#cwlongpost — Public Fediverse posts

@silverpill @🫧 Social coding commons @Rimu @elle And this has to say something.

After all, Mastodon is far from a by-the-book implementation. Mastodon's ActivityPub implementation is influenced by two things. One, the legacy compatibility decisions from a time when Mastodon had two base protocols, OStatus and ActivityPub, and it had to make ActivityPub work like OStatus. Two, Mastodon's willingness to combat the Fediverse and eventually EEE it rather than embracing it.

Let me put it this way: At least for the longest time, Mastodon has tried hard to be incompatible with large parts of the Fediverse, at least with those parts that don't appear like add-ons to Mastodon (like PeerTube or Pixelfed).

And it has reached its goal: Almost all of those on Mastodon who do know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon think that Mastodon still is the reference implementation of ActivityPub, and everything that doesn't work exactly like Mastodon, or that causes friction when interacting with Mastodon, is broken. That's one way to get rid of competition: Make it look bad to your own users.

Entire features, some of which are backed by FEPs, are bad from a Mastodon point of view. For example, enclosed threaded conversations with one post and otherwise comments, as can be found all over the Fediverse from Friendica and its descendants to the whole Threadiverse, are bad because they're so different from Mastodon's threads loosely tied together from toots and more toots. And there's an FEP for them: FEP-171b "Conversation Containers".

This has gotten so bad especially since the big Twitter exodus from 2022 that developers no longer implement ActivityPub; to quote a diaspora* developer, they "implement Mastodon". They build their stuff hard against Mastodon with little to no regards for actual ActivityPub and with little to no regards for the rest of the Fediverse.

Even Mike Macgirvin, formerly the staunchest Mastodon critic under the sun, has given in. He has added a per-post switch to (streams) and Forte which lets you choose between starting an enclosed conversation as per FEP-171b that Mastodon doesn't properly understand and starting a Mastodon-style loose thread that Mastodon understands.

I mean, what kind of "decentralised" Fediverse is it if the W3C is powerless, if the SWICG is effectively powerless, if the other devs are powerless, too, because it's Gargron and his Mastodon developers who are the one and only authority that defines how the Fediverse has to be built? And when Mastodon decides to re-invent the wheel once more, the whole rest of the Fediverse has to throw away its existing wheels and implement Mastodon's not even necessarily better wheels?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Mastodon #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@silverpill @🫧 Social coding commons @Rimu @elle And this has to say something.

After all, Mastodon is far from a by-the-book implementation. Mastodon's ActivityPub implementation is influenced by two things. One, the legacy compatibility decisions from a time when Mastodon had two base protocols, OStatus and ActivityPub, and it had to make ActivityPub work like OStatus. Two, Mastodon's willingness to combat the Fediverse and eventually EEE it rather than embracing it.

Let me put it this way: At least for the longest time, Mastodon has tried hard to be incompatible with large parts of the Fediverse, at least with those parts that don't appear like add-ons to Mastodon (like PeerTube or Pixelfed).

And it has reached its goal: Almost all of those on Mastodon who do know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon think that Mastodon still is the reference implementation of ActivityPub, and everything that doesn't work exactly like Mastodon, or that causes friction when interacting with Mastodon, is broken. That's one way to get rid of competition: Make it look bad to your own users.

Entire features, some of which are backed by FEPs, are bad from a Mastodon point of view. For example, enclosed threaded conversations with one post and otherwise comments, as can be found all over the Fediverse from Friendica and its descendants to the whole Threadiverse, are bad because they're so different from Mastodon's threads loosely tied together from toots and more toots. And there's an FEP for them: FEP-171b "Conversation Containers".

This has gotten so bad especially since the big Twitter exodus from 2022 that developers no longer implement ActivityPub; to quote a diaspora* developer, they "implement Mastodon". They build their stuff hard against Mastodon with little to no regards for actual ActivityPub and with little to no regards for the rest of the Fediverse.

Even Mike Macgirvin, formerly the staunchest Mastodon critic under the sun, has given in. He has added a per-post switch to (streams) and Forte which lets you choose between starting an enclosed conversation as per FEP-171b that Mastodon doesn't properly understand and starting a Mastodon-style loose thread that Mastodon understands.

I mean, what kind of "decentralised" Fediverse is it if the W3C is powerless, if the SWICG is effectively powerless, if the other devs are powerless, too, because it's Gargron and his Mastodon developers who are the one and only authority that defines how the Fediverse has to be built? And when Mastodon decides to re-invent the wheel once more, the whole rest of the Fediverse has to throw away its existing wheels and implement Mastodon's not even necessarily better wheels?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Mastodon #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@silverpill @🫧 Social coding commons @Rimu @elle And this has to say something.

