#federatedsocialweb — Public Fediverse posts

@CynthesisToday If you want to speak to someone who really knows his way around communications protocols, I'll have to refer you to @mike, creator of #Friendica, #RedMatrix, #Hubzilla, #Osada, #Zap, #Misty, #Roadhouse and #Streams and of the #FederatedSocialWeb protocols #DFRN (base protocol for Friendica) and #Zot (base protocol for all the others), thus also inventor of #NomadicIdentity, as well as contributor to both the #Diaspora protocol and #ActivityPub.

@ophiocephalic 🐍 @Tim Chambers @Fediverse Report @Spread Mastodon As a #FederatedSocialWeb veteran and former self-hoster of my own private #Friendica and #Hubzilla instances, I have to say that I can hardly see literally absolutely the whole Fediverse fediblocking #Meta.

You have to keep a few things in mind.

First of all, the Fediverse is not only #Mastodon. Nor is the Fediverse only about a dozen big projects. The Fediverse is dozens upon dozens of big and small projects.

For the whole Fediverse to fediblock Meta, every single last one of them, even just recently launched private proof-of-concept alphas of brand-new projects which nonetheless will federate, will require not only a mandatory instance-wide blocking mechanism, but a mandatory standard blacklist with Meta's instance on it. Otherwise developers can't test-drive their new Fediverse server application without their test instance being defederated left and right for not blocking Meta.

Of course, this would also mean that everything that even only as much as understands #ActivityPub would require such a mandatory default blacklist with Meta on it. Even if it isn't based on ActivityPub. Even if ActivityPub is an add-on, a plug-in, maybe even third-party like in the case of #WordPress. Even if ActivityPub has to be manually activated instance-wide by the admin and then separately by the users for each one of their channels like in Hubzilla's case.

That is, putting Meta on the same list as all other defederated instances would probably be considered not enough. Blocking Meta would have to be hard-coded into the engine of the project itself, also to mandatorily roll it out to all instances of all projects. Instance block lists aren't part of the source code, and if they became that, lots of not-so-techy instance admins would end up with file conflicts they can't solve because the git pull involved in the upgrade would try to create a file that already exists.

Still, this wouldn't be 100% water-tight. An absolutely mandatory fediblock for Meta would mean certain death for lots and lots of small private instances. Admins of such tiny instances often only do the very bare necessities to keep them running. Sometimes they rarely or never even upgrade the underlying operating system, much less the Fediverse project running on it. Why should they? It runs. And an upgrade means a) a hassle and b) probably more of a hassle if stuff breaks.

Just to prove my point: There are still Mastodon 3.x instances in the Fediverse. There are still a very few running small instances of #Osada and #Zap, both of which have been discontinued on New Year's Eve 2022. These projects are no longer maintained. They won't get any updates anymore. They were superseded by #Streams, and not everyone who still runs these old projects wants to do the switch.

And then there are those projects that are technically still in development, but whose development has slowed down dramatically. Look at how often #Pleroma rolls out new versions. And Pleroma isn't exactly obscure, it has public instances. Or look at #Plume which counts as still actively developed, but whose devs barely find any time to do anything, so it often doesn't get any updates in many months. I don't even think that Plume has any means of blocking instances by blacklist.

So if blocking Meta becomes mandatory, you can fediblock an entire long-form blogging project out of the Fediverse with all its private and public instances because not a single instance will participate in blocking Meta, because not a single instance is even capable of doing that, because the capability is not included and rolled out in time, because the devs can't find the time to include it.

@Kaity A @Ada While I do appreciate your effort, how much of the Fediverse do you plan this to cover within less than, say, two months?

blahaj.zone?

All #Mastodon instances?

Or all instances of all #Fediverse projects?

The latter, so much I can tell you, will be impossible to achieve. First of all, of course, this would require extensive modification to many Fediverse projects that aren't Mastodon. Keep in mind that there are some projects that are both years older than Mastodon and based on a protocol that is not #ActivityPub.

