#cwmeta — Public Fediverse posts

@Truth & Answers I've just come across a toot from a Mastodon user who demanded that everyone who posts, quote, "on Mastodon," end quote, limit their posts to 500 characters.

This was far from being the first time I've read this very demand or similar demands. It just was the most recent time.

Where this comes from? Well, it has two sides.

The Mastodon side

One side are Mastodon users. Not all of them, but most of them. Literally all of them were on-boarded onto Mastodon with the notion that Mastodon is its own enclosed network with nothing else in it. Those who pull them on board either think it's easier for them to understand if they aren't told about the non-Mastodon Fediverse, or they don't know about the non-Mastodon Fediverse themselves.

Some of these newbies think Mastodon is the network because they've never heard of the Fediverse. Others think the Fediverse is Mastodon and nothing else.

My estimation, and not only mine, is that more than 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse consists of nothing else than Mastodon. A great deal of the rest thinks the Fediverse doesn't extend beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube. Not much anyway.

It doesn't help that Mastodon, unlike other Fediverse server applications such as Misskey, the Forkeys, Friendica, (streams) or Forte, does not tell its users which server app a message came from. It doesn't help either that Mastodon "sanitises" away quite a few things that'd make non-Mastodon messages a dead giveaway. So the huge majority of Mastodon users believe that if they see it on Mastodon, it came from Mastodon.

So these people are dropped into a network which they think is nothing but a purist, minimalist microblogging service with no more than 500 characters, and whose only differences from Twitter are the name, that it isn't just one website, that it isn't owned by Elon Musk, and that it isn't overrun by fascists.

They get used to it. They get used to only having a maximum of 500 characters. They get used to the CW field being the CW field. They get used to Mastodon's entire culture which they see as the be-all, end-all of online culture.

And then they come across a message with a whole lot over 500 characters for the first time. Something which, to their best knowledge, shouldn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse. Something which mustn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse.

Some don't have any idea how it could be possible to "toot" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon", and they ask how one can do that. Others believe that all these "long toots" come from hacked Mastodon servers. Either way, they often demand that these Mastodon users adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and act like all good Mastodon users shall act. Including not "tooting" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon".

Both are being told that these "toots" aren't "toots" because they don't come from Mastodon. That the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon. That there's other server software in the Fediverse that has always been able to post way more than 500 characters.

That changes nothing for them. They still demand everyone in the Fediverse adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and only to these, and that everyone in the Fediverse use whatever they use exactly like vanilla, unmodified Mastodon.

And they feel absolutely justified. According to their gospel, Gargron invented the Fediverse when he created Mastodon. And everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon (once they discover that there is such stuff) has either been designed as an add-on glued onto Mastodon (Pixelfed, PeerTube), or it's an evil, savage intruder (everything that's capable of largely doing the same thing as Mastodon without being Mastodon).

The Fediverse is to Mastodon users what the ancient world was to the Romans. Mastodon is the Roman Empire. Literally the only place that has got something like culture. A few places have voluntarily joined the Roman Mastodon Empire. All the rest consists of primitive, savage, culture-less barbarians whose lands need to be conquered by force to bring them culture.

The non-Mastodon side

The other side are the non-Mastodon users. This sounds harsh, but while Mastodon users act by faith and belief, non-Mastodon users act by knowledge. It's them who know what the Fediverse really is. That there has never been a point in history at which the Fediverse has only been Mastodon. And that culture does exist outside of Mastodon. Only that these cultures are different from Mastodon's culture, largely because they're geared towards the technical capabilities of the underlying software.

To non-Mastodon users, the Fediverse feels like the New World when the European conquerors and settlers arrived. They demanded the natives adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianty or face death. The natives actually already had cultures. Cultures that suited them and their surroundings much more than the culture lived in European cities. But the Europeans didn't acknowledge the natives' cultures as such, nor did they care.

From non-Mastodon users' point of view, Mastodon users act to them like the Europeans acted to the natives in their colonies-to-be.

A very good example, also because it's such an extreme example, has to be Friendica. In case you don't know, Friendica (https://friendi.ca; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica) is a free, open-source, decentralised, federated Facebook alternative that first came out as early as May, 2010. Friendica developed a wholly different culture from Mastodon's because it's vastly different from Mastodon.

Mastodon's culture was mostly coined in mid-2022 by those who escaped from Elon Musk's announcement to buy out Twitter in February/March, 2022.
Friendica's culture was coined by its early users in 2010 already.

Mastodon users are mostly used to living in a Mastodon-only network with no connection to anything that isn't Mastodon. They believe that Mastodon and the Fediverse were designed as such, and that Friendica is an illegitimate intruder.
Friendica users are used to being able to connect to everything that moves, including Mastodon, including the whole Fediverse, no matter which iteration of the Fediverse, including diaspora*, and the some. That's because Friendica was designed from the ground up to be able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. It's part of its concept.

Mastodon users believe that Mastodon was there before anything.
Friendica users know that Friendica was there long before Mastodon, even before diaspora*, and that Friendica still wasn't the first.

Mastodon users are used to only having 500 characters. They still consider that a lot in comparison with Twitter's 280 characters.
Friendica users are used to not having any character limit whatsoever. Friendica's actual technical character limit is imposed by the maximum size of the message text database field, and that's over 16.7 million characters.

Mastodon users are used to chopping long posts into threads. It's what they expect. Actual long posts irritate them.
Friendica users are used to posting long post in one piece. It's what they expect. One and the same post being chopped up into itty-bitty bits irritate them.

Mastodon users are used to putting CWs in a dedicated CW field.
Friendica users are used to the self-same text field actually being a summary field (Friendica calls it "abstract"). While Mastodon got that field in 2017 as a pull request from a user, Friendica had it from the get-go, i.e. since 2010. And Friendica actually adopted it from Evan Prodromou's decentralised Twitter alternative StatusNet from 2008 with which Friendica was able to federate with from the get-go as well.

Mastodon users "know" that Gargron invented the CW field.
Friendica users actually do know for a fact that they've had the same field as a summary field since long before Mastodon was even made. There are still enough Friendica veterans around from before 2016.

This also means that Mastodon users are used to poster-side CWs which all readers get just the same.
Friendica users are used to CWs being automatically generated on the reader's side, individually for each reader, by an optional text filter.
In fact, Mastodon can do the same. But nobody knows, it came way too late to become part of Mastodon's culture (Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022), it's too tedious to use, it probably isn't supported by that many phone apps, and next to nobody uses Mastodon's Web interface. In the meantime, Friendica has had this feature for some twelve years longer, and it's only an on-off switch and one editable keyword list.

Mastodon users are used to only having up to four images and to images always only being file attachments dangling below a post.
Friendica users are used to being able to embed a virtually unlimited number of images to a post. And to actually embed them, as in, with text above the image and text below the image and another image below that text and more text below that image. Theoretically, they could insert tiny images into lines of text. By the way, Mastodon refuses to display embedded images. It also rejects any file attachments beyond the first four. And up to version 4.0 from October, 2022, it didn't support any kind of text formatting and "sanitised" all message texts down to plain text.

This also means that Mastodon users are used to only having plain text or mucking around with Unicode characters for bold type and italics.
Friendica users are used to being able to not only see, but also post all sorts of text formatting that HTML is capable of.

Mastodon users are often deadly afraid of quote-posts because they only know quote-posts as a means of harassment and dogpiling on Twitter.
Friendica users, their entire culture being entirely unfazed by whatever has ever happened on Twitter, are absolutely used to always having had quote-posts at hand and to using quote-posts as a means of forwarding content. They had what Mastodon calls "quotes" years before they had what Mastodon calls "boosts" (and what many Mastodon users refer to as "retoots").

Mastodon users are used to conversations being loosely tied together from toots and to having to visibly mention all those whom they want to receive a reply.
Friendica users are used to having enclosed threaded conversations with only one post and otherwise only comments. They're also used to everyone in the conversation, i.e. everyone who has received the original post, automatically receiving every single last comment. They're used to always seeing the entire thread immediately as opposed to single-message piecemeal.

Mastodon users are used to shouting into the void with hashtags attached if they want to talk about a certain topic. It's the only way for them to do so.
Friendica users are used to having groups. Oh, and full-text search.

The conflict

It should be obvious that these two types have a very high chance of not getting along, especially if the Mastodon user is fairly new and not used to there being stuff in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon.

Mastodon users keep demanding that everyone else in the Fediverse live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules and only by these.

Mastodon users who have joined in 2026 keep ordering Friendica veterans who have joined in the early 2010s (before there was any Mastodon) to act like they're on Mastodon.

They demand these Friendica veterans fully adopt Mastodon's culture (which isn't even geared towards Friendica's set of features).

They indirectly demand these Friendica veterans give up their own culture (because they cannot comprehend that there can be any other culture in the Fediverse than Mastodon's, as in, that what Friendica has is a culture, even though it's different from Mastodon's).

They directly demand these Friendica veterans give up some 40% of the features they've been using for a decade and a half and indirectly demand they give up another 40% of these features.

They demand these Friendica veterans stop posting more than 500 characters at once.

They demand these Friendica veterans put CWs into their abstract field. (Again, they think that Gargron has invented this field from scratch as a CW field,)

They demand these Friendica veterans use their abstract field only for CWs.

They demand these Friendica veterans stop "spamming" hashtags that clearly aren't there for content discovery. (They cannot comprehend that these hashtags are there to trigger automatic reader-side CWs because the entire concept is completely alien to them.)

And so forth.

These Friendica veterans have been in the Fediverse for about a decade and a half. And suddently, these Mastodon newbies appear and tell them how to use Friendica.

Of course, these Mastodon newbies don't know a thing about Friendica. They think the Friendica veterans are Mastodon users, and they're telling them how to use Mastodon.

So the Friendica users tell them, no, they aren't on Mastodon. They're on Friendica which has got absolutely nothing to do with Mastodon.

Then the Mastodon newbies will believe that someone has created this weird Friendica thing after Mastodon was made (it can't possibly be any other way, right?9 and illegally hacked this Friendica thing into the Mastodon Fediverse. And whoever made Friendica omitted to make Friendica just like Mastodon.

Okay, now the Friendica users tell them that Friendica was launched in 2010, how long before Mastodon that was, and that they themselves have been around for much longer than Mastodon, too.

Now, either the Mastodon newbies will fail to comprehend that there can be anything in the Fediverse made before Mastodon if Gargron has invented the very technology. Or they think that the Fediverse was still created with Mastodon, and that Friendica still illegally intruded into the Mastodon Fediverse.

Either way, the Friendica veterans will have to adapt and act entirely by Mastodon's standards. This is the Mastodon Fediverse, Mastodon is the biggest software (if only by monthly active users, by the way), Mastodon has defined "the Fediverse culture", and thus it's the Mastodon users and only the Mastodon users who get to say how people have to act and behave in the Fediverse.

And then the Mastodon users wonder how there's so much Mastodon hatred on Friendica (and there actually is). How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users trying to force them to use Friendica like Mastodon. How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users chopping long posts into small bits. As if they had a choice. How Friendica users complain about CWs in whatever that abstract field is supposed to be. And so forth.

How dare the Friendica users complain? The Mastodon users are the good guys! It's them and only them who have a culture, who have rules, who know how to use the Fediverse!

By the way: It gets even worse between Mastodon and Lemmy.

Mastodon's culture is an idealised version of pre-Musk Twitter's culture with bits of Tumblr's SFW culture mixed in. That's because just about everyone on Mastodon originally came from Twitter, and most of them escaped from Elon Musk. They want Mastodon (and the Fediverse) be a better Twitter. It helps that Mastodon is still trying hard to be a Twitter clone.

Lemmy's culture, on the other hand, is a carbon copy of Reddit's culture. Lemmy is a Reddit clone that shares next to no features at all with Mastodon except for ActivityPub support. Next to all Lemmy users are former Redditors who left Reddit when Reddit started charging $20,000,000 for its client API, effectively killing off all third-party Reddit apps. They saw no reason in changing their culture because it wasn't the culture that drove them away. Hardly any of them were on Twitter, and almost none of them have ever been on Mastodon. Many think the Fediverse is Lemmy. Of the rest, many think the Fediverse is Lemmy with a side of PieFed.

Mastodon lives on hashtags even more than Twitter. Lemmy has zero support for hashtags because Reddit doesn't have any either, and neither does Hacker News.

Mastodon requires mentions to get replies to their recipients. One visible mention per recipient. Lemmy doesn't need mentions for this at all. Mentions on Lemmy only serve to, well, mention someone. Just like on Reddit.

And so forth.

It's actually easy to spot threads on Lemmy that were started by Mastodon users: The title is in the post text, or there's no title at all because the Mastodon users did as they always do: mention in the first line, then a new line because that looks prettier. Of course, there's a mention in the post text. And there's a bunch of hashtags strewn across the post text even though they don't even work. If you're very lucky, the hashtags are at the bottom, but most Mastodon users don't waste any of their 500 characters on that.

I hope you get a rough idea how much headbutting there is between Mastodon users who think that the Mastodon users rule supreme over the whole Fediverse and Lemmy community owners who do rule over the Lemmy communities which these Mastodon users have just posted into.

Countermeasures

Both sides are actually taking countermeasures. The non-Mastodon side is more effective at it, though.

On Mastodon's side, there are very few single users who block every single non-Mastodon server they come across.

Countermeasures on the non-Mastodon side vary. They start with single users who block each Mastodon user who doesn't behave like they want them to behave, e.g. they block everyone who chops a long post into a thread at first trike.

Then there's Hubzilla, reworked from a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator. Hubzilla has always been based on its own protocol, Zot6 (Friendica's creator calls it an older version of Nomad). ActivityPub support is optional, on by default on new servers and off by default on new channels. The current devs won't change anything about that. Not only doesn't Hubzilla's technology allow for moving it to ActivityPub as its base protocol, but ActivityPub being optional is seen as a last-resort "drawbridge" for those to whom Mastodon has become unbearable.

Nowadays, Friendica's creator is working on two other applications in the same family. (streams) is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, and Forte is a fork of (streams). Both have an admin-side user agent filter. It can block entire Fediverse applications without having to hassle around with a URL list. It was mainly created and advertised as a means to permanently lock Threads out, even if Threads should change URLs. But it's also being advertised as being capable of blocking all of Mastodon, all present and future servers. Mastodon being intentially made barely compatible with the rest of the Fediverse is only one reason for this.

(streams) and Forte also have another admin-side filter which, when turned on, locks everything out that doesn't support enclosed threaded conversations. That's because server applications like Mastodon mess with the way that (streams), Forte and their ancestors handle conversations. Granted, when this is activated only to get rid of Mastodon, it causes quite a bit of collateral damage.

Generally, (streams) and Forte are very similar. The main difference is that Forte is entirely based on ActivityPub whereas (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad with ActivityPub still being optional. The reason why (streams) is kept around is for there to still be one of these applications with the same protocol-level "drawbridge" as Hubzilla. And in fact, the most important (streams) group used to have ActivityPub off with the intention to keep Mastodon out.

I guess there are still Mastodon users who absolutely defend and support Mastodon's way being forced upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, and who are irritated or upset about non-Mastodon users being very defensive of their own non-Mastodon ways and refusing to adopt Mastodon's (allegedly much superior) culture instead of embracing it.

And I guess there are Mastodon users who feel absolutely entitled to get to every last Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte user unhindered and force them to use Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte exactly like Mastodon in every way possible.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lemmy #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@Truth & Answers I've just come across a toot from a Mastodon user who demanded that everyone who posts, quote, "on Mastodon," end quote, limit their posts to 500 characters.

This was far from being the first time I've read this very demand or similar demands. It just was the most recent time.

Where this comes from? Well, it has two sides.

The Mastodon side

One side are Mastodon users. Not all of them, but most of them. Literally all of them were on-boarded onto Mastodon with the notion that Mastodon is its own enclosed network with nothing else in it. Those who pull them on board either think it's easier for them to understand if they aren't told about the non-Mastodon Fediverse, or they don't know about the non-Mastodon Fediverse themselves.

Some of these newbies think Mastodon is the network because they've never heard of the Fediverse. Others think the Fediverse is Mastodon and nothing else.

My estimation, and not only mine, is that more than 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse consists of nothing else than Mastodon. A great deal of the rest thinks the Fediverse doesn't extend beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube. Not much anyway.

It doesn't help that Mastodon, unlike other Fediverse server applications such as Misskey, the Forkeys, Friendica, (streams) or Forte, does not tell its users which server app a message came from. It doesn't help either that Mastodon "sanitises" away quite a few things that'd make non-Mastodon messages a dead giveaway. So the huge majority of Mastodon users believe that if they see it on Mastodon, it came from Mastodon.