After all, Mastodon is far from a by-the-book implementation. Mastodon's ActivityPub implementation is influenced by two things. One, the legacy compatibility decisions from a time when Mastodon had two base protocols, OStatus and ActivityPub, and it had to make ActivityPub work like OStatus. Two, Mastodon's willingness to combat the Fediverse and eventually EEE it rather than embracing it.

Let me put it this way: At least for the longest time, Mastodon has tried hard to be incompatible with large parts of the Fediverse, at least with those parts that don't appear like add-ons to Mastodon (like PeerTube or Pixelfed).

And it has reached its goal: Almost all of those on Mastodon who do know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon think that Mastodon still is the reference implementation of ActivityPub, and everything that doesn't work exactly like Mastodon, or that causes friction when interacting with Mastodon, is broken. That's one way to get rid of competition: Make it look bad to your own users.

Entire features, some of which are backed by FEPs, are bad from a Mastodon point of view. For example, enclosed threaded conversations with one post and otherwise comments, as can be found all over the Fediverse from Friendica and its descendants to the whole Threadiverse, are bad because they're so different from Mastodon's threads loosely tied together from toots and more toots. And there's an FEP for them: FEP-171b "Conversation Containers".

This has gotten so bad especially since the big Twitter exodus from 2022 that developers no longer implement ActivityPub; to quote a diaspora* developer, they "implement Mastodon". They build their stuff hard against Mastodon with little to no regards for actual ActivityPub and with little to no regards for the rest of the Fediverse.

Even Mike Macgirvin, formerly the staunchest Mastodon critic under the sun, has given in. He has added a per-post switch to (streams) and Forte which lets you choose between starting an enclosed conversation as per FEP-171b that Mastodon doesn't properly understand and starting a Mastodon-style loose thread that Mastodon understands.

I mean, what kind of "decentralised" Fediverse is it if the W3C is powerless, if the SWICG is effectively powerless, if the other devs are powerless, too, because it's Gargron and his Mastodon developers who are the one and only authority that defines how the Fediverse has to be built? And when Mastodon decides to re-invent the wheel once more, the whole rest of the Fediverse has to throw away its existing wheels and implement Mastodon's not even necessarily better wheels?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Mastodon #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@silverpill @🫧 Social coding commons @Rimu @elle And this has to say something.

After all, Mastodon is far from a by-the-book implementation. Mastodon's ActivityPub implementation is influenced by two things. One, the legacy compatibility decisions from a time when Mastodon had two base protocols, OStatus and ActivityPub, and it had to make ActivityPub work like OStatus. Two, Mastodon's willingness to combat the Fediverse and eventually EEE it rather than embracing it.

Let me put it this way: At least for the longest time, Mastodon has tried hard to be incompatible with large parts of the Fediverse, at least with those parts that don't appear like add-ons to Mastodon (like PeerTube or Pixelfed).

And it has reached its goal: Almost all of those on Mastodon who do know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon think that Mastodon still is the reference implementation of ActivityPub, and everything that doesn't work exactly like Mastodon, or that causes friction when interacting with Mastodon, is broken. That's one way to get rid of competition: Make it look bad to your own users.

Entire features, some of which are backed by FEPs, are bad from a Mastodon point of view. For example, enclosed threaded conversations with one post and otherwise comments, as can be found all over the Fediverse from Friendica and its descendants to the whole Threadiverse, are bad because they're so different from Mastodon's threads loosely tied together from toots and more toots. And there's an FEP for them: FEP-171b "Conversation Containers".

This has gotten so bad especially since the big Twitter exodus from 2022 that developers no longer implement ActivityPub; to quote a diaspora* developer, they "implement Mastodon". They build their stuff hard against Mastodon with little to no regards for actual ActivityPub and with little to no regards for the rest of the Fediverse.

Even Mike Macgirvin, formerly the staunchest Mastodon critic under the sun, has given in. He has added a per-post switch to (streams) and Forte which lets you choose between starting an enclosed conversation as per FEP-171b that Mastodon doesn't properly understand and starting a Mastodon-style loose thread that Mastodon understands.

I mean, what kind of "decentralised" Fediverse is it if the W3C is powerless, if the SWICG is effectively powerless, if the other devs are powerless, too, because it's Gargron and his Mastodon developers who are the one and only authority that defines how the Fediverse has to be built? And when Mastodon decides to re-invent the wheel once more, the whole rest of the Fediverse has to throw away its existing wheels and implement Mastodon's not even necessarily better wheels?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Mastodon #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@silverpill @🫧 Social coding commons @Rimu @elle And this has to say something.