#Friendica (6 years older than Mastodon) might have to dig deeply into its UI, its underlying #DFRN protocol (8 years older than ActivityPub), of course the ActivityPub connector and maybe actually also all the other connectors, of which Friendica has many. If bad comes to worse, Friendica would have to enforce Mastodon users' quote and interaction limits upon #Diaspora users, and Diaspora* and Mastodon aren't even federated with one another and only touch each other on a few projects that are federated with both.

Second, the development of some projects has slowed down to an almost or actual still-stand. You won't see #Plume integrate everything that you've planned before July. It'd be a miracle to see Plume even roll out a bugfix release until then.

Third, @Mario Vavti and @mike are very unlikely let anyone on Mastodon force them to design #Hubzilla and #Streams, or even the #Zot or #Nomad protocol, in any particular way. It's bad enough that the Mastodon core devs try to bully them into re-designing stuff that's many years older than Mastodon.

By the way, both Hubzilla and (streams) have part of what you want to introduce built in already now. Hubzilla actually had it before Mastodon even existed.

What you're trying to do is
a) re-invent the wheel
b) make your wheel design mandatory for the whole Fediverse
c) force Hubzilla and (streams) to discard their way of handling permissions which is firmly integrated with the Zot/Nomad protocol and its own very detailed and fine-grained permission control, the kind of which even the #CalcKey devs couldn't imagine in their wildest dreams, and which has seen some 11 years of daily operation, and replace it with yours

Fourth, there are still some instances of some projects out there that haven't seen a single update this whole year. Or for over a year. There still seem to be Hubzilla hubs alive that run 5.x or even 4.x while the current version is 8.2, and 8.4 is just around the corner. There are also still instances of the (indirect) Hubzilla forks #Osada and #Zap alive, and both projects have been EOL and discontinued since New Year's Eve. These instances will continue not having what you want the whole Fediverse to have.

Next question: How exactly do you want such limitations to be enforced? Do you simply want to keep offending posts/comments from being created? Or do you actually want to go as far as UI buttons being greyed out or disappearing altogether on the UIs of all Web interfaces of all projects and on all desktop and mobile apps?

In the case of quoting, either will be very difficult to achieve outside of Mastodon, especially on the old #FederatedSocialWeb projects Friendica and Hubzilla and their newest offspring, (streams).

See, when Mastodon will introduce quotes, it'd be a button, and everything else will be hocus-pocus happening in the background. On Friendica and Hubzilla, quotes, just like any kind of text formatting, are done with BBcode which is in the post/comment editor in plain sight and can be edited. In (streams)' case, Markdown and HTML come on top.

There are about a thousand and one ways for me to quote you or anyone else. I'd demonstrate a selection of them, but Mastodon's text formatting limitations won't let me, at least not short of taking a screenshot of both the source code and what it looks like. If you want to keep everyone on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) from quoting those who don't want to be quoted with 100% reliability, these three projects would need editors that could catch all possible ways of quoting someone. If you still want them to rule out false positives, it's really approaching impossibility.

@fastfinge What if I told you that just about the whole Fediverse supports quotes, only Mastodon doesn't?

What if I told you that #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse? What if I told you that I myself am not on Mastodon, although this post of mine has appeared on your timeline?

What if I told you that, in fact, the Fediverse has been around for much longer than Mastodon?

What if I told you that it started in 2008 with something called Laconi.ca, now known as #GNUsocial (#^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social)

Okay, GNU social doesn't really count as part of today's Fediverse because it doesn't support #ActivityPub. And okay, it wasn't called the Fediverse back then but the #FederatedSocialWeb. But still, the whole concept isn't new. It was not invented by Eugen Rochko.

Still, even today's Fediverse is more than Mastodon and older than Mastodon. And just about everything that isn't Mastodon supports quotes while still being fully federated with Mastodon.

But let me elaborate (warning, this post is over 12 times as long as a toot can possibly be):

#Friendica (#^https://friendi.ca, #^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/Special:MyLanguage/What_is_Friendica%3F) was launched in July 2010. That was six years before Mastodon. It was created by a guy named Mike Macgirvin as a decentralised, distributed, federated replacement for Facebook. No, not Twitter. Facebook.

From the very beginning, it had many features which Mastodon users keep demanding today. Including quotes. Again, when Mastodon was launched, Friendica had had these features in daily productive use for six years already.

