-click toggle. You don't do that casually. It's basically configuration. It requires so many mouse clicks that you do it consciously and intentionally. If you want to post in private, you have to really want to post in private.

Better yet: You can default to posting only to a certain limited target audience. In fact, by default on a brand-new channel, you only post to the members of one privacy group/access list (which is a Mastodon list on coke and 'roids). You have to manually reconfigure your new channel if you want to post to the general public by default.

If you preview your post, you can see whether it's a direct message to one or multiple single connections (envelope icon next to your long name), a limited-permissions message to one or multiple privacy groups/access lists/group actors (closed padlock icon) or actually public (no icon).

Even better yet: Posts to group actors generally aren't public. Posts to at least Friendica groups, Hubzilla forums, (streams) groups and Forte groups are never public. They do not go out to your followers as well unless they're connected to the same group. And this is independent from whether a group is public or private. You can't accidentially post to a group actor in public, and if you do, you don't post to that group actor at all, at least not in a way that makes the group actor forward your post to its other connections.

Granted, what does not happen is your background switching from your background colour or background image (which can be user-configured) to red #800000 or a yellow-and-back chevron pattern when you change visibility and permissions to something that isn't public.

The Sin of Ghost Conversations and Phantom Follower Counts

And again, when @Tim Chambers says, "the Fediverse", he almost exclusively means Mastodon. He writes as if the entire Fediverse handled conversations as terribly as Mastodon, as if the entire Fediverse was as blissfully unaware of enclosed conversations as Mastodon. Which is not the case.

Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, as well as their ancestor Friendica, handle conversations in ways that exceed Mastodon users' imaginations and wildest dreams by magnitudes. Unlike Mastodon, they know threaded conversations, and they see them as enclosed objects where only the start post counts as a post, and everything else counts as a comment.

This means that once you've received a post on your stream, you will also receive all comments on that post, regardless of whether or not you follow the commenters, regardless of whether or not they mention you. That's because all four reel in the comments not from the commentors, but from the original poster who is perceived as the owner of the thread. Only blocks or channel-wide filters can prevent comments from coming in.

Beyond that, (streams) was the first to introduce Conversation Containers. Forte inherited them from (streams), and when they were defined in FEP-171b, Hubzilla implemented them, too.

Here on Hubzilla, I can see all comments in this thread because my channel has fetched them directly from @Johannes Ernst. And I can actually see them right away because that's the default view here on Hubzilla, rather than Mastodon's piecemeal.

Even if you import a post manually using the search feature (and you better import the actual start post), AFAIK existing comments will eventually be backfilled. Comments that come in after importing will definitely end up on your stream as part of the thread.

So this is not a shortcoming of the Fediverse. The Fediverse has been able to do better for 15 years. It's a shortcoming of Mastodon.

The only "issue" here may be that it sometimes takes some time for a comment to show up for some reasons. But unless there are blocks or filters in play, it eventually will.

The Sin of Invisible Discovery: The Content Mirage

I'm not going to pick on the audacious implication that "Eugen and team" invented the Fediverse.

But Tim writes like literally everyone wants "the Fediverse" (read, actually Mastodon) to be literally Twitter without Musk.

Also:

• Friendica has had full-blown full-text search since its inception as early as 2010. Five and a half years longer than Mastodon has even existed.
• Hubzilla has had full-blown full-text search since its inception as early as 2011 when it was forked from Free-Friendika. It has inherited full-text search from Friendica.
• (streams) and Forte have had full-blown full-text search since their respective inception in 2021 and 2024, both having inherited it themselves.

Oh, and none of them has an explicit opt-in switch to soothe panicking Twitter converts because panicking Twitter converts have never been the primary target audience of either of them.

Instead, on Hubzilla, whether someone can find your content depends on whether they've got permission to view it in the first place ("Can view my channel stream and posts"). If it's public, they have it. Full stop. Public is public is public. Stop whining. You've made it public, now deal with everything being able to see it.

(streams) and Forte behave the same. In addition, they have an extra permission: "Grant search access to your channel stream and posts". This controls who may search your channel stream using your own local search feature while visiting your channel locally. Something that isn't even possible on Mastodon.