After all, Mastodon is far from a by-the-book implementation. Mastodon's ActivityPub implementation is influenced by two things. One, the legacy compatibility decisions from a time when Mastodon had two base protocols, OStatus and ActivityPub, and it had to make ActivityPub work like OStatus. Two, Mastodon's willingness to combat the Fediverse and eventually EEE it rather than embracing it.

Let me put it this way: At least for the longest time, Mastodon has tried hard to be incompatible with large parts of the Fediverse, at least with those parts that don't appear like add-ons to Mastodon (like PeerTube or Pixelfed).

And it has reached its goal: Almost all of those on Mastodon who do know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon think that Mastodon still is the reference implementation of ActivityPub, and everything that doesn't work exactly like Mastodon, or that causes friction when interacting with Mastodon, is broken. That's one way to get rid of competition: Make it look bad to your own users.

Entire features, some of which are backed by FEPs, are bad from a Mastodon point of view. For example, enclosed threaded conversations with one post and otherwise comments, as can be found all over the Fediverse from Friendica and its descendants to the whole Threadiverse, are bad because they're so different from Mastodon's threads loosely tied together from toots and more toots. And there's an FEP for them: FEP-171b "Conversation Containers".

This has gotten so bad especially since the big Twitter exodus from 2022 that developers no longer implement ActivityPub; to quote a diaspora* developer, they "implement Mastodon". They build their stuff hard against Mastodon with little to no regards for actual ActivityPub and with little to no regards for the rest of the Fediverse.

Even Mike Macgirvin, formerly the staunchest Mastodon critic under the sun, has given in. He has added a per-post switch to (streams) and Forte which lets you choose between starting an enclosed conversation as per FEP-171b that Mastodon doesn't properly understand and starting a Mastodon-style loose thread that Mastodon understands.

I mean, what kind of "decentralised" Fediverse is it if the W3C is powerless, if the SWICG is effectively powerless, if the other devs are powerless, too, because it's Gargron and his Mastodon developers who are the one and only authority that defines how the Fediverse has to be built? And when Mastodon decides to re-invent the wheel once more, the whole rest of the Fediverse has to throw away its existing wheels and implement Mastodon's not even necessarily better wheels?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Mastodon #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@HeliosPi @Gondor @Christine Lemmer-Webber Anonymous originally came from 4chan. The whole name, the whole concept came from 4chan's feature of allowing people to post and comment without logging in and without attributing their posts or comments to individual names. When they did so, the "name" shown where their name or nickname would have been was simply "Anonymous" because they posted anonymously.

Eventually, some channers got the idea to adopt this "Anonymous" as a moniker under which they wanted to do stuff outside of 4chan. Now, this doesn't mean that they officially founded a group with a leader and a coherent structure and named it Anonymous. They simply decided to adopt this "name", or rather the lack of a name, for themselves. This went farther than a nickname used to hide their real-life identity. This went as far as wiping out any and all traces of an individual identity.

Have you ever watched the film V for Vendetta? In the film, the protagonist V sends full-face masks identical to his own, modelled after the terrorist Guy Fawkes, to all citizens of London.

The UK is a post-apocalyptic totalitarian surveillance dictatorship in this film with cameras everywhere and extremely restrictive laws. You do something wrong, you will be identified, tracked down and punished. V is the only one who gets away with everything because he's too smart and, above all, too well-prepared. The Guy Fawkes mask is his "face" that identifies him. It's unique to him, and yet, as he hides so well, the system fails to catch him. Also, it's the only thing that identifies him. And then there's a scene in which a little girl wears her Guy Fawkes mask out in the open. She's caught by the Finger (akin to the Gestapo) and beaten up badly because they genuinely think she's V because she's wearing this mask.

And then comes this iconic scene with thousands upon thousands of Londoners gathering with their Guy Fawkes masks on. The system can't do anything. Theoretically, anyone of them could be V, or maybe, none of them is V. Most importantly, the system can't identify anyone of them at all, what with everyone wearing identical masks. This empowers them to protest against this totalitarian system for the first time since its inception. For unlike other dictatorships, this one does not go against big crowds.

The channers figured out that this works the same as anonymity on the Web. You dare to do anything and everything if you don't identify as your real-life self. On 4chan where nobody except for moot ever logged in, not only weren't they their real-life selves, but they didn't have a unique identity at all. They all had the same handle, Anonymous, just like the citizens of London all had the same "face", the Guy Fawkes mask, in V for Vendetta. Same concept. Thus, when Anonymous became an idea, the Guy Fawkes mask was adopted as a symbol.