So these people are dropped into a network which they think is nothing but a purist, minimalist microblogging service with no more than 500 characters, and whose only differences from Twitter are the name, that it isn't just one website, that it isn't owned by Elon Musk, and that it isn't overrun by fascists.

They get used to it. They get used to only having a maximum of 500 characters. They get used to the CW field being the CW field. They get used to Mastodon's entire culture which they see as the be-all, end-all of online culture.

And then they come across a message with a whole lot over 500 characters for the first time. Something which, to their best knowledge, shouldn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse. Something which mustn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse.

Some don't have any idea how it could be possible to "toot" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon", and they ask how one can do that. Others believe that all these "long toots" come from hacked Mastodon servers. Either way, they often demand that these Mastodon users adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and act like all good Mastodon users shall act. Including not "tooting" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon".

Both are being told that these "toots" aren't "toots" because they don't come from Mastodon. That the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon. That there's other server software in the Fediverse that has always been able to post way more than 500 characters.

That changes nothing for them. They still demand everyone in the Fediverse adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and only to these, and that everyone in the Fediverse use whatever they use exactly like vanilla, unmodified Mastodon.

And they feel absolutely justified. According to their gospel, Gargron invented the Fediverse when he created Mastodon. And everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon (once they discover that there is such stuff) has either been designed as an add-on glued onto Mastodon (Pixelfed, PeerTube), or it's an evil, savage intruder (everything that's capable of largely doing the same thing as Mastodon without being Mastodon).

The Fediverse is to Mastodon users what the ancient world was to the Romans. Mastodon is the Roman Empire. Literally the only place that has got something like culture. A few places have voluntarily joined the Roman Mastodon Empire. All the rest consists of primitive, savage, culture-less barbarians whose lands need to be conquered by force to bring them culture.

The non-Mastodon side

The other side are the non-Mastodon users. This sounds harsh, but while Mastodon users act by faith and belief, non-Mastodon users act by knowledge. It's them who know what the Fediverse really is. That there has never been a point in history at which the Fediverse has only been Mastodon. And that culture does exist outside of Mastodon. Only that these cultures are different from Mastodon's culture, largely because they're geared towards the technical capabilities of the underlying software.

To non-Mastodon users, the Fediverse feels like the New World when the European conquerors and settlers arrived. They demanded the natives adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianty or face death. The natives actually already had cultures. Cultures that suited them and their surroundings much more than the culture lived in European cities. But the Europeans didn't acknowledge the natives' cultures as such, nor did they care.

From non-Mastodon users' point of view, Mastodon users act to them like the Europeans acted to the natives in their colonies-to-be.

A very good example, also because it's such an extreme example, has to be Friendica. In case you don't know, Friendica (https://friendi.ca; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica) is a free, open-source, decentralised, federated Facebook alternative that first came out as early as May, 2010. Friendica developed a wholly different culture from Mastodon's because it's vastly different from Mastodon.

Mastodon's culture was mostly coined in mid-2022 by those who escaped from Elon Musk's announcement to buy out Twitter in February/March, 2022.
Friendica's culture was coined by its early users in 2010 already.

Mastodon users are mostly used to living in a Mastodon-only network with no connection to anything that isn't Mastodon. They believe that Mastodon and the Fediverse were designed as such, and that Friendica is an illegitimate intruder.
Friendica users are used to being able to connect to everything that moves, including Mastodon, including the whole Fediverse, no matter which iteration of the Fediverse, including diaspora*, and the some. That's because Friendica was designed from the ground up to be able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. It's part of its concept.

Mastodon users believe that Mastodon was there before anything.
Friendica users know that Friendica was there long before Mastodon, even before diaspora*, and that Friendica still wasn't the first.

Mastodon users are used to only having 500 characters. They still consider that a lot in comparison with Twitter's 280 characters.
Friendica users are used to not having any character limit whatsoever. Friendica's actual technical character limit is imposed by the maximum size of the message text database field, and that's over 16.7 million characters.

Mastodon users are used to chopping long posts into threads. It's what they expect. Actual long posts irritate them.
Friendica users are used to posting long post in one piece. It's what they expect. One and the same post being chopped up into itty-bitty bits irritate them.

Mastodon users are used to putting CWs in a dedicated CW field.
Friendica users are used to the self-same text field actually being a summary field (Friendica calls it "abstract"). While Mastodon got that field in 2017 as a pull request from a user, Friendica had it from the get-go, i.e. since 2010. And Friendica actually adopted it from Evan Prodromou's decentralised Twitter alternative StatusNet from 2008 with which Friendica was able to federate with from the get-go as well.

Mastodon users "know" that Gargron invented the CW field.
Friendica users actually do know for a fact that they've had the same field as a summary field since long before Mastodon was even made. There are still enough Friendica veterans around from before 2016.

This also means that Mastodon users are used to poster-side CWs which all readers get just the same.
Friendica users are used to CWs being automatically generated on the reader's side, individually for each reader, by an optional text filter.
In fact, Mastodon can do the same. But nobody knows, it came way too late to become part of Mastodon's culture (Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022), it's too tedious to use, it probably isn't supported by that many phone apps, and next to nobody uses Mastodon's Web interface. In the meantime, Friendica has had this feature for some twelve years longer, and it's only an on-off switch and one editable keyword list.

Mastodon users are used to only having up to four images and to images always only being file attachments dangling below a post.
Friendica users are used to being able to embed a virtually unlimited number of images to a post. And to actually embed them, as in, with text above the image and text below the image and another image below that text and more text below that image. Theoretically, they could insert tiny images into lines of text. By the way, Mastodon refuses to display embedded images. It also rejects any file attachments beyond the first four. And up to version 4.0 from October, 2022, it didn't support any kind of text formatting and "sanitised" all message texts down to plain text.

This also means that Mastodon users are used to only having plain text or mucking around with Unicode characters for bold type and italics.
Friendica users are used to being able to not only see, but also post all sorts of text formatting that HTML is capable of.

Mastodon users are often deadly afraid of quote-posts because they only know quote-posts as a means of harassment and dogpiling on Twitter.
Friendica users, their entire culture being entirely unfazed by whatever has ever happened on Twitter, are absolutely used to always having had quote-posts at hand and to using quote-posts as a means of forwarding content. They had what Mastodon calls "quotes" years before they had what Mastodon calls "boosts" (and what many Mastodon users refer to as "retoots").

Mastodon users are used to conversations being loosely tied together from toots and to having to visibly mention all those whom they want to receive a reply.
Friendica users are used to having enclosed threaded conversations with only one post and otherwise only comments. They're also used to everyone in the conversation, i.e. everyone who has received the original post, automatically receiving every single last comment. They're used to always seeing the entire thread immediately as opposed to single-message piecemeal.

Mastodon users are used to shouting into the void with hashtags attached if they want to talk about a certain topic. It's the only way for them to do so.
Friendica users are used to having groups. Oh, and full-text search.

The conflict

It should be obvious that these two types have a very high chance of not getting along, especially if the Mastodon user is fairly new and not used to there being stuff in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon.

Mastodon users keep demanding that everyone else in the Fediverse live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules and only by these.

Mastodon users who have joined in 2026 keep ordering Friendica veterans who have joined in the early 2010s (before there was any Mastodon) to act like they're on Mastodon.

They demand these Friendica veterans fully adopt Mastodon's culture (which isn't even geared towards Friendica's set of features).

They indirectly demand these Friendica veterans give up their own culture (because they cannot comprehend that there can be any other culture in the Fediverse than Mastodon's, as in, that what Friendica has is a culture, even though it's different from Mastodon's).

They directly demand these Friendica veterans give up some 40% of the features they've been using for a decade and a half and indirectly demand they give up another 40% of these features.

They demand these Friendica veterans stop posting more than 500 characters at once.

They demand these Friendica veterans put CWs into their abstract field. (Again, they think that Gargron has invented this field from scratch as a CW field,)

They demand these Friendica veterans use their abstract field only for CWs.

They demand these Friendica veterans stop "spamming" hashtags that clearly aren't there for content discovery. (They cannot comprehend that these hashtags are there to trigger automatic reader-side CWs because the entire concept is completely alien to them.)

And so forth.

These Friendica veterans have been in the Fediverse for about a decade and a half. And suddently, these Mastodon newbies appear and tell them how to use Friendica.

Of course, these Mastodon newbies don't know a thing about Friendica. They think the Friendica veterans are Mastodon users, and they're telling them how to use Mastodon.

So the Friendica users tell them, no, they aren't on Mastodon. They're on Friendica which has got absolutely nothing to do with Mastodon.

Then the Mastodon newbies will believe that someone has created this weird Friendica thing after Mastodon was made (it can't possibly be any other way, right?9 and illegally hacked this Friendica thing into the Mastodon Fediverse. And whoever made Friendica omitted to make Friendica just like Mastodon.

Okay, now the Friendica users tell them that Friendica was launched in 2010, how long before Mastodon that was, and that they themselves have been around for much longer than Mastodon, too.

Now, either the Mastodon newbies will fail to comprehend that there can be anything in the Fediverse made before Mastodon if Gargron has invented the very technology. Or they think that the Fediverse was still created with Mastodon, and that Friendica still illegally intruded into the Mastodon Fediverse.

Either way, the Friendica veterans will have to adapt and act entirely by Mastodon's standards. This is the Mastodon Fediverse, Mastodon is the biggest software (if only by monthly active users, by the way), Mastodon has defined "the Fediverse culture", and thus it's the Mastodon users and only the Mastodon users who get to say how people have to act and behave in the Fediverse.

And then the Mastodon users wonder how there's so much Mastodon hatred on Friendica (and there actually is). How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users trying to force them to use Friendica like Mastodon. How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users chopping long posts into small bits. As if they had a choice. How Friendica users complain about CWs in whatever that abstract field is supposed to be. And so forth.

How dare the Friendica users complain? The Mastodon users are the good guys! It's them and only them who have a culture, who have rules, who know how to use the Fediverse!

By the way: It gets even worse between Mastodon and Lemmy.

Mastodon's culture is an idealised version of pre-Musk Twitter's culture with bits of Tumblr's SFW culture mixed in. That's because just about everyone on Mastodon originally came from Twitter, and most of them escaped from Elon Musk. They want Mastodon (and the Fediverse) be a better Twitter. It helps that Mastodon is still trying hard to be a Twitter clone.

Lemmy's culture, on the other hand, is a carbon copy of Reddit's culture. Lemmy is a Reddit clone that shares next to no features at all with Mastodon except for ActivityPub support. Next to all Lemmy users are former Redditors who left Reddit when Reddit started charging $20,000,000 for its client API, effectively killing off all third-party Reddit apps. They saw no reason in changing their culture because it wasn't the culture that drove them away. Hardly any of them were on Twitter, and almost none of them have ever been on Mastodon. Many think the Fediverse is Lemmy. Of the rest, many think the Fediverse is Lemmy with a side of PieFed.

Mastodon lives on hashtags even more than Twitter. Lemmy has zero support for hashtags because Reddit doesn't have any either, and neither does Hacker News.

Mastodon requires mentions to get replies to their recipients. One visible mention per recipient. Lemmy doesn't need mentions for this at all. Mentions on Lemmy only serve to, well, mention someone. Just like on Reddit.

And so forth.

It's actually easy to spot threads on Lemmy that were started by Mastodon users: The title is in the post text, or there's no title at all because the Mastodon users did as they always do: mention in the first line, then a new line because that looks prettier. Of course, there's a mention in the post text. And there's a bunch of hashtags strewn across the post text even though they don't even work. If you're very lucky, the hashtags are at the bottom, but most Mastodon users don't waste any of their 500 characters on that.

I hope you get a rough idea how much headbutting there is between Mastodon users who think that the Mastodon users rule supreme over the whole Fediverse and Lemmy community owners who do rule over the Lemmy communities which these Mastodon users have just posted into.

Countermeasures

Both sides are actually taking countermeasures. The non-Mastodon side is more effective at it, though.

On Mastodon's side, there are very few single users who block every single non-Mastodon server they come across.

Countermeasures on the non-Mastodon side vary. They start with single users who block each Mastodon user who doesn't behave like they want them to behave, e.g. they block everyone who chops a long post into a thread at first trike.

Then there's Hubzilla, reworked from a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator. Hubzilla has always been based on its own protocol, Zot6 (Friendica's creator calls it an older version of Nomad). ActivityPub support is optional, on by default on new servers and off by default on new channels. The current devs won't change anything about that. Not only doesn't Hubzilla's technology allow for moving it to ActivityPub as its base protocol, but ActivityPub being optional is seen as a last-resort "drawbridge" for those to whom Mastodon has become unbearable.

Nowadays, Friendica's creator is working on two other applications in the same family. (streams) is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, and Forte is a fork of (streams). Both have an admin-side user agent filter. It can block entire Fediverse applications without having to hassle around with a URL list. It was mainly created and advertised as a means to permanently lock Threads out, even if Threads should change URLs. But it's also being advertised as being capable of blocking all of Mastodon, all present and future servers. Mastodon being intentially made barely compatible with the rest of the Fediverse is only one reason for this.

(streams) and Forte also have another admin-side filter which, when turned on, locks everything out that doesn't support enclosed threaded conversations. That's because server applications like Mastodon mess with the way that (streams), Forte and their ancestors handle conversations. Granted, when this is activated only to get rid of Mastodon, it causes quite a bit of collateral damage.

Generally, (streams) and Forte are very similar. The main difference is that Forte is entirely based on ActivityPub whereas (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad with ActivityPub still being optional. The reason why (streams) is kept around is for there to still be one of these applications with the same protocol-level "drawbridge" as Hubzilla. And in fact, the most important (streams) group used to have ActivityPub off with the intention to keep Mastodon out.

I guess there are still Mastodon users who absolutely defend and support Mastodon's way being forced upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, and who are irritated or upset about non-Mastodon users being very defensive of their own non-Mastodon ways and refusing to adopt Mastodon's (allegedly much superior) culture instead of embracing it.

And I guess there are Mastodon users who feel absolutely entitled to get to every last Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte user unhindered and force them to use Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte exactly like Mastodon in every way possible.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lemmy #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@TeflonTrout :bc: he/him @Sharp Leaves Still, forcing Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules upon literally everyone in the Fediverse is bad.

Maybe you haven't heard about this yet, but: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has never been only Mastodon. It didn't even start with Mastodon. And it doesn't entirely work like Mastodon either.

For starters, this means that just because you see it on Mastodon, it didn't necessarily originate on Mastodon.

There are places in the Fediverse that are vastly older than Mastodon, and that are very different from Mastodon. Thus, they have their own culture, based on their own technology and their own features and where their users came from, and largely without any influences from Mastodon.

The oldest still existing server software in the Fediverse is not Mastodon from 2016. It's Friendica (https://friendi.ca, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica). Friendica is essentially a mixture of a Facebook alternative and fully-featured long-form blogging. No Twitter or Mastodon influence anywhere. And Friendica first came out in May, 2010, five years and eight months before Mastodon.

Friendica did not intrude into the Mastodon Fediverse that was created by Eugen Rochko as a Mastodon-only network. Mastodon was born into an already existing Fediverse that consisted of at least Friendica, Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) and GNU social (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social; now defunct).