And yet, people don't use quotes to harass others by "stealing" discussions. This is technically impossible on Friendica due to its architecture which is more like Facebook or a blog or a forum and less like Twitter or Mastodon. Threads aren't stand-alone posts floating around the timelines, loosely tied together by increasing numbers of mentions. Instead, they're start-post-and-comments structures. Replies aren't stand-alone posts. Replies are comments firmly tied to one start post by Friendica's internal structure.

Oh, and Friendica doesn't run on ActivityPub. It has its own internal protocol, #DFRN. Still, Friendica quickly created an ActivityPub connector and federated with Mastodon, thus becoming part of the Fediverse. Friendica federates with a whole lot of projects and platforms. In fact, there is a growing number of forums mostly frequented by Mastodon users which run on Friendica, such as FediverseNews.

I myself am on #Hubzilla (#^https://hubzilla.org, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/Special:MyLanguage/What_is_Hubzilla%3F). It started life in 2012, still four years before Mastodon, as a fork of Friendica, created by Friendica's own inventor. In 2011 already, Mike had conceived an even more powerful protocol named #Zot which comes with features that are outright utterly unimaginable for Mastodon users such as #NomadicIdentity. Hubzilla even had its first stable release before Mastodon was launched.

And Hubzilla still has almost all the features Friendica has with a whole lot more on top. Again, including quotes. Again, yes, before Mastodon refused to have them. And again, yes, without anyone misusing them for harassment.

And again, it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to read this.

I should also mention that both Friendica and Hubzilla have technical barriers in the way of publicly quoting private or restricted posts, at least with references/a connection to the quoted post. Hubzilla in particular has access rights control on a level you couldn't possibly imagine in your wildest dreams.

And just about everything else in the Fediverse that's microblogging or macroblogging has official, built-in quote support.

• #Pleroma (#^https://pleroma.social/, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Pleroma%253F) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
  
• #Akkoma (#^https://akkoma.social/), a Pleroma fork, has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
  
• #MissKey (#^https://misskey-hub.net/en/, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Misskey%253F) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
  
• #CalcKey (#^https://calckey.cloud/, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Calckey%3F) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
  
• #FoundKey (#^https://akkoma.dev/FoundKeyGang/FoundKey) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
  
• #GoToSocial (#^https://docs.gotosocial.org/, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_GoToSocial%3F) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
  
• #Socialhome (#^https://socialhome.network/) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.

Yes, they're all federated with Mastodon. This means that users of any of these projects, including Friendica and Hubzilla, can read Mastodon posts and quote them in their replies, and these replies, in turn, can be read on Mastodon.

Okay, so the Fediverse has two, three, four... ten projects, and all but Mastodon support quotes, and nowhere are there people demanding the feature be removed due to rampant harassment?

No, these are only the microblogging and macroblogging projects, and only those of the macroblogging projects that aren't primarily for long-form blogging, i.e. that aren't mimicking Medium, that aren't mimicking WordPress, that aren't #Wordpress itself. Yes, there are WordPress blogs in the Fediverse, federated with Mastodon.

In fact, the Fediverse is even much, much bigger than that (#^https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/, #^https://the-federation.info/).

Now go block me for harassing you, for being an ableist swine because I treat blind people equally instead of mollycoddling them wherever possibly, even for being a fascist or just for shattering your worldview into itty bitty pieces. This post of mine stands.

CC @Patrick, the Linux guy so that you know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon, too
Also CC @Ada @James

Dezentrale „Walled Gardens“

Diaspora* wurde kaum für "tot" erklärt und schon steht das nächste Projekt in den Startlöchern! Tent.io soll ein protocol for distributed social networking and personal data storage werden. Alles neu, alles anders, alles besser als OStatus, DiSo oder Diaspora*. Aber mal ganz ehrlich... was haben die Diasporas & Co. bisher geschaffen? Ziel war es Facebooks "Walled Gardens" aufzubrechen und was kam wirklich dabei rum? Eine ganze Reihe an dezentralen "Walled Gardens". Na danke! Seit Chris […]

https://notiz.blog/2012/11/15/dezentrale-walled-gardens/