Again, Anonymous was never a group. At best, Anonymous was a collective, a swarm of identical beings like the Biblical demon(s) Legion (hence, "We are Anonymous. We are Legion."). Actually, Anonymous was an idea. A concept. Being anonymous in the traditional sense, being without an individual identity, became a collective identity.

One was not "a member of Anonymous". That's silly. An invention of those who have never understood Anonymous. One couldn't be "a member of Anonymous" because there was nothing to be a member of. One was Anonymous. You did something, maybe you coordinated that deed with others, and you all decided to do it under the collective moniker of Anonymous, especially if it aligned with whatever else Anonymous stood for at that given time. Of course, you had to make bloody sure that none of you were actually individually identifiable.

I couldn't say, "I'm Jupiter Rowland. I'm a member of Anonymous." This is silly and factually wrong. One can't possibly be a member of Anonymous. Anonymous isn't something one could be a member of.

I couldn't say, "I'm Jupiter Rowland. I'm Anonymous." That's an oxymoron. If I'm Jupiter Rowland, I can't possibly be Anonymous because I. Am. Not. Anonymous. Not if I still have an individual identity.

Instead, I'd put on my Guy Fawkes mask, say, "I am Anonymous," and wipe out the identity of Jupiter Rowland entirely in the process. As I become Anonymous, I stop being Jupiter Rowland. I stop being an individual. I stop being individually identifiable. I become the same as all the others in Guy Fawkes masks who are both anonymous and Anonymous. I can only be Anonymous when I'm actually anonymous. When I take the Guy Fawkes mask off again, I stop being Anonymous because I stop being anonymous.

Now, 4chan today is no longer 4chan from 20 years ago. It was commercialised. The "good parts" remained 4chan and in moot's possession. The "bad parts" were "outsourced" to 4channel which, I think, is independent.

Even they aren't as bad as when 4chan was the "Internet Hate Machine", and Anomymous attacked fandoms they didn't like. The infamous /i/ board on which such invasions were planned, which was the birthplace of Anonymous, was deleted when the actions that were planned there endangered all of 4chan. What used to happen there went to other image boards like ∞chan, and Anonymous tried to distance themselves from what was planned there because ∞chan had also become a hive of Eliot-Rodgers-worshipping incels.

I guess digital activism is gone from image boards completely. Image boards were a thing for the very late Generation X and the Millennials. They, in turn, were digital activists when they were still young. But after they'd got a job and founded a family, the whole thing had become too dangerous, and they didn't have that much time anymore. That, or the whole Anonymous thing came back to bite them when law enforcement joined forces with domestic or even foreign intelligence agencies to track them down.

I also guess that using the "Anonymous" moniker for activism or similar actions has become too dangerous nowadays. Most people have never understood Anonymous. The general public, mass media, tech media, politicians, law enforcement, they all see Anonymous as an enclosed, organised, coherent group. It isn't far from there to being declared a terrorist group nowadays.

Antifa serves as an example. It works exactly the same as Anonymous, only that it isn't about anonymity, lack of individual identity and blending into a crowd of identical beings. It isn't a coherent group. It is an idea, a label, at best a collective. But literally everyone outside Antifa thinks they know for a fact that Antifa is an enclosed, coherent group with a leader and an internal organisation and what-have-you. Antifa is a "terrorist group" in the USA as far as I know. Antifa is feared by the powers that be just as much as Anonymous is. And Antifa is misunderstood by the powers that be in just the same way as Anonymous is.

So if Anonymous carried on, the same fate would befall it as Antifa. Or even worse because, unlike Antifa, Anonymous is officially, and wrongly, being referred to as a "hacker group" although only few who have use the moniker "Anonymous" have ever done so as actual hackers. DDoSing a website in the 2000s by hammering on the F5 key when a dozen people doing so were sufficient to bring a Web server down is not a hack, but next to nobody who isn't actually a hacker understands this either.

In other words: If you refer to yourself as Anonymous nowadays, you basically risk being arrested violently by heavily armed special police or military forces for allegedly being a member of the "hacker group Anonymous" that did this or that thing.

Younger generations don't use image boards anymore except maybe for a few 15-year-old edgelords who, unlike the 15-year-old edgelords 20 years ago, don't have what it takes to evolve into Anonymous. In fact, younger generations barely use PCs and Web browsers anymore unless they're hardcore gamers with too much money. They do everything on phones with dedicated apps.

Anonymous, to them, is a "boomer" thing (where "boomer" means everyone older than them and their friends) like Facebook or Instagram or image boards in general. And lastly, the whole idea is contrary to what these younger generations believe in instead: personal fame.