Here's how Friendica differs from Mastodon in ways that may disturb Mastodon hardliners:

• Mastodon is hard-coded to 500 characters. This character limit is deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture.
  Friendica doesn't have an arbitrary character limit; it's limited by the maximum size of the database field for the post text. Currently, this is 16,777,215 characters. Thus, Friendica doesn't have keeping messages short in its culture, it never has, and it never will.
• Mastodon users tend to be eager to block anyone who doesn't cut long posts into pieces of no more than 500 characters each.
  I know at least one Friendica veteran who blocks everyone upon first strike who does cut long posts into annoying strings of tiny chunks.
• Mastodon introduced a CW field in 2017.
  Friendica has had the exact same field as a summary/abstract field since its own beginning in 2010. That, and Friendica has always had a much more efficient way of handling CWs, one that Mastodon itself adopted with version 4.0 in October, 2022. Thus, by its technology and culture, Friendica users despise misusing their abstract field to force the same CW upon everyone out there with a hot, flaming passion.
  So if you see someone "misusing" the CW field for "a subject or a summary or whatever that is," that might not be a clueless Mastodon user. Instead, it might be a Friendica user who has been around for a dozen years longer than you, who is used to living by Friendica's culture, and who knows tons more about the Fediverse than you do.
• Friendica users are much less likely to add alt-texts to their images. That's for two reasons.
  One, Friendica's culture is not an idealised version of pre-Musk, very-left-wing Twitter's culture. It does not include attacking and punishing everyone who doesn't add 100% hand-written, 100% accurate, sufficiently detailed alt-texts to their images.
  Two, Friendica handles images drastically differently from Mastodon. Mastodon always has a nifty little entry field for alt-texts whenever you attach an image. On Friendica, images are embedded into posts rather than attached to them, like in a blog post. And oftentimes, you literally have to program the alt-text into the raw image embedding markup code.
• On Mastodon, it's considered intrusive and reply-guying to reply to someone who hasn't mentioned you, and to whom you aren't mutually connected. You couldn't possibly have received the toot that you're replying to otherwise.
  On Friendica, that's perfectly normal. Friendica doesn't show you single messages by default. It always shows you the entire conversation thread, all the way up to the start post, with all branches. Thus, neither Friendica's technology nor Friendica's culture rules out replying to any comment in the thread.
• Mastodon has only just introduced Twitter-style quote-posts a few months ago. With a safety feature that only works on Mastodon and GoToSocial for fear of that feature being used for harassment and dogpiling just like on Twitter. And because literally everyone on Mastodon comes from Twitter, it's actually being used for harassment and dogpiling.
  Friendica has had that very same feature since its inception in 2010, over a decade and a half longer. It has never not had this feature. It has always been able to quote-post any public message in the Fediverse. But since Friendica is not entirely populated by former Twitter users, it hasn't been used for harassment or dogpiling even once. It's only used to forward content. For most of the time, it literally was the only available way to forward a message.
• Mastodon users tend to be very protective and defensive about their allegedly Mastodon-only Fediverse.
  Friendica users are used to being able to connect with everything that moves and then some. It's one of Friendica's key features that it speaks a whole lot of protocols, not just ActivityPub.
  Whereas Mastodon users see Mastodon as a "decentralised walled garden", Friendica users see Friendica as the gateway to the whole federated social Web plus some places that aren't, strictly speaking, federated.
• Mastodon users will staunchly insist that "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" essentially mean the same because they believe they do. They will attack anyone who claims otherwise.
  Friendica users will staunchly insist that there's a huge difference between "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" because they actually know there is one. They will lecture anyone who claims otherwise.

Of course, from a Mastodon point of view, it's both tempting and fully justified to tell the Friendica users that this is the Mastodon Fediverse, and that they will have to adapt the Mastodon culture and abolish their own culture or be thrown out. But for one, Mastodon's culture doesn't fit Friendica's technology.

Besides, that'd literally be like European settlers holding Native Americans at gunpoint and forcing them to give up their own culture, adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianity or else. The only difference is that European settlers, unlike the Mastodon users, did not think that they were there first, and that everyone else is an intruder.

I mean, sure, go ahead and attack anyone who doesn't strictly live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules if you think you have to. But prepare for a whole lot of defence and even counter-attacks from Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Iceshrimp-JS, Iceshrimp.NET, Sharkey, GoToSocial, Hollo, snac2, Mitra, Socialhome, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and the rest of the non-Mastodon Fediverse.

CC: @Jan Wildeboer

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

@TeflonTrout :bc: he/him @Sharp Leaves Still, forcing Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules upon literally everyone in the Fediverse is bad.

Maybe you haven't heard about this yet, but: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has never been only Mastodon. It didn't even start with Mastodon. And it doesn't entirely work like Mastodon either.

For starters, this means that just because you see it on Mastodon, it didn't necessarily originate on Mastodon.

There are places in the Fediverse that are vastly older than Mastodon, and that are very different from Mastodon. Thus, they have their own culture, based on their own technology and their own features and where their users came from, and largely without any influences from Mastodon.

The oldest still existing server software in the Fediverse is not Mastodon from 2016. It's Friendica (https://friendi.ca, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica). Friendica is essentially a mixture of a Facebook alternative and fully-featured long-form blogging. No Twitter or Mastodon influence anywhere. And Friendica first came out in May, 2010, five years and eight months before Mastodon.

Friendica did not intrude into the Mastodon Fediverse that was created by Eugen Rochko as a Mastodon-only network. Mastodon was born into an already existing Fediverse that consisted of at least Friendica, Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) and GNU social (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social; now defunct).

Here's how Friendica differs from Mastodon in ways that may disturb Mastodon hardliners:

• Mastodon is hard-coded to 500 characters. This character limit is deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture.
  Friendica doesn't have an arbitrary character limit; it's limited by the maximum size of the database field for the post text. Currently, this is 16,777,215 characters. Thus, Friendica doesn't have keeping messages short in its culture, it never has, and it never will.
• Mastodon users tend to be eager to block anyone who doesn't cut long posts into pieces of no more than 500 characters each.
  I know at least one Friendica veteran who blocks everyone upon first strike who does cut long posts into annoying strings of tiny chunks.
• Mastodon introduced a CW field in 2017.
  Friendica has had the exact same field as a summary/abstract field since its own beginning in 2010. That, and Friendica has always had a much more efficient way of handling CWs, one that Mastodon itself adopted with version 4.0 in October, 2022. Thus, by its technology and culture, Friendica users despise misusing their abstract field to force the same CW upon everyone out there with a hot, flaming passion.
  So if you see someone "misusing" the CW field for "a subject or a summary or whatever that is," that might not be a clueless Mastodon user. Instead, it might be a Friendica user who has been around for a dozen years longer than you, who is used to living by Friendica's culture, and who knows tons more about the Fediverse than you do.
• Friendica users are much less likely to add alt-texts to their images. That's for two reasons.
  One, Friendica's culture is not an idealised version of pre-Musk, very-left-wing Twitter's culture. It does not include attacking and punishing everyone who doesn't add 100% hand-written, 100% accurate, sufficiently detailed alt-texts to their images.
  Two, Friendica handles images drastically differently from Mastodon. Mastodon always has a nifty little entry field for alt-texts whenever you attach an image. On Friendica, images are embedded into posts rather than attached to them, like in a blog post. And oftentimes, you literally have to program the alt-text into the raw image embedding markup code.
• On Mastodon, it's considered intrusive and reply-guying to reply to someone who hasn't mentioned you, and to whom you aren't mutually connected. You couldn't possibly have received the toot that you're replying to otherwise.
  On Friendica, that's perfectly normal. Friendica doesn't show you single messages by default. It always shows you the entire conversation thread, all the way up to the start post, with all branches. Thus, neither Friendica's technology nor Friendica's culture rules out replying to any comment in the thread.
• Mastodon has only just introduced Twitter-style quote-posts a few months ago. With a safety feature that only works on Mastodon and GoToSocial for fear of that feature being used for harassment and dogpiling just like on Twitter. And because literally everyone on Mastodon comes from Twitter, it's actually being used for harassment and dogpiling.
  Friendica has had that very same feature since its inception in 2010, over a decade and a half longer. It has never not had this feature. It has always been able to quote-post any public message in the Fediverse. But since Friendica is not entirely populated by former Twitter users, it hasn't been used for harassment or dogpiling even once. It's only used to forward content. For most of the time, it literally was the only available way to forward a message.
• Mastodon users tend to be very protective and defensive about their allegedly Mastodon-only Fediverse.
  Friendica users are used to being able to connect with everything that moves and then some. It's one of Friendica's key features that it speaks a whole lot of protocols, not just ActivityPub.
  Whereas Mastodon users see Mastodon as a "decentralised walled garden", Friendica users see Friendica as the gateway to the whole federated social Web plus some places that aren't, strictly speaking, federated.
• Mastodon users will staunchly insist that "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" essentially mean the same because they believe they do. They will attack anyone who claims otherwise.
  Friendica users will staunchly insist that there's a huge difference between "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" because they actually know there is one. They will lecture anyone who claims otherwise.

Of course, from a Mastodon point of view, it's both tempting and fully justified to tell the Friendica users that this is the Mastodon Fediverse, and that they will have to adapt the Mastodon culture and abolish their own culture or be thrown out. But for one, Mastodon's culture doesn't fit Friendica's technology.

Besides, that'd literally be like European settlers holding Native Americans at gunpoint and forcing them to give up their own culture, adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianity or else. The only difference is that European settlers, unlike the Mastodon users, did not think that they were there first, and that everyone else is an intruder.

I mean, sure, go ahead and attack anyone who doesn't strictly live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules if you think you have to. But prepare for a whole lot of defence and even counter-attacks from Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Iceshrimp-JS, Iceshrimp.NET, Sharkey, GoToSocial, Hollo, snac2, Mitra, Socialhome, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and the rest of the non-Mastodon Fediverse.

CC: @Jan Wildeboer

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

@TeflonTrout :bc: he/him @Sharp Leaves Still, forcing Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules upon literally everyone in the Fediverse is bad.

Maybe you haven't heard about this yet, but: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has never been only Mastodon. It didn't even start with Mastodon. And it doesn't entirely work like Mastodon either.

For starters, this means that just because you see it on Mastodon, it didn't necessarily originate on Mastodon.

There are places in the Fediverse that are vastly older than Mastodon, and that are very different from Mastodon. Thus, they have their own culture, based on their own technology and their own features and where their users came from, and largely without any influences from Mastodon.

The oldest still existing server software in the Fediverse is not Mastodon from 2016. It's Friendica (https://friendi.ca, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica). Friendica is essentially a mixture of a Facebook alternative and fully-featured long-form blogging. No Twitter or Mastodon influence anywhere. And Friendica first came out in May, 2010, five years and eight months before Mastodon.

Friendica did not intrude into the Mastodon Fediverse that was created by Eugen Rochko as a Mastodon-only network. Mastodon was born into an already existing Fediverse that consisted of at least Friendica, Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) and GNU social (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social; now defunct).

Here's how Friendica differs from Mastodon in ways that may disturb Mastodon hardliners:

• Mastodon is hard-coded to 500 characters. This character limit is deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture.
  Friendica doesn't have an arbitrary character limit; it's limited by the maximum size of the database field for the post text. Currently, this is 16,777,215 characters. Thus, Friendica doesn't have keeping messages short in its culture, it never has, and it never will.
• Mastodon users tend to be eager to block anyone who doesn't cut long posts into pieces of no more than 500 characters each.
  I know at least one Friendica veteran who blocks everyone upon first strike who does cut long posts into annoying strings of tiny chunks.
• Mastodon introduced a CW field in 2017.
  Friendica has had the exact same field as a summary/abstract field since its own beginning in 2010. That, and Friendica has always had a much more efficient way of handling CWs, one that Mastodon itself adopted with version 4.0 in October, 2022. Thus, by its technology and culture, Friendica users despise misusing their abstract field to force the same CW upon everyone out there with a hot, flaming passion.
  So if you see someone "misusing" the CW field for "a subject or a summary or whatever that is," that might not be a clueless Mastodon user. Instead, it might be a Friendica user who has been around for a dozen years longer than you, who is used to living by Friendica's culture, and who knows tons more about the Fediverse than you do.
• Friendica users are much less likely to add alt-texts to their images. That's for two reasons.
  One, Friendica's culture is not an idealised version of pre-Musk, very-left-wing Twitter's culture. It does not include attacking and punishing everyone who doesn't add 100% hand-written, 100% accurate, sufficiently detailed alt-texts to their images.
  Two, Friendica handles images drastically differently from Mastodon. Mastodon always has a nifty little entry field for alt-texts whenever you attach an image. On Friendica, images are embedded into posts rather than attached to them, like in a blog post. And oftentimes, you literally have to program the alt-text into the raw image embedding markup code.
• On Mastodon, it's considered intrusive and reply-guying to reply to someone who hasn't mentioned you, and to whom you aren't mutually connected. You couldn't possibly have received the toot that you're replying to otherwise.
  On Friendica, that's perfectly normal. Friendica doesn't show you single messages by default. It always shows you the entire conversation thread, all the way up to the start post, with all branches. Thus, neither Friendica's technology nor Friendica's culture rules out replying to any comment in the thread.
• Mastodon has only just introduced Twitter-style quote-posts a few months ago. With a safety feature that only works on Mastodon and GoToSocial for fear of that feature being used for harassment and dogpiling just like on Twitter. And because literally everyone on Mastodon comes from Twitter, it's actually being used for harassment and dogpiling.
  Friendica has had that very same feature since its inception in 2010, over a decade and a half longer. It has never not had this feature. It has always been able to quote-post any public message in the Fediverse. But since Friendica is not entirely populated by former Twitter users, it hasn't been used for harassment or dogpiling even once. It's only used to forward content. For most of the time, it literally was the only available way to forward a message.
• Mastodon users tend to be very protective and defensive about their allegedly Mastodon-only Fediverse.
  Friendica users are used to being able to connect with everything that moves and then some. It's one of Friendica's key features that it speaks a whole lot of protocols, not just ActivityPub.
  Whereas Mastodon users see Mastodon as a "decentralised walled garden", Friendica users see Friendica as the gateway to the whole federated social Web plus some places that aren't, strictly speaking, federated.
• Mastodon users will staunchly insist that "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" essentially mean the same because they believe they do. They will attack anyone who claims otherwise.
  Friendica users will staunchly insist that there's a huge difference between "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" because they actually know there is one. They will lecture anyone who claims otherwise.

Of course, from a Mastodon point of view, it's both tempting and fully justified to tell the Friendica users that this is the Mastodon Fediverse, and that they will have to adapt the Mastodon culture and abolish their own culture or be thrown out. But for one, Mastodon's culture doesn't fit Friendica's technology.

Besides, that'd literally be like European settlers holding Native Americans at gunpoint and forcing them to give up their own culture, adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianity or else. The only difference is that European settlers, unlike the Mastodon users, did not think that they were there first, and that everyone else is an intruder.

I mean, sure, go ahead and attack anyone who doesn't strictly live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules if you think you have to. But prepare for a whole lot of defence and even counter-attacks from Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Iceshrimp-JS, Iceshrimp.NET, Sharkey, GoToSocial, Hollo, snac2, Mitra, Socialhome, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and the rest of the non-Mastodon Fediverse.

CC: @Jan Wildeboer

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

@TeflonTrout :bc: he/him @Sharp Leaves Still, forcing Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules upon literally everyone in the Fediverse is bad.

Maybe you haven't heard about this yet, but: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has never been only Mastodon. It didn't even start with Mastodon. And it doesn't entirely work like Mastodon either.

For starters, this means that just because you see it on Mastodon, it didn't necessarily originate on Mastodon.

There are places in the Fediverse that are vastly older than Mastodon, and that are very different from Mastodon. Thus, they have their own culture, based on their own technology and their own features and where their users came from, and largely without any influences from Mastodon.

The oldest still existing server software in the Fediverse is not Mastodon from 2016. It's Friendica (https://friendi.ca, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica). Friendica is essentially a mixture of a Facebook alternative and fully-featured long-form blogging. No Twitter or Mastodon influence anywhere. And Friendica first came out in May, 2010, five years and eight months before Mastodon.

Friendica did not intrude into the Mastodon Fediverse that was created by Eugen Rochko as a Mastodon-only network. Mastodon was born into an already existing Fediverse that consisted of at least Friendica, Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) and GNU social (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social; now defunct).