As for not having any content on my channel stream before I connect to anyone: I, for one, do not want some algorithm to force content upon me that I'm not interested in. Full. Frigging. Stop. I want to have full and exclusive control over what I see and what I don't.

The Sin of User Discovery Hell

Can it really be that Mastodon's directory is so much worse than Friendica's, Hubzilla's, (streams)' and Forte's directories? I guess it is because it really only lists local accounts on that one particular server. A side-effect of Mastodon being a microblogging service and Twitter clone. And not a full-blown, fully-featured social network and Facebook alternative. No, seriously, it isn't that.

Friendica is. It was designed as such. It was designed to take Facebook's place, and not by aping and cloning Facebook, but by being better than Facebook.

The directory on each node is decentralised. It lists all actors known to that node. What's outright unimaginable from a Mastodon point of view: It takes the keywords in the profiles into account. Better even: It ranks suggestions by the number of matching keywords.

Want something centralised instead? Try the Friendica Directory. Looking for people? Looking for news accounts? Looking for groups? There are specialised tabs for that. Friendica can tell them apart, and so can the Friendica Directory.

Caveat: The Friendica Directory only lists Friendica accounts. Friendica's built-in directory should list everything it knows. I haven't used Friendica in many years, but I guess this even includes diaspora* accounts because why not?

Hubzilla has indirectly inherited its directory from Friendica. This is the directory on Netzgemeinde, the biggest Hubzilla hub.

Again, it lists local as well as federated channels. You can choose whether to see only local channels ("This Website Only") or federated channels as well. You can choose whether channels flagged NSFW shall be listed or not ("Safe Mode"). You can choose to only have group actors listed that let themselves be listed ("Public Forums Only"). You have a cloud of keywords from the keyword lists in the profiles that you can filter by (Mastodon doesn't even have keyword lists in profiles). You have full-text search for names and keywords. There's even a Facebook-style suggestion mode that proposes connections to you with a ranking based on your keywords and their keywords as well as the number of common connections, and that still has the same filters.

Caveat this time: Hubzilla's directory only supports the one sole protocol built into Hubzilla's core. And that's Zot6. This means that Hubzilla's directory only lists Hubzilla and (streams) channels because Hubzilla and (streams) are the only Fediverse server applications that support Zot6.

(streams) and Forte have inherited their directories again. And they probably have the most powerful decentralised directories in the entire Fediverse. I'd give you a link, but (streams) directories generally aren't public; only local channels can access them.

These directories are similar to the ones on Hubzilla. You see local and federated actors, and you can choose to only see local actors ("This Website Only"). You can choose to only see group actors ("Groups Only"). You can choose to not see channels flagged NSFW ("Safe Mode"). What's new: Inactive actors can be kept out, too ("Recently Updated").

Now it comes: (streams) has ActivityPub built into its core, and it's on by default on new channels. Forte is entirely based on ActivityPub.

This means that their directories can list anything from anywhere that uses ActivityPub. "Groups Only" gives you Guppe groups, Lemmy communities, /kbin and Mbin magazines, PieFed communities, Mobilizon groups, Flipboard magazines, Friendica groups, Hubzilla forums, (streams) groups, Forte groups etc., all on one list.

(streams) has a slight edge over Forte here because it also lists Hubzilla and (streams) channels that have ActivityPub off such as the Streams Users Tea Garden where ActivityPub was turned off with the very intention to keep Mastodon out.

If there was a gigantic Forte server, as big as mastodon.social, and its directory was accessible to the public, that directory would be the best directory in the Fediverse for anything really. If it was on (streams), it would list more, but it would confuse some users of e.g. Mastodon who'd try to follow Hubzilla or (streams) channels that have ActivityPub off. Forte simply doesn't list these because it can't find them.

A global directory of everything sounds like a good idea, but it's next to impossible to implement.

Either the directory would go look for actors itself. In order to do that, it would have to know within a split-second not only whenever a new actor is created somewhere so it can index that actor right away, but also whenever a new server is spun up so that the admin actor can be indexed, and that server can be watched. How is it supposed to know all that?