Those who used to be Anonymous no longer are. And nobody became Anonymous after them.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Antifa #Anonymous

@Ben Pate 🤘🏻 Well, I'm used to having not only full native data portability, but even live, hot, bidirectional, real-time updates of entire Fediverse identities that contain stuff which 99% of the Fediverse doesn't support. Natively without an external application. Available for longer than Mastodon itself. Between any number of independent servers. So I'm not easily impressed.

I would be kind of impressed if LOLA managed to move a Mastodon account into a brand-new, virgin Hubzilla channel

• automatically activating all necessary apps from PubCrawl to Privacy Groups to Superblock to NSFW if the Mastodon account has at least one hiding filter
• activating all features that are either hard-coded or switched on on the Mastodon source account, but off by default on new Hubzilla channels
• (optionally) setting the channel role to Custom and configuring it in such a way that Hubzilla behaves as closely to Mastodon as possible, permissions-wise
• translating all followers and followed into Hubzilla's system of Facebook-style mutual-by-default contacts
• reconnecting all followers and followed on their end
• translating each Mastodon list into a Hubzilla privacy group, all members included while keeping the default "Friends" privacy group and adding all contacts to it
• converting followed hashtags into FediBuzz contacts (Hubzilla cannot follow hashtags, but we want the Hubzilla destination channel to be as close to the Mastodon source account as possible)
• translating not only the entire timeline of the Mastodon source account into a Hubzilla stream, but also importing entire threads behind and around each post in the timeline (this is absolutely necessary for the Mastodon user to keep their replies to other people's posts because a Hubzilla comment cannot exist without the start post and the entire branch of the conversation that led to it; also, it's a Hubzilla killer feature over Mastodon that you always see entire conversations instead of single-message piecemeal)
• transferring all posts, replies and DMs with all media in them
• converting Mastodon's loosely-tied threads, no matter who has started them, into Hubzilla-style enclosed conversations as per FEP-171b Conversation Containers with unified permissions for all messages within a conversation
• translating mentions and links into Hubzilla-specific markup
• translating faves into thumbs up
• translating Mastodon 4.6-style quotes into Hubzilla-style shares, automatically recognising which Hubzilla version the destination channel is running on and deciding which Hubzilla share format to use
• translating CWs in comments into [summary][/summary] tags (this would require Hubzilla to actually fully support summaries in comments which it currently doesn't because that doesn't make sense from a Facebook/blogging POV)
• translating Mastodon's post visibility settings into Hubzilla's permission system as far as that's possible (only for start posts, that is, because comments always inherit their permissions from the start post; also, this will have to be done after taking care of all contacts because "followers only" Mastodon toots will have to be converted into non-public posts which grant permission to see them only to the "Friends" privacy group, and likewise, DMs will have to have the contact(s) to whom they were originally sent assigned as those who are permitted to see them)
• importing all images, videos and other attached files into the Hubzilla channel's file space, including appropriate permission settings and, ideally, sorting them into Hubzilla-style "year-month" folders
• converting all media attachments into embedded links to the locations of the respective media files in the file space, including adding alt-texts to the embedding code
• importing the block list on the Mastodon source account into Superblock (that is, Hubzilla cannot block entire servers, but maybe this could automatically be translated into filter lines)
• converting blocking filters into channel-wide filter lines, converting bare keywords into regular expressions if the whole word option is set for these keywords on Mastodon
• adding the keywords of hiding filters to NSFW, converting bare keywords into regular expressions if the whole word option is set for these keywords on Mastodon
• translating the selected languages on the Mastodon source account into channel-wide filters on Hubzilla (even though this probably won't work exactly identical because Hubzilla neither sets nor knows per-message language settings)
• recognising the contents of Mastodon's free-text profile fields and moving them into the appropriate ones of Hubzilla's several dozen purpose-bound profile fields
• populating Hubzilla's keyword field with all hashtags found in the profile text of the Mastodon source account
• setting your channel language according to the language that most of your posts are in
• bonus points for entering Mastodon's colours into the Redbasic colour settings and changing the PDL layout settings so that the look of the Hubzilla destination channel is closer to that of the Mastodon source account than by default

Even that wouldn't give you a 100% identical copy of your Mastodon account. Hubzilla doesn't support quote-post control; the only way to make your posts non-quote-postable is by making them non-public (something that Mastodon can only understand as a DM), and you have no control whatsoever over the permissions of your comments on other people's posts anyway. Also, as I've already mentioned, Hubzilla currently doesn't support summaries (= Mastodon CWs) in comments.

However, vice versa, it'd be even harder to shoehorn Hubzilla's wealth of features into a new Mastodon account.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla #NomadicIdentity #LOLA