Here's how Friendica differs from Mastodon in ways that may disturb Mastodon hardliners:

• Mastodon is hard-coded to 500 characters. This character limit is deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture.
  Friendica doesn't have an arbitrary character limit; it's limited by the maximum size of the database field for the post text. Currently, this is 16,777,215 characters. Thus, Friendica doesn't have keeping messages short in its culture, it never has, and it never will.
• Mastodon users tend to be eager to block anyone who doesn't cut long posts into pieces of no more than 500 characters each.
  I know at least one Friendica veteran who blocks everyone upon first strike who does cut long posts into annoying strings of tiny chunks.
• Mastodon introduced a CW field in 2017.
  Friendica has had the exact same field as a summary/abstract field since its own beginning in 2010. That, and Friendica has always had a much more efficient way of handling CWs, one that Mastodon itself adopted with version 4.0 in October, 2022. Thus, by its technology and culture, Friendica users despise misusing their abstract field to force the same CW upon everyone out there with a hot, flaming passion.
  So if you see someone "misusing" the CW field for "a subject or a summary or whatever that is," that might not be a clueless Mastodon user. Instead, it might be a Friendica user who has been around for a dozen years longer than you, who is used to living by Friendica's culture, and who knows tons more about the Fediverse than you do.
• Friendica users are much less likely to add alt-texts to their images. That's for two reasons.
  One, Friendica's culture is not an idealised version of pre-Musk, very-left-wing Twitter's culture. It does not include attacking and punishing everyone who doesn't add 100% hand-written, 100% accurate, sufficiently detailed alt-texts to their images.
  Two, Friendica handles images drastically differently from Mastodon. Mastodon always has a nifty little entry field for alt-texts whenever you attach an image. On Friendica, images are embedded into posts rather than attached to them, like in a blog post. And oftentimes, you literally have to program the alt-text into the raw image embedding markup code.
• On Mastodon, it's considered intrusive and reply-guying to reply to someone who hasn't mentioned you, and to whom you aren't mutually connected. You couldn't possibly have received the toot that you're replying to otherwise.
  On Friendica, that's perfectly normal. Friendica doesn't show you single messages by default. It always shows you the entire conversation thread, all the way up to the start post, with all branches. Thus, neither Friendica's technology nor Friendica's culture rules out replying to any comment in the thread.
• Mastodon has only just introduced Twitter-style quote-posts a few months ago. With a safety feature that only works on Mastodon and GoToSocial for fear of that feature being used for harassment and dogpiling just like on Twitter. And because literally everyone on Mastodon comes from Twitter, it's actually being used for harassment and dogpiling.
  Friendica has had that very same feature since its inception in 2010, over a decade and a half longer. It has never not had this feature. It has always been able to quote-post any public message in the Fediverse. But since Friendica is not entirely populated by former Twitter users, it hasn't been used for harassment or dogpiling even once. It's only used to forward content. For most of the time, it literally was the only available way to forward a message.
• Mastodon users tend to be very protective and defensive about their allegedly Mastodon-only Fediverse.
  Friendica users are used to being able to connect with everything that moves and then some. It's one of Friendica's key features that it speaks a whole lot of protocols, not just ActivityPub.
  Whereas Mastodon users see Mastodon as a "decentralised walled garden", Friendica users see Friendica as the gateway to the whole federated social Web plus some places that aren't, strictly speaking, federated.
• Mastodon users will staunchly insist that "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" essentially mean the same because they believe they do. They will attack anyone who claims otherwise.
  Friendica users will staunchly insist that there's a huge difference between "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" because they actually know there is one. They will lecture anyone who claims otherwise.

Of course, from a Mastodon point of view, it's both tempting and fully justified to tell the Friendica users that this is the Mastodon Fediverse, and that they will have to adapt the Mastodon culture and abolish their own culture or be thrown out. But for one, Mastodon's culture doesn't fit Friendica's technology.

Besides, that'd literally be like European settlers holding Native Americans at gunpoint and forcing them to give up their own culture, adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianity or else. The only difference is that European settlers, unlike the Mastodon users, did not think that they were there first, and that everyone else is an intruder.

I mean, sure, go ahead and attack anyone who doesn't strictly live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules if you think you have to. But prepare for a whole lot of defence and even counter-attacks from Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Iceshrimp-JS, Iceshrimp.NET, Sharkey, GoToSocial, Hollo, snac2, Mitra, Socialhome, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and the rest of the non-Mastodon Fediverse.

CC: @Jan Wildeboer

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

@TeflonTrout :bc: he/him @Sharp Leaves Still, forcing Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules upon literally everyone in the Fediverse is bad.

Maybe you haven't heard about this yet, but: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has never been only Mastodon. It didn't even start with Mastodon. And it doesn't entirely work like Mastodon either.

For starters, this means that just because you see it on Mastodon, it didn't necessarily originate on Mastodon.

There are places in the Fediverse that are vastly older than Mastodon, and that are very different from Mastodon. Thus, they have their own culture, based on their own technology and their own features and where their users came from, and largely without any influences from Mastodon.

The oldest still existing server software in the Fediverse is not Mastodon from 2016. It's Friendica (https://friendi.ca, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica). Friendica is essentially a mixture of a Facebook alternative and fully-featured long-form blogging. No Twitter or Mastodon influence anywhere. And Friendica first came out in May, 2010, five years and eight months before Mastodon.

Friendica did not intrude into the Mastodon Fediverse that was created by Eugen Rochko as a Mastodon-only network. Mastodon was born into an already existing Fediverse that consisted of at least Friendica, Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) and GNU social (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social; now defunct).

Here's how Friendica differs from Mastodon in ways that may disturb Mastodon hardliners:

• Mastodon is hard-coded to 500 characters. This character limit is deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture.
  Friendica doesn't have an arbitrary character limit; it's limited by the maximum size of the database field for the post text. Currently, this is 16,777,215 characters. Thus, Friendica doesn't have keeping messages short in its culture, it never has, and it never will.
• Mastodon users tend to be eager to block anyone who doesn't cut long posts into pieces of no more than 500 characters each.
  I know at least one Friendica veteran who blocks everyone upon first strike who does cut long posts into annoying strings of tiny chunks.
• Mastodon introduced a CW field in 2017.
  Friendica has had the exact same field as a summary/abstract field since its own beginning in 2010. That, and Friendica has always had a much more efficient way of handling CWs, one that Mastodon itself adopted with version 4.0 in October, 2022. Thus, by its technology and culture, Friendica users despise misusing their abstract field to force the same CW upon everyone out there with a hot, flaming passion.
  So if you see someone "misusing" the CW field for "a subject or a summary or whatever that is," that might not be a clueless Mastodon user. Instead, it might be a Friendica user who has been around for a dozen years longer than you, who is used to living by Friendica's culture, and who knows tons more about the Fediverse than you do.
• Friendica users are much less likely to add alt-texts to their images. That's for two reasons.
  One, Friendica's culture is not an idealised version of pre-Musk, very-left-wing Twitter's culture. It does not include attacking and punishing everyone who doesn't add 100% hand-written, 100% accurate, sufficiently detailed alt-texts to their images.
  Two, Friendica handles images drastically differently from Mastodon. Mastodon always has a nifty little entry field for alt-texts whenever you attach an image. On Friendica, images are embedded into posts rather than attached to them, like in a blog post. And oftentimes, you literally have to program the alt-text into the raw image embedding markup code.
• On Mastodon, it's considered intrusive and reply-guying to reply to someone who hasn't mentioned you, and to whom you aren't mutually connected. You couldn't possibly have received the toot that you're replying to otherwise.
  On Friendica, that's perfectly normal. Friendica doesn't show you single messages by default. It always shows you the entire conversation thread, all the way up to the start post, with all branches. Thus, neither Friendica's technology nor Friendica's culture rules out replying to any comment in the thread.
• Mastodon has only just introduced Twitter-style quote-posts a few months ago. With a safety feature that only works on Mastodon and GoToSocial for fear of that feature being used for harassment and dogpiling just like on Twitter. And because literally everyone on Mastodon comes from Twitter, it's actually being used for harassment and dogpiling.
  Friendica has had that very same feature since its inception in 2010, over a decade and a half longer. It has never not had this feature. It has always been able to quote-post any public message in the Fediverse. But since Friendica is not entirely populated by former Twitter users, it hasn't been used for harassment or dogpiling even once. It's only used to forward content. For most of the time, it literally was the only available way to forward a message.
• Mastodon users tend to be very protective and defensive about their allegedly Mastodon-only Fediverse.
  Friendica users are used to being able to connect with everything that moves and then some. It's one of Friendica's key features that it speaks a whole lot of protocols, not just ActivityPub.
  Whereas Mastodon users see Mastodon as a "decentralised walled garden", Friendica users see Friendica as the gateway to the whole federated social Web plus some places that aren't, strictly speaking, federated.
• Mastodon users will staunchly insist that "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" essentially mean the same because they believe they do. They will attack anyone who claims otherwise.
  Friendica users will staunchly insist that there's a huge difference between "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" because they actually know there is one. They will lecture anyone who claims otherwise.

Of course, from a Mastodon point of view, it's both tempting and fully justified to tell the Friendica users that this is the Mastodon Fediverse, and that they will have to adapt the Mastodon culture and abolish their own culture or be thrown out. But for one, Mastodon's culture doesn't fit Friendica's technology.

Besides, that'd literally be like European settlers holding Native Americans at gunpoint and forcing them to give up their own culture, adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianity or else. The only difference is that European settlers, unlike the Mastodon users, did not think that they were there first, and that everyone else is an intruder.

I mean, sure, go ahead and attack anyone who doesn't strictly live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules if you think you have to. But prepare for a whole lot of defence and even counter-attacks from Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Iceshrimp-JS, Iceshrimp.NET, Sharkey, GoToSocial, Hollo, snac2, Mitra, Socialhome, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and the rest of the non-Mastodon Fediverse.

CC: @Jan Wildeboer

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

@Phantasm

One that happened quite early on was Mastodon's hijack of the
summary
field for content warnings which wasn't used for that previously.

And everyone on Mastodon believes that Eugen Rochko has invented this field from scratch as a CW field. It's deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture now. It got to the point at which non-Mastodon users use the summary field as such, and they're attacked by Mastodon users for allegedly misusing the CW field.

Worse yet: Friendica has had a much more elegant way of handling content warnings since its inception, about seven years before Mastodon introduced the CW field: Have them created by a keyword filter on the reader's side. The advantage is that you have your own individual CWs, and other users who don't need these specific CWs don't have them. All its descendants have inherited it. But if you add the appropriate keywords as hashtags, Mastodon users might scold and/or mute/block you for hashtag spam.

Even worse: Mastodon itself has introduced essentially the same functionality with version 4.0 in October, 2022, just shortly before Elon Musk took over Twitter. But this has never entered Mastodon's culture which is mostly built around Mastodon 3.x. Or maybe it's because filters are the one thing where Friendica and its family are much easier to handle than Mastodon. Or it's simply because Mastodon users were promised to be babied and pampered and coddled all over, so they don't want to take care of their own CWs.

Now their "hijacks" are more on the side of centralizing moderation and overall working on features that aim to reduce the social aspect of the network and increase witch hunting. Like the new "follow packs" or whatever they called them which will definitely never turn into "block packs" that will inevitably end up maintained by heavily opinionated people like on BlueSky.

Mastodon already relies heavily on importing or subscribing to automatically generated filter lists. For some admins, the filter lists can't be too extensive. Of course, hardly any admins really curate these lists.

At least the times of absolutely monstrous lists consisting of multiple other monster lists compiled by overzealous snowflakes are over. There used to be a time where it took two or three server admins with lists of their own to have one server blocked on hundreds of servers.

Lemmy only recently figured out how to properly federate posts instead of just sending a post link along with a title to instances not running Lemmy.

I guess the two Lemmy devs have finally understood that they can't develop Lemmy as its own enclosed network anymore, now that a lot of traffic on Lemmy comes from and goes to Mbin and PieFed. They've lost a lot of users to these two, and I guess they know they can't afford to lose the traffic from these users as well.

They still don't really care for compatibility with Mastodon, probably also because of how much Mastodon's culture clashes with Lemmy's. And Friendica and its family just happen to be sufficiently compatible by mere chance, I guess.

Coincidentally looking at Fedilist I can see that there are approximately 450 running Friendica instances, approx 100 Hubzilla instances, and apparently 2 Forte instances which doesn't seem right. Streams isn't on the list. That list is acquired by crawling through the various peers endpoints on Fedi servers.

For Friendica and Hubzilla, I think it isn't too far off.

(streams) is intentionally kept away from stats sites. Also, its nodeinfo code was intentionally removed almost entirely. This was done to keep (streams) out of that rat race for server popularity and to make it uninteresting for commercial actors that might want to sell it as allegedly their own original creation. Then again, it isn't like (streams) has many servers, much less public servers with open registration. (I'm still waiting for another server to clone my two (streams) channels to.)

Forte has quite a bunch of private, single-user servers, but to my best knowledge, there's only one with open registrations. But while Forte does have nodeinfo implemented again, it's set up to not send any actual numbers. Besides, these tiny Forte servers are quite difficult to crawl, also due to Mastodon users' tendency to block everything that's too disturbingly far off Mastodon in behaviour.

CC: @Pawlicker

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Lemmy #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #MastodonCulture

@Phantasm

One that happened quite early on was Mastodon's hijack of the
summary
field for content warnings which wasn't used for that previously.

And everyone on Mastodon believes that Eugen Rochko has invented this field from scratch as a CW field. It's deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture now. It got to the point at which non-Mastodon users use the summary field as such, and they're attacked by Mastodon users for allegedly misusing the CW field.

Worse yet: Friendica has had a much more elegant way of handling content warnings since its inception, about seven years before Mastodon introduced the CW field: Have them created by a keyword filter on the reader's side. The advantage is that you have your own individual CWs, and other users who don't need these specific CWs don't have them. All its descendants have inherited it. But if you add the appropriate keywords as hashtags, Mastodon users might scold and/or mute/block you for hashtag spam.

Even worse: Mastodon itself has introduced essentially the same functionality with version 4.0 in October, 2022, just shortly before Elon Musk took over Twitter. But this has never entered Mastodon's culture which is mostly built around Mastodon 3.x. Or maybe it's because filters are the one thing where Friendica and its family are much easier to handle than Mastodon. Or it's simply because Mastodon users were promised to be babied and pampered and coddled all over, so they don't want to take care of their own CWs.

Now their "hijacks" are more on the side of centralizing moderation and overall working on features that aim to reduce the social aspect of the network and increase witch hunting. Like the new "follow packs" or whatever they called them which will definitely never turn into "block packs" that will inevitably end up maintained by heavily opinionated people like on BlueSky.

Mastodon already relies heavily on importing or subscribing to automatically generated filter lists. For some admins, the filter lists can't be too extensive. Of course, hardly any admins really curate these lists.

At least the times of absolutely monstrous lists consisting of multiple other monster lists compiled by overzealous snowflakes are over. There used to be a time where it took two or three server admins with lists of their own to have one server blocked on hundreds of servers.

Lemmy only recently figured out how to properly federate posts instead of just sending a post link along with a title to instances not running Lemmy.

I guess the two Lemmy devs have finally understood that they can't develop Lemmy as its own enclosed network anymore, now that a lot of traffic on Lemmy comes from and goes to Mbin and PieFed. They've lost a lot of users to these two, and I guess they know they can't afford to lose the traffic from these users as well.

They still don't really care for compatibility with Mastodon, probably also because of how much Mastodon's culture clashes with Lemmy's. And Friendica and its family just happen to be sufficiently compatible by mere chance, I guess.

Coincidentally looking at Fedilist I can see that there are approximately 450 running Friendica instances, approx 100 Hubzilla instances, and apparently 2 Forte instances which doesn't seem right. Streams isn't on the list. That list is acquired by crawling through the various peers endpoints on Fedi servers.

For Friendica and Hubzilla, I think it isn't too far off.

(streams) is intentionally kept away from stats sites. Also, its nodeinfo code was intentionally removed almost entirely. This was done to keep (streams) out of that rat race for server popularity and to make it uninteresting for commercial actors that might want to sell it as allegedly their own original creation. Then again, it isn't like (streams) has many servers, much less public servers with open registration. (I'm still waiting for another server to clone my two (streams) channels to.)

Forte has quite a bunch of private, single-user servers, but to my best knowledge, there's only one with open registrations. But while Forte does have nodeinfo implemented again, it's set up to not send any actual numbers. Besides, these tiny Forte servers are quite difficult to crawl, also due to Mastodon users' tendency to block everything that's too disturbingly far off Mastodon in behaviour.

CC: @Pawlicker

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Lemmy #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #MastodonCulture

@Phantasm

One that happened quite early on was Mastodon's hijack of the
summary
field for content warnings which wasn't used for that previously.

And everyone on Mastodon believes that Eugen Rochko has invented this field from scratch as a CW field. It's deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture now. It got to the point at which non-Mastodon users use the summary field as such, and they're attacked by Mastodon users for allegedly misusing the CW field.

Worse yet: Friendica has had a much more elegant way of handling content warnings since its inception, about seven years before Mastodon introduced the CW field: Have them created by a keyword filter on the reader's side. The advantage is that you have your own individual CWs, and other users who don't need these specific CWs don't have them. All its descendants have inherited it. But if you add the appropriate keywords as hashtags, Mastodon users might scold and/or mute/block you for hashtag spam.

Even worse: Mastodon itself has introduced essentially the same functionality with version 4.0 in October, 2022, just shortly before Elon Musk took over Twitter. But this has never entered Mastodon's culture which is mostly built around Mastodon 3.x. Or maybe it's because filters are the one thing where Friendica and its family are much easier to handle than Mastodon. Or it's simply because Mastodon users were promised to be babied and pampered and coddled all over, so they don't want to take care of their own CWs.