Well, or the directory, a single, monolithic, centralised website, would have to be hard-coded into all Fediverse server software. That way, each server could immediately report newly created actors to the central directory upon their creation.

For starters, this would make the whole Fediverse depend on one single centralised website under the control of, if bad comes to worse, one person.

Besides, this would be a privacy nightmare. Let's suppose I create a new (streams) channel that's supposed to be private. Its existence and all its properties would be sent to the central directory before I can set it to private and restrict its permissions. This wouldn't be so bad on Hubzilla because I'd make the channel private before I turn on PubCrawl and make the channel accessible to the directory in the first place because the directory would only understand ActivityPub.

Of course, the directory would mostly be built against Mastodon. It would not understand the permissions systems implemented on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, and it might happily siphon off the profiles of channels where access to the profile is restricted and make them publicly accessible. On the other hand, this is likely to mean that the directory couldn't read most of Hubzilla's, (streams)' and Forte's profile text fields anyway because Mastodon doesn't have them.

But such a centralised directory wouldn't make connecting to other users that much easier and more convenient. You'd still have to copy and paste URLs or IDs into your local search and search for them (unless you're on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte where you can connect to URLs directly). At the very least, you should be able to go to the centralised directory and follow anyone just by clicking or tapping them. That, however, would require OpenWebAuth support on both your home server and that directory.

Ideally, that directory would be firmly built into all instances of all Fediverse software from snac2 to Mastodon to Hubzilla, even replacing any existing directory to confuse people less. But that would make the Fediverse even more dependent on one central website and its owner, something which should be avoided at all cost.

Lastly, nothing can ever be built into all instances of all Fediverse software. Remember that there's software with living instances that's barely being developed such as Plume. There's even software with living instances that's been officially pronounced dead such as Calckey, Firefish or /kbin. How are Firefish servers supposed to implement such a feature if nobody maintains Firefish anymore, and even the code repository was deleted?

CC: @Risotto Bias

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #OpenWebAuth #SingleSignOn #NomadicIdentity #Search #FullTextSearch #Directory #Permissions #Privacy #Conversations #ThreadedConversations #FEP_171b #ConversationContainers

@Rob Shearer

Excellent write-up, agree with most of the points.

On a related note: it is a pity that the poorly thought-out and designed Mastodon became the overwhelmingly popular Fediverse platform. I wish it were one of the Mike Macgirvin creations such as Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte, with their advanced features such as Nomadic Identity, OpenWebAuth (Federated Single Sign On), conversation containers for threaded conversations, extremely fine-grained privacy controls, etc.

Nomadic Identity, in particular, is brilliant. This is how it works. You have a channel (that participates in the Fediverse, this is equivalent to an account on Mastodon) on any account on, let us say, Hubzilla instance A. You can open another account on Hubzilla instance B, and create a clone there of your channel on instance A. So this clone becomes a live, real-time backup of your channel; the backup includes your connections as well as your posts. And it is bidirectional. You can log on to your clone channel on B, and use it like your main instance, and now the clone on instance A will mirror your activity. If you wish, you can clone the channel on a third instance C. If one of A or B or C abruptly shuts down, you can continue operating your channel from your clone channel, so you lose nothing.

This addresses one of your pain points as to how account migration does not work on Mastodon.

By the way: you can have multiple channels per instance, and you can have clones of each channel on different instances. So if you wish, you can have separate channels for your hobbies and your professional activities and your politics; all contained and operated within a single account on a particular instance.

You can read more about Nomadic Identity here

#^https://medium.com/@tamanning/nomadic-identity-brought-to-you-by-hubzilla-67eadce13c3b

and here.

#^https://medium.com/@tamanning/getting-started-with-nomadic-identity-how-to-create-a-personal-channel-on-hubzilla-7d9666a428b

It is said that Bluesky is working on pioneering something like Nomadic Identity. Ironically, Mike Macgirvin had already pioneered it all the way back in 2012. He initially did it with Nomad (which underlies Hubzilla and (streams)), a protocol far richer and better-defined than ActivityPub; and recently, he even got Nomadic Identity working on ActivityPub.