Now their "hijacks" are more on the side of centralizing moderation and overall working on features that aim to reduce the social aspect of the network and increase witch hunting. Like the new "follow packs" or whatever they called them which will definitely never turn into "block packs" that will inevitably end up maintained by heavily opinionated people like on BlueSky.

Mastodon already relies heavily on importing or subscribing to automatically generated filter lists. For some admins, the filter lists can't be too extensive. Of course, hardly any admins really curate these lists.

At least the times of absolutely monstrous lists consisting of multiple other monster lists compiled by overzealous snowflakes are over. There used to be a time where it took two or three server admins with lists of their own to have one server blocked on hundreds of servers.

Lemmy only recently figured out how to properly federate posts instead of just sending a post link along with a title to instances not running Lemmy.

I guess the two Lemmy devs have finally understood that they can't develop Lemmy as its own enclosed network anymore, now that a lot of traffic on Lemmy comes from and goes to Mbin and PieFed. They've lost a lot of users to these two, and I guess they know they can't afford to lose the traffic from these users as well.

They still don't really care for compatibility with Mastodon, probably also because of how much Mastodon's culture clashes with Lemmy's. And Friendica and its family just happen to be sufficiently compatible by mere chance, I guess.

Coincidentally looking at Fedilist I can see that there are approximately 450 running Friendica instances, approx 100 Hubzilla instances, and apparently 2 Forte instances which doesn't seem right. Streams isn't on the list. That list is acquired by crawling through the various peers endpoints on Fedi servers.

For Friendica and Hubzilla, I think it isn't too far off.

(streams) is intentionally kept away from stats sites. Also, its nodeinfo code was intentionally removed almost entirely. This was done to keep (streams) out of that rat race for server popularity and to make it uninteresting for commercial actors that might want to sell it as allegedly their own original creation. Then again, it isn't like (streams) has many servers, much less public servers with open registration. (I'm still waiting for another server to clone my two (streams) channels to.)

Forte has quite a bunch of private, single-user servers, but to my best knowledge, there's only one with open registrations. But while Forte does have nodeinfo implemented again, it's set up to not send any actual numbers. Besides, these tiny Forte servers are quite difficult to crawl, also due to Mastodon users' tendency to block everything that's too disturbingly far off Mastodon in behaviour.

CC: @Pawlicker

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Lemmy #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #MastodonCulture

@Phantasm

One that happened quite early on was Mastodon's hijack of the
summary
field for content warnings which wasn't used for that previously.

And everyone on Mastodon believes that Eugen Rochko has invented this field from scratch as a CW field. It's deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture now. It got to the point at which non-Mastodon users use the summary field as such, and they're attacked by Mastodon users for allegedly misusing the CW field.

Worse yet: Friendica has had a much more elegant way of handling content warnings since its inception, about seven years before Mastodon introduced the CW field: Have them created by a keyword filter on the reader's side. The advantage is that you have your own individual CWs, and other users who don't need these specific CWs don't have them. All its descendants have inherited it. But if you add the appropriate keywords as hashtags, Mastodon users might scold and/or mute/block you for hashtag spam.

Even worse: Mastodon itself has introduced essentially the same functionality with version 4.0 in October, 2022, just shortly before Elon Musk took over Twitter. But this has never entered Mastodon's culture which is mostly built around Mastodon 3.x. Or maybe it's because filters are the one thing where Friendica and its family are much easier to handle than Mastodon. Or it's simply because Mastodon users were promised to be babied and pampered and coddled all over, so they don't want to take care of their own CWs.

Now their "hijacks" are more on the side of centralizing moderation and overall working on features that aim to reduce the social aspect of the network and increase witch hunting. Like the new "follow packs" or whatever they called them which will definitely never turn into "block packs" that will inevitably end up maintained by heavily opinionated people like on BlueSky.

Mastodon already relies heavily on importing or subscribing to automatically generated filter lists. For some admins, the filter lists can't be too extensive. Of course, hardly any admins really curate these lists.

At least the times of absolutely monstrous lists consisting of multiple other monster lists compiled by overzealous snowflakes are over. There used to be a time where it took two or three server admins with lists of their own to have one server blocked on hundreds of servers.

Lemmy only recently figured out how to properly federate posts instead of just sending a post link along with a title to instances not running Lemmy.

I guess the two Lemmy devs have finally understood that they can't develop Lemmy as its own enclosed network anymore, now that a lot of traffic on Lemmy comes from and goes to Mbin and PieFed. They've lost a lot of users to these two, and I guess they know they can't afford to lose the traffic from these users as well.

They still don't really care for compatibility with Mastodon, probably also because of how much Mastodon's culture clashes with Lemmy's. And Friendica and its family just happen to be sufficiently compatible by mere chance, I guess.

Coincidentally looking at Fedilist I can see that there are approximately 450 running Friendica instances, approx 100 Hubzilla instances, and apparently 2 Forte instances which doesn't seem right. Streams isn't on the list. That list is acquired by crawling through the various peers endpoints on Fedi servers.

For Friendica and Hubzilla, I think it isn't too far off.

(streams) is intentionally kept away from stats sites. Also, its nodeinfo code was intentionally removed almost entirely. This was done to keep (streams) out of that rat race for server popularity and to make it uninteresting for commercial actors that might want to sell it as allegedly their own original creation. Then again, it isn't like (streams) has many servers, much less public servers with open registration. (I'm still waiting for another server to clone my two (streams) channels to.)

Forte has quite a bunch of private, single-user servers, but to my best knowledge, there's only one with open registrations. But while Forte does have nodeinfo implemented again, it's set up to not send any actual numbers. Besides, these tiny Forte servers are quite difficult to crawl, also due to Mastodon users' tendency to block everything that's too disturbingly far off Mastodon in behaviour.

CC: @Pawlicker

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Lemmy #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #MastodonCulture

@Erdstern @Aljoscha Rittner (beandev) Nur was ist "unsere Kultur"? Die Mastodon-Kultur? Falls ja: Die Mastodon-Kultur ist nicht die Kultur des ganzen Fediverse und wird es auch definitiv nie werden. Nein, wirklich nicht. Egal, wie sehr sich die Mastodon-Nutzerschaft darum bemüht.

Dafür ist das Fediverse zu unterschiedlich. Gewisse Dinge in der Mastodon-Kultur funktionieren einfach nicht überall und/oder werden woanders ganz anders gehandhabt. Das wird dir jeder bestätigen, der im Fediverse etwas anderes als Mastodon als Daily Driver nutzt.

CWs sind übrigens tatsächlich ein ganz hervorragendes Beispiel. Da gibt es gigantische Unterschiede zwischen einerseits Mastodon und andererseits Friendica und seinen Nachfahren (Hubzilla, (streams), Forte).

Der erste Unterschied ist: Friendica und seine Familie haben Mastodons CW-Feld nicht. Das heißt, sie haben das schon. Aber es ist ein Feld für Zusammenfassungen. Warum sie das nicht wie Mastodon als CW-Feld gemacht haben? Weil Friendica es schon sieben Jahre länger als Zusammenfassungsfeld hat, als Mastodon es als CW-Feld hat. Und Hubzilla zwei Jahre länger. Beide waren tatsächlich schon vor Mastodon im Fediverse.

Warum Zusammenfassungen? Weil Friendica und Hubzilla ein "Zeichenlimit" von über 16 Millionen und (streams) und Forte eins von über 24 Millionen haben, wo Mastodon nur 500 Zeichen hat. Da kann man soviel auf einmal posten, daß Zusammenfassungen sinnvoll werden. Im übrigen ist Friendica nicht wie Twitter, sondern eine Kombination aus Facebook und Blog. Und gute Bloggingplattformen haben immer sowohl Titel als auch Zusammenfassungen. Friendica hat beides, seine Nachfahren auch.

Der nächste Unterschied ist auch technischer Natur: Auf Friendica, (streams) und Forte haben für Zusammenfassungen kein dediziertes Eingabefeld. Bei beiden müssen Zusammenfassungen in Tag-Paare gesteckt werden. Hubzilla hat als einziges ein dediziertes Eingabefeld für Zusammenfassungen. Das gibt es aber nur für Posts und nicht für Kommentare (alle vier haben dafür separate Editoren, genau wie Facebook und jede Bloggingplattform da draußen). Ich meine: Hast du schon mal einen Blog-Kommentar mit Zusammenfassung gesehen? Nee? Siehste. Und genau deswegen hat dieser Kommentar auch keine CW.

Und letztlich kommt noch etwas dazu, das Technik mit Kultur verbindet: Alle vier machen CWs statt dessen ganz anders, und zwar schon immer.

Auf allen vieren werden CWs vollautomatisch generiert. Aber nicht beim Schreiben eines Beitrags, sondern wenn man ihn empfangen hat. Also auf Leserseite. Optional. Mittels eines einfachen Textfilter. Und abhängig davon, welche Schlüsselwörter man CW't haben will. Ganz ohne Gemecker, was denn jetzt CW't werden muß und was auf gar keinen Fall CW't werden darf. Für dich wird's dann eben CW't, für andere wird exakt derselbe Beitrag nicht CW't.

Im Prinzip ist das wie Mastodons Filtereinstellung "Mit einer Warnung ausblenden", die es seit Version 4.0 vom Oktober 2022 gibt. Nur hatte Friendica genau dieses Feature schon gut zwölf Jahre vor Mastodon. Und in sehr viel einfacher. Statt nämlich für jedes Schlüsselwort aufwendig jeweils eine Filtereinstellung zusammenklicken zu müssen, gibt's eine Liste von Schlüsselwörtern, wo man neue einfach eintragen kann.

Teil der Kultur auf Friendica und seinen Nachfahren und ganz besonders ab Hubzilla ist Self-Empowerment. Selbstmoderation. Selbst dafür zu sorgen, daß im eigenen Stream Ruhe herrscht, statt sich von vorne bis hinten verhätscheln und sich alles auf dem Silbertablett servieren zu lassen. Teil der Kultur ist damit auch, sich seine CWs leserseitig ganz individuell für sich selbst generieren zu lassen, und wenn man selbst unangenehme Inhalte postet, entsprechende Schlüsselwörter einzubauen.

Da kannst du als Mastodon-Nutzer noch so sehr auf CWs gemäß Mastodon-Kultur und Mastodon-Regeln pochen. Auf Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) und Forte wird dir jeder sagen, daß es eine unausgegorene Kacklösung ist, das Zusammenfassungsfeld für sowas zu mißbrauchen, und Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) und Forte es tausendmal eleganter machen. Wer auf den vieren etwas von Mastodon versteht, kann sogar anmerken, daß genau die Vorgehensweise von Friendica & Co. seit gut dreieinhalb Jahren auch auf Mastodon geht.

Auf Mastodon beißt unsereins aber auf Granitkeks, weil:

• Auf Mastodon gilt: Jeder Beitrag ist ein Mastodon-Tröt, es sei denn, er fällt extrem aus dem Rahmen (z. B. Titel in fett, Zusammenfassung, externer Link, das war's). Wenn etwas nicht von Mastodon kommt, merken viele das gar nicht. Und annähernd niemand kann sagen, woher etwas kommt, wenn nicht von Mastodon.
• Mehr als die Hälfte der Mastodon-Nutzer "weiß" (will sagen, glaubt zu wissen), daß das Fediverse nur aus Mastodon besteht.
• Nur wenige wissen, daß Friendica existiert.
• Von denen wissen nur wenige, daß Friendica mit Mastodon verbunden ist und mit Mastodon Inhalte austauscht.
• Von Hubzilla wissen noch sehr viel weniger Leute, von dessen Nachfahren ganz zu schweigen.
• Das Argument, daß Friendica und Hubzilla schon vor Mastodon da waren, zieht schon deshalb nicht, weil von denen, die schon mal von einem von den beiden gehört haben, sich niemand vorstellen kann, daß sie älter sind als Mastodon. "Jeder weiß" (will sagen, glaubt zu wissen), daß Mastodon der Urknall des Fediverse war und alles andere erst danach dazugekommen ist, weil Gargron ja die ganze Technologie erst erfunden hat.
• Was diese Serveranwendungen können, wissen nochmals weniger Leute. Und wenn Mastodon etwas nicht kann, ist es unvorstellbar, daß irgendwas im Fediverse das kann.
• Sogar Mastodons "Mit einer Warnung ausblenden" ist komplett unbekannt. Es hätte Mastodons CW-Kultur revolutionieren können, hat es aber nicht.
• Obendrein wurde Mastodons Kultur, die dem gesamten Fediverse aufgezwungen wird, Mitte 2022 definiert von denjenigen, die im Februar und März von Twitter abgehauen waren. Also noch auf Basis von Mastodon 3.x. Was seitdem an neuen Features dazugekommen ist, ist praktisch samt und sonders nie Teil der Mastodon-Kultur geworden.
• Letztlich "weiß" jeder auf Mastodon (will sagen, glaubt zu wissen), daß Gargron das CW-Feld von Grund auf neu erfunden hat, daß es also nie als irgendetwas anderes verwendet worden ist und auch jetzt nicht wird.

So werden weiterhin Mastodon-Nutzer von Friendica-, Hubzilla-, (streams)- und Forte-Nutzern verlangen, a) Inhaltswarnungen ins Zusammenfassungsfeld zu schreiben, b) das Zusammenfassungsfeld nur für Inhaltswarnungen zu nehmen (und nicht etwa für Zusammenfassungen, das wäre ja Mißbrauch) und c) die Zahl der Hashtags zu reduzieren (die die Friendica-, Hubzilla-, (streams)- und Forte-Nutzer verwenden, um Schlüsselwörter zum Filtern diskret im Beitrag unterbringen zu können).

Und weil Mastodon-Nutzer beim Durchsetzen ihrer Idealvorstellungen von einem Fediverse ein "Nein" nicht akzeptieren, wird sehr bald über "durchaus freundliche Hinweise" hinaus eskaliert. Ich selbst bin wahrscheinlich schon zigtausendfach blockiert worden, nur weil ich mich nicht wie ein Mastodon-Nutzer verhalte.

Wahrscheinlich würden sich exakt dieselben Mastodon-Nutzer aufregen wie das HB-Männchen, wenn sie erfahren würden, daß Friendica-Nutzer sie blockieren, weil sie z. B. das Zusammenfassungsfeld für Inhaltswarnungen mißbrauchen oder lange Posts in kleine Schnipsel von unter 500 Zeichen zerschneiden (für letzteren Fall kenne ich tatsächlich jemanden auf Friendica und inzwischen auch jemanden auf Akkoma).

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NichtNurMastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta

@Erdstern @Aljoscha Rittner (beandev) Nur was ist "unsere Kultur"? Die Mastodon-Kultur? Falls ja: Die Mastodon-Kultur ist nicht die Kultur des ganzen Fediverse und wird es auch definitiv nie werden. Nein, wirklich nicht. Egal, wie sehr sich die Mastodon-Nutzerschaft darum bemüht.

Dafür ist das Fediverse zu unterschiedlich. Gewisse Dinge in der Mastodon-Kultur funktionieren einfach nicht überall und/oder werden woanders ganz anders gehandhabt. Das wird dir jeder bestätigen, der im Fediverse etwas anderes als Mastodon als Daily Driver nutzt.

CWs sind übrigens tatsächlich ein ganz hervorragendes Beispiel. Da gibt es gigantische Unterschiede zwischen einerseits Mastodon und andererseits Friendica und seinen Nachfahren (Hubzilla, (streams), Forte).

Der erste Unterschied ist: Friendica und seine Familie haben Mastodons CW-Feld nicht. Das heißt, sie haben das schon. Aber es ist ein Feld für Zusammenfassungen. Warum sie das nicht wie Mastodon als CW-Feld gemacht haben? Weil Friendica es schon sieben Jahre länger als Zusammenfassungsfeld hat, als Mastodon es als CW-Feld hat. Und Hubzilla zwei Jahre länger. Beide waren tatsächlich schon vor Mastodon im Fediverse.

Warum Zusammenfassungen? Weil Friendica und Hubzilla ein "Zeichenlimit" von über 16 Millionen und (streams) und Forte eins von über 24 Millionen haben, wo Mastodon nur 500 Zeichen hat. Da kann man soviel auf einmal posten, daß Zusammenfassungen sinnvoll werden. Im übrigen ist Friendica nicht wie Twitter, sondern eine Kombination aus Facebook und Blog. Und gute Bloggingplattformen haben immer sowohl Titel als auch Zusammenfassungen. Friendica hat beides, seine Nachfahren auch.