#^https://fediversity.site/item/b69ce5a0-0c22-4933-8393-dce7100f4584

Unfortunately, the movers and shakers of the ActivityPub world keep pretending that Mike Macgirvin and his work does not exist.

Then there’s OpenWebAuth for Federated Single Sign On. This enables seamless granting of permissions for you to operate your social dashboard from different parts of the Fediverse.

You can read here how Nomadic Identity and OpenWebAuth together enable network resilience, censorship resistance, and ease of migration.

#^https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/activitypub-nomadic-identity/

There’s also conversation containers—these ensure that unlike on Mastodon, every single post/comment in a conversation thread is visible to every single person participating in or merely viewing the thread. (Also: you don't need @ tagging, anyone who participated in the conversation by replying at least once or by boosting or liking some post is notified of all new posts/comments.)

I won’t elaborate on the fine-grained privacy controls, but I think they too address some of your pain points with Mastodon.

Having said all that, I must mention that your core criticism of Mastodon also applies to Hubzilla, (streams), and Forte: there is asynchronous distribution of “some subset of a global database across some parts of the network”. I personally think there ought to be a truly universal search and community-controlled user-specific custom algorithms to address this problem, but I doubt the vocal part of the userbase here would agree.

And relative to Mastodon, the Hubzilla+(streams)+Forte community is tiny, so there is hardly any local content.

#Nomad #Zot #ActivityPub #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Forte #NomadicIdentity #OpenWebAuth #ConversationContainers #PrivacyControls

@Jeff Atwood

@Peter Vágner @Dieguito 🦝🧑🏻‍💻🍕 How conversations work is not unified all across the Fediverse. Even how connections work is not unified.

Mastodon has taken over the follower/followed principle from Twitter which is always illustrated with arrows with one point. A following B is illustrated with an arrow from A to B. A being followed by B is illustrated with an arrow from B to A. A and B following each other mutually is illustrated with one arrow from A to B and one arrow from B to A.

It appears to me that Friendica has adopted this to become more compatible with Mastodon. But its several descendants, created by Friendica's own creator, starting with Hubzilla, haven't.

Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte still have the bidirectional "connection" or "contact" as the default. It's illustrated with one arrow, but with one point on each end.

Also, all three understand a threaded conversation as an enclosed contruct entirely owned by the conversation starter. Everyone on these three who has the start post on their stream always actually has the whole thread on their stream.

In fact, all three have Conversation Containers implemented. This feature was originally created in the streams repository in 2022. Forte has had it from the get-go as it started out as a fork of (streams). It was eventually turned into FEP-171b and backported to Hubzilla last year.

All three make sure that everyone who has a post on their stream also always has all comments on that post, at least those that are made after they have received the post.

This works on two basic principles:

• All comments go directly to the original poster because the original poster owns the thread.
• Those who have the post automatically receive all comments from the original poster.

In a pure Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte system, your above example would look like this:

• User 1 and User 2 are connected.
• User 1 and User 3 are connected. (This doesn't even matter.)
• User 2 and User 3 are connected.
• User 2 and User 4 are connected.

Much simpler than explaining everything with "following" and "being followed", isn't it?

Now, the conversation works like this.

• User 2 sends a public post, thus creating a Conversation Container of which they are the owner.
  User 1, User 3 and User 4 receive the post.
• User 3 comments on User 2's post.
  The comment goes from User 3 to User 2, who is the owner of the conversation, and it is automatically forwarded to User 1 and User 4 who already have User 2's post on their streams.
• User 4 comments on User 3's comment.
  The comment goes from User 4 past User 3 straight to User 2, who is the owner of the conversation, and it is automatically forwarded to User 1 and User 3 who already have User 2's post on their streams.

The only mentioning that occurs here, if any, is User 4 mentioning User 3. This is not necessary for User 4's post to reach anyone. This is only necessary to make sure on Hubzilla (which doesn't have a tree view) that User 4 is replying to User 3's comment and not to User 2's post.