Der nächste Unterschied ist auch technischer Natur: Auf Friendica, (streams) und Forte haben für Zusammenfassungen kein dediziertes Eingabefeld. Bei beiden müssen Zusammenfassungen in Tag-Paare gesteckt werden. Hubzilla hat als einziges ein dediziertes Eingabefeld für Zusammenfassungen. Das gibt es aber nur für Posts und nicht für Kommentare (alle vier haben dafür separate Editoren, genau wie Facebook und jede Bloggingplattform da draußen). Ich meine: Hast du schon mal einen Blog-Kommentar mit Zusammenfassung gesehen? Nee? Siehste. Und genau deswegen hat dieser Kommentar auch keine CW.

Und letztlich kommt noch etwas dazu, das Technik mit Kultur verbindet: Alle vier machen CWs statt dessen ganz anders, und zwar schon immer.

Auf allen vieren werden CWs vollautomatisch generiert. Aber nicht beim Schreiben eines Beitrags, sondern wenn man ihn empfangen hat. Also auf Leserseite. Optional. Mittels eines einfachen Textfilter. Und abhängig davon, welche Schlüsselwörter man CW't haben will. Ganz ohne Gemecker, was denn jetzt CW't werden muß und was auf gar keinen Fall CW't werden darf. Für dich wird's dann eben CW't, für andere wird exakt derselbe Beitrag nicht CW't.

Im Prinzip ist das wie Mastodons Filtereinstellung "Mit einer Warnung ausblenden", die es seit Version 4.0 vom Oktober 2022 gibt. Nur hatte Friendica genau dieses Feature schon gut zwölf Jahre vor Mastodon. Und in sehr viel einfacher. Statt nämlich für jedes Schlüsselwort aufwendig jeweils eine Filtereinstellung zusammenklicken zu müssen, gibt's eine Liste von Schlüsselwörtern, wo man neue einfach eintragen kann.

Teil der Kultur auf Friendica und seinen Nachfahren und ganz besonders ab Hubzilla ist Self-Empowerment. Selbstmoderation. Selbst dafür zu sorgen, daß im eigenen Stream Ruhe herrscht, statt sich von vorne bis hinten verhätscheln und sich alles auf dem Silbertablett servieren zu lassen. Teil der Kultur ist damit auch, sich seine CWs leserseitig ganz individuell für sich selbst generieren zu lassen, und wenn man selbst unangenehme Inhalte postet, entsprechende Schlüsselwörter einzubauen.

Da kannst du als Mastodon-Nutzer noch so sehr auf CWs gemäß Mastodon-Kultur und Mastodon-Regeln pochen. Auf Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) und Forte wird dir jeder sagen, daß es eine unausgegorene Kacklösung ist, das Zusammenfassungsfeld für sowas zu mißbrauchen, und Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) und Forte es tausendmal eleganter machen. Wer auf den vieren etwas von Mastodon versteht, kann sogar anmerken, daß genau die Vorgehensweise von Friendica & Co. seit gut dreieinhalb Jahren auch auf Mastodon geht.

Auf Mastodon beißt unsereins aber auf Granitkeks, weil:

• Auf Mastodon gilt: Jeder Beitrag ist ein Mastodon-Tröt, es sei denn, er fällt extrem aus dem Rahmen (z. B. Titel in fett, Zusammenfassung, externer Link, das war's). Wenn etwas nicht von Mastodon kommt, merken viele das gar nicht. Und annähernd niemand kann sagen, woher etwas kommt, wenn nicht von Mastodon.
• Mehr als die Hälfte der Mastodon-Nutzer "weiß" (will sagen, glaubt zu wissen), daß das Fediverse nur aus Mastodon besteht.
• Nur wenige wissen, daß Friendica existiert.
• Von denen wissen nur wenige, daß Friendica mit Mastodon verbunden ist und mit Mastodon Inhalte austauscht.
• Von Hubzilla wissen noch sehr viel weniger Leute, von dessen Nachfahren ganz zu schweigen.
• Das Argument, daß Friendica und Hubzilla schon vor Mastodon da waren, zieht schon deshalb nicht, weil von denen, die schon mal von einem von den beiden gehört haben, sich niemand vorstellen kann, daß sie älter sind als Mastodon. "Jeder weiß" (will sagen, glaubt zu wissen), daß Mastodon der Urknall des Fediverse war und alles andere erst danach dazugekommen ist, weil Gargron ja die ganze Technologie erst erfunden hat.
• Was diese Serveranwendungen können, wissen nochmals weniger Leute. Und wenn Mastodon etwas nicht kann, ist es unvorstellbar, daß irgendwas im Fediverse das kann.
• Sogar Mastodons "Mit einer Warnung ausblenden" ist komplett unbekannt. Es hätte Mastodons CW-Kultur revolutionieren können, hat es aber nicht.
• Obendrein wurde Mastodons Kultur, die dem gesamten Fediverse aufgezwungen wird, Mitte 2022 definiert von denjenigen, die im Februar und März von Twitter abgehauen waren. Also noch auf Basis von Mastodon 3.x. Was seitdem an neuen Features dazugekommen ist, ist praktisch samt und sonders nie Teil der Mastodon-Kultur geworden.
• Letztlich "weiß" jeder auf Mastodon (will sagen, glaubt zu wissen), daß Gargron das CW-Feld von Grund auf neu erfunden hat, daß es also nie als irgendetwas anderes verwendet worden ist und auch jetzt nicht wird.

So werden weiterhin Mastodon-Nutzer von Friendica-, Hubzilla-, (streams)- und Forte-Nutzern verlangen, a) Inhaltswarnungen ins Zusammenfassungsfeld zu schreiben, b) das Zusammenfassungsfeld nur für Inhaltswarnungen zu nehmen (und nicht etwa für Zusammenfassungen, das wäre ja Mißbrauch) und c) die Zahl der Hashtags zu reduzieren (die die Friendica-, Hubzilla-, (streams)- und Forte-Nutzer verwenden, um Schlüsselwörter zum Filtern diskret im Beitrag unterbringen zu können).

Und weil Mastodon-Nutzer beim Durchsetzen ihrer Idealvorstellungen von einem Fediverse ein "Nein" nicht akzeptieren, wird sehr bald über "durchaus freundliche Hinweise" hinaus eskaliert. Ich selbst bin wahrscheinlich schon zigtausendfach blockiert worden, nur weil ich mich nicht wie ein Mastodon-Nutzer verhalte.

Wahrscheinlich würden sich exakt dieselben Mastodon-Nutzer aufregen wie das HB-Männchen, wenn sie erfahren würden, daß Friendica-Nutzer sie blockieren, weil sie z. B. das Zusammenfassungsfeld für Inhaltswarnungen mißbrauchen oder lange Posts in kleine Schnipsel von unter 500 Zeichen zerschneiden (für letzteren Fall kenne ich tatsächlich jemanden auf Friendica und inzwischen auch jemanden auf Akkoma).

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NichtNurMastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta

@Truth Collector Partially, it's because I've learned lots of things about the Fediverse that most others didn't. Things that might be useful.

Partially, I'm waiting for someone to challenge what I've said and e.g. say that eye contact only counts as such when a) the eyes are actually clearly visible as eyes, and b) they look directly at the camera. Or even only when it's a full facial portrait (= it isn't eye contact when some random stranger somewhere in the background of the image happens to look at the camera).

Still, if it were for me, Mastodon wouldn't even have its CW field. Mastodon and its community would rely on the poster forcing the exact same CWs upon everyone, regardless of whether or not they need these CWs.

If it were for me, Mastodon would have had the "Hide with warning" filter setting which it introduced in October, 2022 from its very beginning in early 2016 on. And it would be set in stone in Mastodon's community and Mastodon's culture that this setting generates CWs.

Basically, this is what Friendica (created in 2010, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed) and Hubzilla (created in 2015, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed; I'm on Hubzilla, by the way) have been doing it for much longer than Mastodon has even been around.

The idea is like this: If you want certain content hidden behind a button, set up a filter with a keyword that hides any content with that keyword behind a button, automatically, and most importantly, only for you individually. (Friendica, Hubzilla: Add that keyword to the "NSFW" filter list. It does the same.)

If you want to post something sensitive or potentially triggering, you add that keyword to your post, either as part of the actual post text or as a hashtag at the end of the post.

Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered the usual way won't see your post at all. Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered as described above will get your post, but hidden behind a button. Everyone who doesn't have that keyword filtered will get your post in plain sight, conveniently unhidden.

The advantage is that only those who need something hidden behind a CW will have it hidden behind a CW. Those who don't won't.

Alas, while the technology is there (on Friendica since 2010, on Hubzilla since 2015, on Mastodon since 2022), at least on Mastodon nobody will ever use it. It came too late to become part of Mastodon's culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla

@Truth Collector Partially, it's because I've learned lots of things about the Fediverse that most others didn't. Things that might be useful.

Partially, I'm waiting for someone to challenge what I've said and e.g. say that eye contact only counts as such when a) the eyes are actually clearly visible as eyes, and b) they look directly at the camera. Or even only when it's a full facial portrait (= it isn't eye contact when some random stranger somewhere in the background of the image happens to look at the camera).

Still, if it were for me, Mastodon wouldn't even have its CW field. Mastodon and its community would rely on the poster forcing the exact same CWs upon everyone, regardless of whether or not they need these CWs.

If it were for me, Mastodon would have had the "Hide with warning" filter setting which it introduced in October, 2022 from its very beginning in early 2016 on. And it would be set in stone in Mastodon's community and Mastodon's culture that this setting generates CWs.

Basically, this is what Friendica (created in 2010, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed) and Hubzilla (created in 2015, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed; I'm on Hubzilla, by the way) have been doing it for much longer than Mastodon has even been around.

The idea is like this: If you want certain content hidden behind a button, set up a filter with a keyword that hides any content with that keyword behind a button, automatically, and most importantly, only for you individually. (Friendica, Hubzilla: Add that keyword to the "NSFW" filter list. It does the same.)

If you want to post something sensitive or potentially triggering, you add that keyword to your post, either as part of the actual post text or as a hashtag at the end of the post.

Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered the usual way won't see your post at all. Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered as described above will get your post, but hidden behind a button. Everyone who doesn't have that keyword filtered will get your post in plain sight, conveniently unhidden.

The advantage is that only those who need something hidden behind a CW will have it hidden behind a CW. Those who don't won't.

Alas, while the technology is there (on Friendica since 2010, on Hubzilla since 2015, on Mastodon since 2022), at least on Mastodon nobody will ever use it. It came too late to become part of Mastodon's culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla

@Truth Collector Partially, it's because I've learned lots of things about the Fediverse that most others didn't. Things that might be useful.

Partially, I'm waiting for someone to challenge what I've said and e.g. say that eye contact only counts as such when a) the eyes are actually clearly visible as eyes, and b) they look directly at the camera. Or even only when it's a full facial portrait (= it isn't eye contact when some random stranger somewhere in the background of the image happens to look at the camera).

Still, if it were for me, Mastodon wouldn't even have its CW field. Mastodon and its community would rely on the poster forcing the exact same CWs upon everyone, regardless of whether or not they need these CWs.

If it were for me, Mastodon would have had the "Hide with warning" filter setting which it introduced in October, 2022 from its very beginning in early 2016 on. And it would be set in stone in Mastodon's community and Mastodon's culture that this setting generates CWs.

Basically, this is what Friendica (created in 2010, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed) and Hubzilla (created in 2015, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed; I'm on Hubzilla, by the way) have been doing it for much longer than Mastodon has even been around.

The idea is like this: If you want certain content hidden behind a button, set up a filter with a keyword that hides any content with that keyword behind a button, automatically, and most importantly, only for you individually. (Friendica, Hubzilla: Add that keyword to the "NSFW" filter list. It does the same.)

If you want to post something sensitive or potentially triggering, you add that keyword to your post, either as part of the actual post text or as a hashtag at the end of the post.

Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered the usual way won't see your post at all. Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered as described above will get your post, but hidden behind a button. Everyone who doesn't have that keyword filtered will get your post in plain sight, conveniently unhidden.

The advantage is that only those who need something hidden behind a CW will have it hidden behind a CW. Those who don't won't.

Alas, while the technology is there (on Friendica since 2010, on Hubzilla since 2015, on Mastodon since 2022), at least on Mastodon nobody will ever use it. It came too late to become part of Mastodon's culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla

@Truth Collector Partially, it's because I've learned lots of things about the Fediverse that most others didn't. Things that might be useful.

Partially, I'm waiting for someone to challenge what I've said and e.g. say that eye contact only counts as such when a) the eyes are actually clearly visible as eyes, and b) they look directly at the camera. Or even only when it's a full facial portrait (= it isn't eye contact when some random stranger somewhere in the background of the image happens to look at the camera).

Still, if it were for me, Mastodon wouldn't even have its CW field. Mastodon and its community would rely on the poster forcing the exact same CWs upon everyone, regardless of whether or not they need these CWs.

If it were for me, Mastodon would have had the "Hide with warning" filter setting which it introduced in October, 2022 from its very beginning in early 2016 on. And it would be set in stone in Mastodon's community and Mastodon's culture that this setting generates CWs.

Basically, this is what Friendica (created in 2010, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed) and Hubzilla (created in 2015, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed; I'm on Hubzilla, by the way) have been doing it for much longer than Mastodon has even been around.

The idea is like this: If you want certain content hidden behind a button, set up a filter with a keyword that hides any content with that keyword behind a button, automatically, and most importantly, only for you individually. (Friendica, Hubzilla: Add that keyword to the "NSFW" filter list. It does the same.)

If you want to post something sensitive or potentially triggering, you add that keyword to your post, either as part of the actual post text or as a hashtag at the end of the post.

Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered the usual way won't see your post at all. Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered as described above will get your post, but hidden behind a button. Everyone who doesn't have that keyword filtered will get your post in plain sight, conveniently unhidden.

The advantage is that only those who need something hidden behind a CW will have it hidden behind a CW. Those who don't won't.

Alas, while the technology is there (on Friendica since 2010, on Hubzilla since 2015, on Mastodon since 2022), at least on Mastodon nobody will ever use it. It came too late to become part of Mastodon's culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla

@Truth Collector Partially, it's because I've learned lots of things about the Fediverse that most others didn't. Things that might be useful.

Partially, I'm waiting for someone to challenge what I've said and e.g. say that eye contact only counts as such when a) the eyes are actually clearly visible as eyes, and b) they look directly at the camera. Or even only when it's a full facial portrait (= it isn't eye contact when some random stranger somewhere in the background of the image happens to look at the camera).

Still, if it were for me, Mastodon wouldn't even have its CW field. Mastodon and its community would rely on the poster forcing the exact same CWs upon everyone, regardless of whether or not they need these CWs.

If it were for me, Mastodon would have had the "Hide with warning" filter setting which it introduced in October, 2022 from its very beginning in early 2016 on. And it would be set in stone in Mastodon's community and Mastodon's culture that this setting generates CWs.

Basically, this is what Friendica (created in 2010, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed) and Hubzilla (created in 2015, connected to Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has existed; I'm on Hubzilla, by the way) have been doing it for much longer than Mastodon has even been around.

The idea is like this: If you want certain content hidden behind a button, set up a filter with a keyword that hides any content with that keyword behind a button, automatically, and most importantly, only for you individually. (Friendica, Hubzilla: Add that keyword to the "NSFW" filter list. It does the same.)

If you want to post something sensitive or potentially triggering, you add that keyword to your post, either as part of the actual post text or as a hashtag at the end of the post.

Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered the usual way won't see your post at all. Everyone who has that keyword automatically filtered as described above will get your post, but hidden behind a button. Everyone who doesn't have that keyword filtered will get your post in plain sight, conveniently unhidden.

The advantage is that only those who need something hidden behind a CW will have it hidden behind a CW. Those who don't won't.

Alas, while the technology is there (on Friendica since 2010, on Hubzilla since 2015, on Mastodon since 2022), at least on Mastodon nobody will ever use it. It came too late to become part of Mastodon's culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla

@Truth Collector It's really hard to explain to a neurotypical person who absolutely doesn't know this feeling, and who absolutely can't relate to it. It's even harder for me because I, personally, don't know this feeling from first-hand experience myself.

In addition, it isn't just "yes" or "no". Different people experience eye contact differently, and different people may feel uncomfortable about it in different ways.

I've read somewhere (I don't know where, and I don't have a link) that some neurodivergent people, upon seeing a picture with eye contact, feel like the person on that picture is looking through their eyes, right into their brain, their mind, their very soul. In this case, it feels intrusive to them. Even though it's "only" a picture.

But it isn't necessarily that and only that. Here's a quote-post from someone on Mastodon who actually is autistic, and who explains what images with eye contact feel like to them individually.

RE: https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112839238866393700

Also, there is this comment on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/18x1rdm/comment/kg75s54/.

I'm not diagnosed, but have always hated eye contact to the point where people on the cover of magazines would disturb me, specially those in the pile of magazines you'll find in the toilets, I would always turn them over to hide the faces. Now I wouldn't need a CW for that online, but depending on the context it does make me feel uneasy. I've been staying at my sister's over the holidays, she has pictures of family and friends on her fridge, I would sit with my back turned to it and feel like I was being stared at.

Unfortunately, there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers or reports about this. All there is about neurodivergence and eye contact is about how neurodivergent people don't make and maintain eye contact in conversations. And these tend to immediately and only go into the direction of "they don't do that because they can't recognise faces". Neuroscientists seem to only have understood this phenomenon that far (probably also because literally every last neuroscientist is as bog-standard neurotypical as they ever come, so there are none who can analyse their own experiences).

This may also be because this entire phenomenon is so very obscure. It's only an issue in a few select online spaces. It probably originated on pre-Yahoo! Tumblr which was chock-full of neurodivergent young people up and down and and back and forth across the whole spectrum. I guess one reason why they used Tumblr was that it had a dedicated content warning field, much like the one on Mastodon, only that it was invented from scratch for this purpose and not, like on Mastodon, a re-purposed text field that originally had a wholly different use (true story).

But this whole phenomenon only existed on Tumblr and nowhere else on the Web, much less in real life.

When Yahoo! took over Tumblr, they changed the rules in such way that entire communities were driven away, including many neurodivergent users. They often found a new home on Twitter. But Twitter doesn't have a dedicated content warning field, so the entire concept of CW-ing topics that may trigger people or make them feel unbearably uncomfortable lay dormant there.

It only came back when many of those who had been chased away from Tumblr to Twitter when Yahoo! took over Tumblr were chased away from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon Musk toook over Twitter. And Mastodon does have a CW field. So this entire concept was revived.

Unlike Tumblr, however, the greater Fediverse is not a place where enclosed and totally secluded bubbles can exist, at least not at the same degree as on Tumblr. Especially not if Mastodon is involved. So you have young neurodivergent people whom a whole lot of things may turn into quivering nervous wrecks for reasons that even their shrinks would fail to understand if they had any. They demand just about everything be CW'd. And they inevitably encounter much more mentally stable, bog-standard neurotypical people who are like, "Can't relate, don't understand, not gonna comply."

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility

@Truth Collector It's really hard to explain to a neurotypical person who absolutely doesn't know this feeling, and who absolutely can't relate to it. It's even harder for me because I, personally, don't know this feeling from first-hand experience myself.

In addition, it isn't just "yes" or "no". Different people experience eye contact differently, and different people may feel uncomfortable about it in different ways.

I've read somewhere (I don't know where, and I don't have a link) that some neurodivergent people, upon seeing a picture with eye contact, feel like the person on that picture is looking through their eyes, right into their brain, their mind, their very soul. In this case, it feels intrusive to them. Even though it's "only" a picture.

But it isn't necessarily that and only that. Here's a quote-post from someone on Mastodon who actually is autistic, and who explains what images with eye contact feel like to them individually.

RE: https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112839238866393700

Also, there is this comment on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/18x1rdm/comment/kg75s54/.

I'm not diagnosed, but have always hated eye contact to the point where people on the cover of magazines would disturb me, specially those in the pile of magazines you'll find in the toilets, I would always turn them over to hide the faces. Now I wouldn't need a CW for that online, but depending on the context it does make me feel uneasy. I've been staying at my sister's over the holidays, she has pictures of family and friends on her fridge, I would sit with my back turned to it and feel like I was being stared at.

Unfortunately, there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers or reports about this. All there is about neurodivergence and eye contact is about how neurodivergent people don't make and maintain eye contact in conversations. And these tend to immediately and only go into the direction of "they don't do that because they can't recognise faces". Neuroscientists seem to only have understood this phenomenon that far (probably also because literally every last neuroscientist is as bog-standard neurotypical as they ever come, so there are none who can analyse their own experiences).

This may also be because this entire phenomenon is so very obscure. It's only an issue in a few select online spaces. It probably originated on pre-Yahoo! Tumblr which was chock-full of neurodivergent young people up and down and and back and forth across the whole spectrum. I guess one reason why they used Tumblr was that it had a dedicated content warning field, much like the one on Mastodon, only that it was invented from scratch for this purpose and not, like on Mastodon, a re-purposed text field that originally had a wholly different use (true story).

But this whole phenomenon only existed on Tumblr and nowhere else on the Web, much less in real life.

When Yahoo! took over Tumblr, they changed the rules in such way that entire communities were driven away, including many neurodivergent users. They often found a new home on Twitter. But Twitter doesn't have a dedicated content warning field, so the entire concept of CW-ing topics that may trigger people or make them feel unbearably uncomfortable lay dormant there.

It only came back when many of those who had been chased away from Tumblr to Twitter when Yahoo! took over Tumblr were chased away from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon Musk toook over Twitter. And Mastodon does have a CW field. So this entire concept was revived.

Unlike Tumblr, however, the greater Fediverse is not a place where enclosed and totally secluded bubbles can exist, at least not at the same degree as on Tumblr. Especially not if Mastodon is involved. So you have young neurodivergent people whom a whole lot of things may turn into quivering nervous wrecks for reasons that even their shrinks would fail to understand if they had any. They demand just about everything be CW'd. And they inevitably encounter much more mentally stable, bog-standard neurotypical people who are like, "Can't relate, don't understand, not gonna comply."

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility

@Truth Collector It's really hard to explain to a neurotypical person who absolutely doesn't know this feeling, and who absolutely can't relate to it. It's even harder for me because I, personally, don't know this feeling from first-hand experience myself.

In addition, it isn't just "yes" or "no". Different people experience eye contact differently, and different people may feel uncomfortable about it in different ways.

I've read somewhere (I don't know where, and I don't have a link) that some neurodivergent people, upon seeing a picture with eye contact, feel like the person on that picture is looking through their eyes, right into their brain, their mind, their very soul. In this case, it feels intrusive to them. Even though it's "only" a picture.

But it isn't necessarily that and only that. Here's a quote-post from someone on Mastodon who actually is autistic, and who explains what images with eye contact feel like to them individually.

RE: https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112839238866393700

Also, there is this comment on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/18x1rdm/comment/kg75s54/.

I'm not diagnosed, but have always hated eye contact to the point where people on the cover of magazines would disturb me, specially those in the pile of magazines you'll find in the toilets, I would always turn them over to hide the faces. Now I wouldn't need a CW for that online, but depending on the context it does make me feel uneasy. I've been staying at my sister's over the holidays, she has pictures of family and friends on her fridge, I would sit with my back turned to it and feel like I was being stared at.

Unfortunately, there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers or reports about this. All there is about neurodivergence and eye contact is about how neurodivergent people don't make and maintain eye contact in conversations. And these tend to immediately and only go into the direction of "they don't do that because they can't recognise faces". Neuroscientists seem to only have understood this phenomenon that far (probably also because literally every last neuroscientist is as bog-standard neurotypical as they ever come, so there are none who can analyse their own experiences).

This may also be because this entire phenomenon is so very obscure. It's only an issue in a few select online spaces. It probably originated on pre-Yahoo! Tumblr which was chock-full of neurodivergent young people up and down and and back and forth across the whole spectrum. I guess one reason why they used Tumblr was that it had a dedicated content warning field, much like the one on Mastodon, only that it was invented from scratch for this purpose and not, like on Mastodon, a re-purposed text field that originally had a wholly different use (true story).

But this whole phenomenon only existed on Tumblr and nowhere else on the Web, much less in real life.

When Yahoo! took over Tumblr, they changed the rules in such way that entire communities were driven away, including many neurodivergent users. They often found a new home on Twitter. But Twitter doesn't have a dedicated content warning field, so the entire concept of CW-ing topics that may trigger people or make them feel unbearably uncomfortable lay dormant there.

It only came back when many of those who had been chased away from Tumblr to Twitter when Yahoo! took over Tumblr were chased away from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon Musk toook over Twitter. And Mastodon does have a CW field. So this entire concept was revived.

Unlike Tumblr, however, the greater Fediverse is not a place where enclosed and totally secluded bubbles can exist, at least not at the same degree as on Tumblr. Especially not if Mastodon is involved. So you have young neurodivergent people whom a whole lot of things may turn into quivering nervous wrecks for reasons that even their shrinks would fail to understand if they had any. They demand just about everything be CW'd. And they inevitably encounter much more mentally stable, bog-standard neurotypical people who are like, "Can't relate, don't understand, not gonna comply."

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility

@Truth Collector It's really hard to explain to a neurotypical person who absolutely doesn't know this feeling, and who absolutely can't relate to it. It's even harder for me because I, personally, don't know this feeling from first-hand experience myself.

In addition, it isn't just "yes" or "no". Different people experience eye contact differently, and different people may feel uncomfortable about it in different ways.

I've read somewhere (I don't know where, and I don't have a link) that some neurodivergent people, upon seeing a picture with eye contact, feel like the person on that picture is looking through their eyes, right into their brain, their mind, their very soul. In this case, it feels intrusive to them. Even though it's "only" a picture.

But it isn't necessarily that and only that. Here's a quote-post from someone on Mastodon who actually is autistic, and who explains what images with eye contact feel like to them individually.

RE: https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112839238866393700

Also, there is this comment on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/18x1rdm/comment/kg75s54/.

I'm not diagnosed, but have always hated eye contact to the point where people on the cover of magazines would disturb me, specially those in the pile of magazines you'll find in the toilets, I would always turn them over to hide the faces. Now I wouldn't need a CW for that online, but depending on the context it does make me feel uneasy. I've been staying at my sister's over the holidays, she has pictures of family and friends on her fridge, I would sit with my back turned to it and feel like I was being stared at.

Unfortunately, there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers or reports about this. All there is about neurodivergence and eye contact is about how neurodivergent people don't make and maintain eye contact in conversations. And these tend to immediately and only go into the direction of "they don't do that because they can't recognise faces". Neuroscientists seem to only have understood this phenomenon that far (probably also because literally every last neuroscientist is as bog-standard neurotypical as they ever come, so there are none who can analyse their own experiences).

This may also be because this entire phenomenon is so very obscure. It's only an issue in a few select online spaces. It probably originated on pre-Yahoo! Tumblr which was chock-full of neurodivergent young people up and down and and back and forth across the whole spectrum. I guess one reason why they used Tumblr was that it had a dedicated content warning field, much like the one on Mastodon, only that it was invented from scratch for this purpose and not, like on Mastodon, a re-purposed text field that originally had a wholly different use (true story).

But this whole phenomenon only existed on Tumblr and nowhere else on the Web, much less in real life.

When Yahoo! took over Tumblr, they changed the rules in such way that entire communities were driven away, including many neurodivergent users. They often found a new home on Twitter. But Twitter doesn't have a dedicated content warning field, so the entire concept of CW-ing topics that may trigger people or make them feel unbearably uncomfortable lay dormant there.

It only came back when many of those who had been chased away from Tumblr to Twitter when Yahoo! took over Tumblr were chased away from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon Musk toook over Twitter. And Mastodon does have a CW field. So this entire concept was revived.

Unlike Tumblr, however, the greater Fediverse is not a place where enclosed and totally secluded bubbles can exist, at least not at the same degree as on Tumblr. Especially not if Mastodon is involved. So you have young neurodivergent people whom a whole lot of things may turn into quivering nervous wrecks for reasons that even their shrinks would fail to understand if they had any. They demand just about everything be CW'd. And they inevitably encounter much more mentally stable, bog-standard neurotypical people who are like, "Can't relate, don't understand, not gonna comply."

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility

@Truth Collector It's really hard to explain to a neurotypical person who absolutely doesn't know this feeling, and who absolutely can't relate to it. It's even harder for me because I, personally, don't know this feeling from first-hand experience myself.

In addition, it isn't just "yes" or "no". Different people experience eye contact differently, and different people may feel uncomfortable about it in different ways.

I've read somewhere (I don't know where, and I don't have a link) that some neurodivergent people, upon seeing a picture with eye contact, feel like the person on that picture is looking through their eyes, right into their brain, their mind, their very soul. In this case, it feels intrusive to them. Even though it's "only" a picture.

But it isn't necessarily that and only that. Here's a quote-post from someone on Mastodon who actually is autistic, and who explains what images with eye contact feel like to them individually.

RE: https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/112839238866393700

Also, there is this comment on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/18x1rdm/comment/kg75s54/.

I'm not diagnosed, but have always hated eye contact to the point where people on the cover of magazines would disturb me, specially those in the pile of magazines you'll find in the toilets, I would always turn them over to hide the faces. Now I wouldn't need a CW for that online, but depending on the context it does make me feel uneasy. I've been staying at my sister's over the holidays, she has pictures of family and friends on her fridge, I would sit with my back turned to it and feel like I was being stared at.

Unfortunately, there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers or reports about this. All there is about neurodivergence and eye contact is about how neurodivergent people don't make and maintain eye contact in conversations. And these tend to immediately and only go into the direction of "they don't do that because they can't recognise faces". Neuroscientists seem to only have understood this phenomenon that far (probably also because literally every last neuroscientist is as bog-standard neurotypical as they ever come, so there are none who can analyse their own experiences).

This may also be because this entire phenomenon is so very obscure. It's only an issue in a few select online spaces. It probably originated on pre-Yahoo! Tumblr which was chock-full of neurodivergent young people up and down and and back and forth across the whole spectrum. I guess one reason why they used Tumblr was that it had a dedicated content warning field, much like the one on Mastodon, only that it was invented from scratch for this purpose and not, like on Mastodon, a re-purposed text field that originally had a wholly different use (true story).

But this whole phenomenon only existed on Tumblr and nowhere else on the Web, much less in real life.

When Yahoo! took over Tumblr, they changed the rules in such way that entire communities were driven away, including many neurodivergent users. They often found a new home on Twitter. But Twitter doesn't have a dedicated content warning field, so the entire concept of CW-ing topics that may trigger people or make them feel unbearably uncomfortable lay dormant there.

It only came back when many of those who had been chased away from Tumblr to Twitter when Yahoo! took over Tumblr were chased away from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon Musk toook over Twitter. And Mastodon does have a CW field. So this entire concept was revived.

Unlike Tumblr, however, the greater Fediverse is not a place where enclosed and totally secluded bubbles can exist, at least not at the same degree as on Tumblr. Especially not if Mastodon is involved. So you have young neurodivergent people whom a whole lot of things may turn into quivering nervous wrecks for reasons that even their shrinks would fail to understand if they had any. They demand just about everything be CW'd. And they inevitably encounter much more mentally stable, bog-standard neurotypical people who are like, "Can't relate, don't understand, not gonna comply."

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility

@Sean C. @Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken @Justin Ferrell I've once encountered someone who seemed to suffer from such extreme PTSD that they demanded everyone CW literally absolutely everything. And, of course, the Mastodon way by forciing all these CWs upon absolutely everyone all the same.

Now, I'm not even on Mastodon myself. I'm on Hubzilla which is doing CWs way differently from Mastodon, which has been doing that for longer than Mastodon has even existed, much less has had CWs.

We don't do CWs poster-side. We don't write CWs into the summary field. In fact, the summary field, which Mastodon has been using as a CW field since 2017, is still a summary field here. A summary field makes a whole lot of sense here, for while most Mastodon servers have a hard-coded character limit of 500, Hubzilla doesn't really have any character limit at all.

Also, we can't do Mastodon-style CWs in replies which are called "comments" here. Like on Facebook, like on Tumblr, like on every last blog out there, but very much unlike on Mastodon, our post editor and our comment editors are wholly separate things. The comment editor can't do summaries. Why not? Because, have you ever seen a blog comment with a summary?

No, we have our CWs automatically generated and reader-side. We have a kind of filter called "NSFW" that can automatically hide content behind a CW. It's basically Mastodon's "Hide with a warning", but as its own keyword filter list and seven years before Mastodon introduced "Hide with a warning". (Twelve years actually because Hubzilla inherited that feature from Friendica.)