On Mastodon, for comparison, everything depends on who follows whom, who mentions whom and whose instance knows whose instance.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Conversations #FEP_171b #ConversationContainers

@Hamiller Friendica Es gibt auch noch FEP-171b "Conversation Containers". Das basiert auf etwas, was (streams) vor etwa einem Jahr eingeführt hat. Bis dahin hatte (streams) dasselbe Konversationsmodell wie Hubzilla, das wieder dem von Friendica ähnlich ist. Und vor einer Woche hat Hubzilla selbst Conversation Containers eingeführt.

Davon mal abgesehen könnte das gesamte Threadiverse (Lemmy, Mbin, PieFed...) ohne ein Konzept von Konversationen auch nicht funktionieren.

Es geht also schon. Auch mit reinem ActivityPub. Die Entwickler müssen nur wollen. Aber Mastodon will im Grunde nichts, was Twitter vor Musk nicht auch hatte.

CC: @Christiane Brauch :calckey:

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #ConversationContainers #FEP_171b

@Jenniferplusplus I sincerely hope that you aren't building Letterbook to only interact with itself and Mastodon.

Sooner or later, Letterbook will encounter content coming in from instances of software created by @Mike Macgirvin ?️, namely Friendica, Hubzilla (these two are actually older than Mastodon), (streams) or Forte. For reference: I am on Hubzilla.

You/it will have to expect and be able to deal with the following:

• Enclosed one-post-many-comments conversations instead of threads that consist of posts loosely tied together
• Permissions of all comments/replies firmly defined by the start post; permissions/visibility can't be changed within a running conversation
• "Monster posts" of any length because none of them has a character limit
• Not just Note-type objects, but also Article-type objects (from Friendica right now, the others may implement them once Mastodon introduces sensible support for them)
• Full HTML text formatting, up to and including numbered lists, tables, horizontal lines, character size and character colour
• Both quotes (as done in bulletin-board forums) and quote-posts (posts fully embedded in other posts like quote-tweets)
• Embedded links (this comment makes a whole lot of use of them)
• Inline images embedded within the text, and more than four of these in one post
• Inline audio streams embedded within the text
• Inline videos embedded within the text
• "Weird" mentions and hashtags with the @ or the # not part of the link (look at the mentions and the hashtags in this comment, then look at mentions and hashtags on Mastodon and compare them)
• "Summaries in the CW field" (because Mastodon repurposed StatusNet's summary field, which was used by StatusNet, Friendica and Hubzilla as an actual summary field, for content warnings in 2017; several Fediverse server apps continue to use it for summaries)
• All four support titles in addition to summaries

Some of the above may also come in from elsewhere, e.g. a wider range of text formatting than Mastodon allows itself to render is fully supported by just about everything that isn't Mastodon.

Also, ActivityPub is currently evolving. New FEPs are being put to use and bringing in new features far away from how Mastodon is working. In particular, (streams) and Forte and @silverpill's Mitra use decentralised identifiers as per FEP-ef61 (Portable Objects). Forte has nomadic identity fully implemented via ActivityPub while (streams) at least supports it. And all three have conversation containers implemented, silverpill wants to make them an FEP, and Hubzilla is planning to implement them with version 10.

This means three things. One, weird identifiers. Two, weird actor identities: What looks like one user automatically cross-posting to another account on another instance to non-nomadic ActivityPub implementations is actually the very same actor residing simultaneously on multiple server instances. Three, again, conversations work drastically different from Twitter and Mastodon.

Lastly, it may be a good idea to implement a little server type display from the get-go so that the user knows what kind of Fediverse instance something comes from. Misskey and its forks have it, Friendica has it, (streams) has it, Forte has it. Just because Mastodon doesn't have it, doesn't mean it's a good idea not to have it. Besides, if content from certain server applications malfunctions on Letterbook, users can pinpoint right away what server application causes that trouble when submitting a bug report.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mitra #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Conversations #ConversationContainers #FEP_ef61 #NomadicIdentity