When we post sensitive or disturbing content, we make sure that those who may not want to see that content have their filters triggered. We do so by making sure that appropriate keywords are in the post text (easy-peasy when you can post over 33,000 times more characters than on Mastodon) or by adding hashtags. The latter is what I do, hence the many hashtags down there.

It's also the only way to have a comment hidden. Again, Hubzilla doesn't have a summary field (= Mastodon CW field) for replies, so it has to rely on people making filters for uncomfortable content.

This could be a thing on Mastodon as well. After all, in October, 2022, Mastodon 4.0 introduced "Hide with a warning" to its filters which does the exact same thing as NSFW on Friendica and Hubzilla: hide messages depending on keywords. However, Mastodon's entire culture was defined in mid-2022 by those who had fled from Twitter in early 2022, so it's based on Mastodon 3.x without "Hide with a warning".

Besides, the vast majority of Mastodon users don't even know that Mastodon has "Hide with a warning", much less what it does. Precious few even seem to know that Mastodon has filters in the first place. And next to nobody knows what the non-Mastodon Fediverse has, nor do they care, also because most Mastodon users don't even know that the Fediverse goes beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.

In addition, while Hubzilla is all about empowering its users to self-moderate their stream, the "Mastodon experience" is generally perceived as being coddled and pampered all over. By mods who remove unwanted content and by all the other users who hide uncomfortable content. Hide it from everyone all the same, regardless of whether or not someone needs that, just because one person needs it.

So back to the beginning: This person took Mastodon's culture to the absolute extreme. And they demanded that I a) adopted Mastodon's way even though it'd b) clash with Hubzilla's culture which is my native culture and c) exaggerate it to the maximum.

Of course, my suggestion to use "Hide with a warning" filters didn't come to fruition. For one, that would have required an infinite number of individual filters on Mastodon. Besides, that person felt entitled to have protection from literally absolutely any and all kinds of content served to them on a silver platter.

I think I ended up Superblocking them.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #MastodonCulture

@Sean C. @Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken @Justin Ferrell I've once encountered someone who seemed to suffer from such extreme PTSD that they demanded everyone CW literally absolutely everything. And, of course, the Mastodon way by forciing all these CWs upon absolutely everyone all the same.

Now, I'm not even on Mastodon myself. I'm on Hubzilla which is doing CWs way differently from Mastodon, which has been doing that for longer than Mastodon has even existed, much less has had CWs.

We don't do CWs poster-side. We don't write CWs into the summary field. In fact, the summary field, which Mastodon has been using as a CW field since 2017, is still a summary field here. A summary field makes a whole lot of sense here, for while most Mastodon servers have a hard-coded character limit of 500, Hubzilla doesn't really have any character limit at all.

Also, we can't do Mastodon-style CWs in replies which are called "comments" here. Like on Facebook, like on Tumblr, like on every last blog out there, but very much unlike on Mastodon, our post editor and our comment editors are wholly separate things. The comment editor can't do summaries. Why not? Because, have you ever seen a blog comment with a summary?

No, we have our CWs automatically generated and reader-side. We have a kind of filter called "NSFW" that can automatically hide content behind a CW. It's basically Mastodon's "Hide with a warning", but as its own keyword filter list and seven years before Mastodon introduced "Hide with a warning". (Twelve years actually because Hubzilla inherited that feature from Friendica.)

When we post sensitive or disturbing content, we make sure that those who may not want to see that content have their filters triggered. We do so by making sure that appropriate keywords are in the post text (easy-peasy when you can post over 33,000 times more characters than on Mastodon) or by adding hashtags. The latter is what I do, hence the many hashtags down there.

It's also the only way to have a comment hidden. Again, Hubzilla doesn't have a summary field (= Mastodon CW field) for replies, so it has to rely on people making filters for uncomfortable content.

This could be a thing on Mastodon as well. After all, in October, 2022, Mastodon 4.0 introduced "Hide with a warning" to its filters which does the exact same thing as NSFW on Friendica and Hubzilla: hide messages depending on keywords. However, Mastodon's entire culture was defined in mid-2022 by those who had fled from Twitter in early 2022, so it's based on Mastodon 3.x without "Hide with a warning".

Besides, the vast majority of Mastodon users don't even know that Mastodon has "Hide with a warning", much less what it does. Precious few even seem to know that Mastodon has filters in the first place. And next to nobody knows what the non-Mastodon Fediverse has, nor do they care, also because most Mastodon users don't even know that the Fediverse goes beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.

In addition, while Hubzilla is all about empowering its users to self-moderate their stream, the "Mastodon experience" is generally perceived as being coddled and pampered all over. By mods who remove unwanted content and by all the other users who hide uncomfortable content. Hide it from everyone all the same, regardless of whether or not someone needs that, just because one person needs it.

So back to the beginning: This person took Mastodon's culture to the absolute extreme. And they demanded that I a) adopted Mastodon's way even though it'd b) clash with Hubzilla's culture which is my native culture and c) exaggerate it to the maximum.

Of course, my suggestion to use "Hide with a warning" filters didn't come to fruition. For one, that would have required an infinite number of individual filters on Mastodon. Besides, that person felt entitled to have protection from literally absolutely any and all kinds of content served to them on a silver platter.

I think I ended up Superblocking them.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #MastodonCulture

@Sean C. @Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken @Justin Ferrell I've once encountered someone who seemed to suffer from such extreme PTSD that they demanded everyone CW literally absolutely everything. And, of course, the Mastodon way by forciing all these CWs upon absolutely everyone all the same.

Now, I'm not even on Mastodon myself. I'm on Hubzilla which is doing CWs way differently from Mastodon, which has been doing that for longer than Mastodon has even existed, much less has had CWs.

We don't do CWs poster-side. We don't write CWs into the summary field. In fact, the summary field, which Mastodon has been using as a CW field since 2017, is still a summary field here. A summary field makes a whole lot of sense here, for while most Mastodon servers have a hard-coded character limit of 500, Hubzilla doesn't really have any character limit at all.

Also, we can't do Mastodon-style CWs in replies which are called "comments" here. Like on Facebook, like on Tumblr, like on every last blog out there, but very much unlike on Mastodon, our post editor and our comment editors are wholly separate things. The comment editor can't do summaries. Why not? Because, have you ever seen a blog comment with a summary?

No, we have our CWs automatically generated and reader-side. We have a kind of filter called "NSFW" that can automatically hide content behind a CW. It's basically Mastodon's "Hide with a warning", but as its own keyword filter list and seven years before Mastodon introduced "Hide with a warning". (Twelve years actually because Hubzilla inherited that feature from Friendica.)

When we post sensitive or disturbing content, we make sure that those who may not want to see that content have their filters triggered. We do so by making sure that appropriate keywords are in the post text (easy-peasy when you can post over 33,000 times more characters than on Mastodon) or by adding hashtags. The latter is what I do, hence the many hashtags down there.

It's also the only way to have a comment hidden. Again, Hubzilla doesn't have a summary field (= Mastodon CW field) for replies, so it has to rely on people making filters for uncomfortable content.

This could be a thing on Mastodon as well. After all, in October, 2022, Mastodon 4.0 introduced "Hide with a warning" to its filters which does the exact same thing as NSFW on Friendica and Hubzilla: hide messages depending on keywords. However, Mastodon's entire culture was defined in mid-2022 by those who had fled from Twitter in early 2022, so it's based on Mastodon 3.x without "Hide with a warning".

Besides, the vast majority of Mastodon users don't even know that Mastodon has "Hide with a warning", much less what it does. Precious few even seem to know that Mastodon has filters in the first place. And next to nobody knows what the non-Mastodon Fediverse has, nor do they care, also because most Mastodon users don't even know that the Fediverse goes beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.

In addition, while Hubzilla is all about empowering its users to self-moderate their stream, the "Mastodon experience" is generally perceived as being coddled and pampered all over. By mods who remove unwanted content and by all the other users who hide uncomfortable content. Hide it from everyone all the same, regardless of whether or not someone needs that, just because one person needs it.

So back to the beginning: This person took Mastodon's culture to the absolute extreme. And they demanded that I a) adopted Mastodon's way even though it'd b) clash with Hubzilla's culture which is my native culture and c) exaggerate it to the maximum.

Of course, my suggestion to use "Hide with a warning" filters didn't come to fruition. For one, that would have required an infinite number of individual filters on Mastodon. Besides, that person felt entitled to have protection from literally absolutely any and all kinds of content served to them on a silver platter.

I think I ended up Superblocking them.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #MastodonCulture

@Sean C. @Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken @Justin Ferrell I've once encountered someone who seemed to suffer from such extreme PTSD that they demanded everyone CW literally absolutely everything. And, of course, the Mastodon way by forciing all these CWs upon absolutely everyone all the same.

Now, I'm not even on Mastodon myself. I'm on Hubzilla which is doing CWs way differently from Mastodon, which has been doing that for longer than Mastodon has even existed, much less has had CWs.

We don't do CWs poster-side. We don't write CWs into the summary field. In fact, the summary field, which Mastodon has been using as a CW field since 2017, is still a summary field here. A summary field makes a whole lot of sense here, for while most Mastodon servers have a hard-coded character limit of 500, Hubzilla doesn't really have any character limit at all.

Also, we can't do Mastodon-style CWs in replies which are called "comments" here. Like on Facebook, like on Tumblr, like on every last blog out there, but very much unlike on Mastodon, our post editor and our comment editors are wholly separate things. The comment editor can't do summaries. Why not? Because, have you ever seen a blog comment with a summary?

No, we have our CWs automatically generated and reader-side. We have a kind of filter called "NSFW" that can automatically hide content behind a CW. It's basically Mastodon's "Hide with a warning", but as its own keyword filter list and seven years before Mastodon introduced "Hide with a warning". (Twelve years actually because Hubzilla inherited that feature from Friendica.)

When we post sensitive or disturbing content, we make sure that those who may not want to see that content have their filters triggered. We do so by making sure that appropriate keywords are in the post text (easy-peasy when you can post over 33,000 times more characters than on Mastodon) or by adding hashtags. The latter is what I do, hence the many hashtags down there.

It's also the only way to have a comment hidden. Again, Hubzilla doesn't have a summary field (= Mastodon CW field) for replies, so it has to rely on people making filters for uncomfortable content.

This could be a thing on Mastodon as well. After all, in October, 2022, Mastodon 4.0 introduced "Hide with a warning" to its filters which does the exact same thing as NSFW on Friendica and Hubzilla: hide messages depending on keywords. However, Mastodon's entire culture was defined in mid-2022 by those who had fled from Twitter in early 2022, so it's based on Mastodon 3.x without "Hide with a warning".

Besides, the vast majority of Mastodon users don't even know that Mastodon has "Hide with a warning", much less what it does. Precious few even seem to know that Mastodon has filters in the first place. And next to nobody knows what the non-Mastodon Fediverse has, nor do they care, also because most Mastodon users don't even know that the Fediverse goes beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.

In addition, while Hubzilla is all about empowering its users to self-moderate their stream, the "Mastodon experience" is generally perceived as being coddled and pampered all over. By mods who remove unwanted content and by all the other users who hide uncomfortable content. Hide it from everyone all the same, regardless of whether or not someone needs that, just because one person needs it.

So back to the beginning: This person took Mastodon's culture to the absolute extreme. And they demanded that I a) adopted Mastodon's way even though it'd b) clash with Hubzilla's culture which is my native culture and c) exaggerate it to the maximum.

Of course, my suggestion to use "Hide with a warning" filters didn't come to fruition. For one, that would have required an infinite number of individual filters on Mastodon. Besides, that person felt entitled to have protection from literally absolutely any and all kinds of content served to them on a silver platter.

I think I ended up Superblocking them.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #MastodonCulture

@Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken Yes, I wish more servers had this rule and enforced it.

Officially appointed moderators only go by the server's written rules, and they only enforce them against local users.

The HOA, on the other hand, have some rules in their heads. Everyone has different rules. And they enforce them against everyone, even regardless of where everyone actually is. Like, they attack Friendica users for allegedly misusing the CW field because they neither know that these users are not on Mastodon, much less where they actually are, nor that Mastodon's CW field has been an abstract field on Friendica for seven years longer than it has been a CW field on Mastodon.

This is part of what makes the Fediverse a minefield once your messages start reaching Mastodon.

I can't say that I'll stop being so overly careful with everything and putting such a big effort particulary into image descriptions, summaries/content warnings and hashtags for filter-triggering purposes if more or even most Mastodon servers adopt and enforce this rule. The irony is that this rule actually protects my long hashtag lines.

In fact, rules like these also ought to include that nobody must be policed for writing "too long" posts because there are places in the Fediverse that neither have character limits to worry about nor a character-limiting culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta

@Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken Yes, I wish more servers had this rule and enforced it.

Officially appointed moderators only go by the server's written rules, and they only enforce them against local users.

The HOA, on the other hand, have some rules in their heads. Everyone has different rules. And they enforce them against everyone, even regardless of where everyone actually is. Like, they attack Friendica users for allegedly misusing the CW field because they neither know that these users are not on Mastodon, much less where they actually are, nor that Mastodon's CW field has been an abstract field on Friendica for seven years longer than it has been a CW field on Mastodon.

This is part of what makes the Fediverse a minefield once your messages start reaching Mastodon.

I can't say that I'll stop being so overly careful with everything and putting such a big effort particulary into image descriptions, summaries/content warnings and hashtags for filter-triggering purposes if more or even most Mastodon servers adopt and enforce this rule. The irony is that this rule actually protects my long hashtag lines.

In fact, rules like these also ought to include that nobody must be policed for writing "too long" posts because there are places in the Fediverse that neither have character limits to worry about nor a character-limiting culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta

@Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken Yes, I wish more servers had this rule and enforced it.

Officially appointed moderators only go by the server's written rules, and they only enforce them against local users.

The HOA, on the other hand, have some rules in their heads. Everyone has different rules. And they enforce them against everyone, even regardless of where everyone actually is. Like, they attack Friendica users for allegedly misusing the CW field because they neither know that these users are not on Mastodon, much less where they actually are, nor that Mastodon's CW field has been an abstract field on Friendica for seven years longer than it has been a CW field on Mastodon.

This is part of what makes the Fediverse a minefield once your messages start reaching Mastodon.

I can't say that I'll stop being so overly careful with everything and putting such a big effort particulary into image descriptions, summaries/content warnings and hashtags for filter-triggering purposes if more or even most Mastodon servers adopt and enforce this rule. The irony is that this rule actually protects my long hashtag lines.

In fact, rules like these also ought to include that nobody must be policed for writing "too long" posts because there are places in the Fediverse that neither have character limits to worry about nor a character-limiting culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta

@Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken Yes, I wish more servers had this rule and enforced it.

Officially appointed moderators only go by the server's written rules, and they only enforce them against local users.

The HOA, on the other hand, have some rules in their heads. Everyone has different rules. And they enforce them against everyone, even regardless of where everyone actually is. Like, they attack Friendica users for allegedly misusing the CW field because they neither know that these users are not on Mastodon, much less where they actually are, nor that Mastodon's CW field has been an abstract field on Friendica for seven years longer than it has been a CW field on Mastodon.

This is part of what makes the Fediverse a minefield once your messages start reaching Mastodon.

I can't say that I'll stop being so overly careful with everything and putting such a big effort particulary into image descriptions, summaries/content warnings and hashtags for filter-triggering purposes if more or even most Mastodon servers adopt and enforce this rule. The irony is that this rule actually protects my long hashtag lines.

In fact, rules like these also ought to include that nobody must be policed for writing "too long" posts because there are places in the Fediverse that neither have character limits to worry about nor a character-limiting culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta

@Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken Yes, I wish more servers had this rule and enforced it.

Officially appointed moderators only go by the server's written rules, and they only enforce them against local users.

The HOA, on the other hand, have some rules in their heads. Everyone has different rules. And they enforce them against everyone, even regardless of where everyone actually is. Like, they attack Friendica users for allegedly misusing the CW field because they neither know that these users are not on Mastodon, much less where they actually are, nor that Mastodon's CW field has been an abstract field on Friendica for seven years longer than it has been a CW field on Mastodon.

This is part of what makes the Fediverse a minefield once your messages start reaching Mastodon.

I can't say that I'll stop being so overly careful with everything and putting such a big effort particulary into image descriptions, summaries/content warnings and hashtags for filter-triggering purposes if more or even most Mastodon servers adopt and enforce this rule. The irony is that this rule actually protects my long hashtag lines.

In fact, rules like these also ought to include that nobody must be policed for writing "too long" posts because there are places in the Fediverse that neither have character limits to worry about nor a character-limiting culture.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta