#fedimeta — Public Fediverse posts

@silverpill @julian In addition, more particularly, it appeared highly unlikely that Mastodon would ever implement something first implemented in the "Anti-Mastodons". The Fediverse server applications that are the farthest from Mastodon while still largely being capable of the same things as Mastodon. Mastodon's nemeses, so-to-speak. The stuff created by the guy who speaks out the most radically against what Mastodon does.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta

@Martin Rundkvist I've written an article with several feature comparison tables between

• Mastodon
• Friendica
• Hubzilla (rebuilt from a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's creator)
• (streams) (fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla by the same creator)
• Forte (fork of the streams repository by still the same creator

https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/0a75de76-eb27-4149-b708-f20b2f79d392

A few goodies:

• Mastodon:
  500 characters; requires source code modifications to get more
  Friendica:
  16,777,215 characters
• Friendica:
  Can render and create the full gamut of HTML text formatting
  Mastodon:
  Can only create plain text; can only render a small subset of HTML text formatting
• Friendica:
  Have as many images pro post as you want
  Embed them within the text
  Mastodon:
  Limited to 4 images
  Images can only be file attachments
• Friendica:
  Shows you all content in the Fediverse just like the author intended it
  Mastodon:
  "Sanitises" away half the formatting, all embedded images and all images except for the first four, just for the sake of purist microblogging
• Mastodon:
  Timeline consists of single messages with no context
  Friendica:
  Timeline consists of complete conversations, all the way back to the start post, with all branches (ignores and blocks notwithstanding)
• Mastodon:
  Conversations consist of toots and more toots, loosely strung together with mentions
  Replies only reach those who are visibly mentioned
  Friendica:
  Conversations consist of exactly one post and otherwise comments
  Replies go from the replier to the thread starter and from there to all participants in the conversation without having to mention anyone
• Friendica:
  Has groups built in (groups are accounts with special settings)
  Mastodon:
  Has no support for groups whatsoever, much less its own groups
  Most Mastodon users don't even know that the Fediverse has groups
• Friendica:
  Lets you federate with the whole Fediverse
  Lets you federate with diaspora*
  Lets you include and remote-control a Bluesky account
  At least used to be able to do the same with a Tumblr account or a Twitter account
  Lets you crosspost to Dreamwidth, Libertree, LiveJournal and XML-RPC-based blogs like WordPress
  Mastodon:
  Just barely so federates with the Fediverse
  Tries to make everything that isn't Mastodon look broken
  Would love for the Fediverse to be only Mastodon
• Mastodon:
  Makes the whole Fediverse look like Mastodon
  Friendica:
  Shows you which server software a message came from

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Mastodon #Friendica

@silverpill Mastodon implements something that's already implemented in Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. Incredible.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #FEP_8b32

Amy "Fif" Rat, the failed political “pundit” who has been losing to me for years, was ranting that, “We lost in the first wormpocalypse, and just can’t take it anymore.” No Amy, just get used to more losing! You’ve been a Loser all your life, and nothing’s going to change. Fiore, your new Wormmunist Comrade, will not be able to save you. She knows you are a failed WODK, and she wants to pick up where you have left. For thousands of years, the concept of Wormmunist Policies have never worked, and they’re not going to work now, especially under the tremendous transformational SUCCESS that the Anathema Administration has brought forth, for the entire Fediverse to see and follow — Best Posting Numbers, EVER, Best Federation Numbers, Best Uptime Numbers, Biggest Investment in Wormium, and on, and on. This is the Golden Age of the Holy Wodk Empire, and a small group of misfits, like you, Fiore, and others, won’t be able to destroy it, and change the course of History in so doing. It’s too big, it’s too powerful, and it’s too good. See you on the Political Battlefield. MAKE WORM PINK GREAT AGAIN! Administrator ANATHEMA

#WormPink #FediMeta #AGPrights #WodkRights #JusticeForAnathema

@Jonathan Kamens 86 47 I don't want to alarm you, but:

Friendica (https://friendi.ca; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica) has introduced full-text search to what would become the Fediverse as early as May, 2010.

Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) inherited this feature from Friendica. Hubzilla first came out in March, 2015.

For reference: Mastodon first came out in January, 2016. It immediately federated with Friendica and Hubzilla. In case you don't believe this: Take a look at my profile on its home server. Does that look like Mastodon?

The Fediverse has full-text search right now, and it has had full-text search for five years and eight months longer than Mastodon has even existed. This is the status quo.

If you want your content to be private, don't make it public in the first place.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #FullTextSearch #Privacy

@steve mookie kong ...which, unfortunately, would limit the features of the backend to what Mastodon itself can do. Because nothing else is implemented in the frontend.

No enclosed threaded conversations. Very limited HTML rendering. No formatting the text of your own messages. No emoji reactions. No images embedded in messages. No more than four images dangling below a message as file attachments.

If anything, someone who is not a Mastodon dev and not even daily-driving Mastodon should soft-fork Mastodon's Web UI and modify it so that it can adjust to the backend and offer all the features of the backend.

If you use it with snac2, you have the full set of snac2's features available.

If you use it with Akkoma, you have the full set of Akkoma's features available.

If you somehow manage to use it with Friendica, you have the full set of Friendica's features available.

Maybe there could be some options in the configuration that can (but don't by default) limit certain features to Mastodon's standard for those who really need the Mastodon UX with a non-Mastodon backend.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #snac2 #Akkoma #Friendica #WebInterface

@Mark Andrew 🇨🇭 I guess that, more often than not, the only new developments that are widely welcome are those that happen on Mastodon, that still don't make Mastodon feel different, and that don't introduce features to Mastodon that are (considered) bad on 𝕏.

This alone is the reason why many Mastodon admins hold on to older Mastodon versions for their dear lives: They want to boycott new Mastodon features which they don't like, but they don't have what it takes to soft-fork or even only hard-fork Mastodon and remove the new features.

Now, when it comes to developments in the Fediverse outside of Mastodon, they tend to be even more nerve-grating for Mastodon users because they often aren't in line with Mastodon and its culture at all. That is, many Mastodon users don't even notice that these features exist unless these features directly hit their timeline. But once they do, they're considered bad new developments even though they've actually been around for much longer than Mastodon itself.

For example, quote-posts and full-text search. Mastodon users tend to be staunchly against both because they're used to harass and dogpile minorities on 𝕏. If at all, they're only okay with these if they come with an opt-in, and/or if server admins can turn them off entirely.

If only they knew that Friendica has had both since May, 2010, five years and eight months longer than Mastodon has even existed. That Friendica has been search-indexing and able to quote-post any public Mastodon toot since Mastodon's very launch. I guess they'd demand the immediate destruction of Friendica or at least its complete and permanent defederation.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #FullTextSearch #Mastodon #Friendica

@Leave X - Protect Democracy Tell that to those who are hostile even towards non-Mastodon Fediverse users because they don't act precisely like Mastodon users (or like Mastodon users are supposed to act), and because they refuse to adopt Mastodon's culture.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #MastodonCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@Jakub Urbanowicz So I guess this change should be proposed to (streams) and Forte.

As I've said, the *keys fail rather ungracefully as they're caught off-guard.

#FediMeta #FediMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Sharkey

@Chao-c'

BTW I had account on identi.ca, which was StatusNet powered (I believe).

It was. At least until Evan and Erin could no longer justify it running on that janky OStatus protocol. The result was the ActivityPump protocol, the pump.io software and Identi.ca's switch to pump.io with all hands on board.

Yes, and it should not be implemented in Ruby or PHP or something like that. I have seen one online discussion forum being rewritten from PHP to Rust few years ago, and the improvement in responsiveness of the web platform was amazing. (I do C, not Rust, but C is too oldschool now, and the performance penalty of Rust is minor, probably not noticeable at all)

This reminds me of how the Fediverse is all over the place in terms of programming languages. Everyone has their own Holy Grail.

Friendica and its descendants are written in PHP. They may not be the fastest (even though what bogged down early Friendica were its heavyweight federation connectors to everywhere, especially the one for Facebook that came in 2011). Mike either discarded or rewrote these when he rewrote Red. But they happily run on a run-of-the-mill LAMP stack.

Mastodon is written in Ruby on Rails. Hubzilla runs circles around it in terms of performance per account/channel, and that has to say something. The only thing that managed to top this was early diaspora*, written in Ruby on Rails for Mac with MongoDB as the database system.

The *omas are built in Elixir. Granted, they're utter featherweights, especially considering their features. They're legendary for their low server impact. Then again, Pleroma apparently is spaghetti code straight from hell. Its own devs often don't have a clue where to go look for bugs, much less how to fix them. (Miraculously, the Akkoma devs do manage to get ride of quite a number of them.)

The *keys are built in TypeScript and Vue.js. I guess one reason why Misskey is infamous for having so many forks and forks of forks is because there are tons of people who can code in JavaScript, the primary mobile programming language.

Iceshrimp.NET is a still very incomplete "rewrite" of old Iceshrimp in C#. It was largely tackled to get rid of all those nasty bugs inherited from Misskey that even Misskey doesn't manage to get rid of. I've heard quite some outcry: Iceshrimp.NET is a sell-out to Microsoft. I guess whoever uttered that didn't go check who owns TypeScript.

PieFed is a dead giveaway: Python. And PieFed makes more headlines in the Threadiverse for server politics than for its underlying technology, except that Lemmy pales in comparison.

GoToSocial is a dead giveaway, too: Go. And it was one of the first Fediverse server applications to not come with a Web UI. Those who use it for a single-user server often don't even bother installing one and use some Mastodon app or other instead. Besides, why drag around a Web UI if there are much better third-party Web UIs than whatever you could whip up?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Iceshrimp #IceshrimpJS #Iceshrimp.NET #PieFed #GoToSocial #PHP #RubyOnRails #Elixir #JavaScript #TypeScript #VueJS #C# #Python #Go

@Chao-c'

I believe there was always the best interest of Mastodon developers to enable their users to engage with content like PeerTube videos, WordPress blog posts, and so on.

WordPress has always been the tricky one out of these.

On the one hand, there was the promise to be able to follow WordPress blogs from Mastodon without resorting to RSS or Atom. And there was the promise to WordPress users to increase their subscribers by the folks in the Fediverse.

On the other hand, there was Mastodon's refusal to render Article-type objects such as those that WordPress sent. And I'm not even talking about rendering them without utterly defacing them. AFAIR, Automattic wasn't really pleased to see Mastodon only linking to WordPress blog posts. (By the way, the *omas and *keys show WordPress blog posts with no problems, even though they consider themselves microblogging apps, too.)

You also mention, that Hubzilla was first application ready to deliberately block other platforms... and then accuse Mastodon of doing the same

Not Hubzilla. (streams) and Forte were the first to have the User Agent Filter and even that not before September, 2024. FedUp, which locks out everything that's incompatible with enclosed conversations, wasn't there before 2025. Neither of these two was backported to Hubzilla.

All that Hubzilla has is ActivityPub being optional. And even that comes from ActivityPub still being an add-on plus the potential desire of Hubzilla users to have a 100% nomadic channel with nothing non-nomadic interfering. Mario and Harald do see it as a potential drawbridge. But it's mostly a historical relic from the times when Mike dreamt of the Grid. In fact, Hubzilla still has Friendica's "federate with everything that moves" attitude deep inside its DNA.

Also, if anyone is interested in blocking the non-Mastodon Fediverse, or large parts of it, from Mastodon, it's individual Mastodon users who have never gotten over their first message from Calckey or Friendica or whatever. The Mastodon devs, well, probably not so much. They want to make the non-Mastodon Fediverse look as bad as they can get away with, but they can't afford locking it out entirely.

I mean, I've actually taken into consideration submitting a feature request in Mastodon's GitHub repository for one or various means of excluding the non-Mastodon Fediverse from individual accounts or even entire servers, if only to see the comments. But I don't think the devs would even only take building that option into consideration, also because it might anger certain other actors like Ghost, Flipboard, Automattic...

But there is no reason to block entire platforms.

Mike Macgirvin will disagree with you.

In fact, almost everyone will disagree with you if you tell them that one of the platforms that can be blocked is Threads.

Myself, I would like to learn Rust and perhaps join some ActivityPub project in Rust, which would not be so strictly focused on being Xitter clone and would support more media options, would display more than 4 image attachments, would be very user configurable, be aware of status size limits of platforms of mentioned users, etc.

Plume is written in Rust. As it so happens, its development is, let's say, dormant. I mean, it outclasses WriteFreely in a whole bunch of ways, be it because it has its own built-in image file space, be it because it supports likes and comments, be it because its Web UI is more straight-forward than WriteFreely's. But its devs don't have any time for it, they won't have any for the foreseeable future, and they recommend everyone who is interested in Plume to join WriteFreely instead.

Maybe they can use an additional main dev who can forward the project (along their plans anyway), merge 3rd-party pull requests and such. It'd be a shame to see it go to waste.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #WordPress #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Plume

@Chao-c'

The wiki reveals even different timeline:

"The wiki" sounds funny to someone who has three wikis of his own on his Hubzilla channel. Anyway...

To me, it seems, that Gargon simply was not as colossal nerd, as others, and somehow managed to create cult following of sufficient number of users, which were not really techies.

Gargron simply was lucky.

I think it was in 2016 already that German tech media got interested in decentralised alternatives to corporate silos. Mastodon caught their interest, being developed in Germany and all. Pleroma didn't, in spite of being developed in Germany, too, not to mention more feature-rich than Mastodon. Friendica was developed in Germany back then already, too, but it seemed like either tech media weren't interested in alternatives to something that needed alternatives much more than Twitter, or Friendica managed to continue to fly under the radar even then.

Anyway, Mastodon got media coverage, and nothing else did.

In 2017, right-wingers started attacking furries and queers on Twitter. They had to escape somewhere. Tumblr wasn't it, having been pretty much killed by being bought out and G-rated. But someone happened to know Mastodon due to the media coverage whereas nobody happened to know Pleroma due to no media coverage at all. So those furries and queers escaped to Mastodon. "Awoo" was briefly part of Mastodon's culture in the late 2010s due to the high furry-to-non-furry rate.

From then on, Mastodon had the two advantages of past media coverage and more users. The rest was like a snowball, essentially. The more users something has, the more users something gains by inviting them.

I guess Friendica and Hubzilla, both of which already existed back then, suffered from the same choice of mindsets: "If you build it, they will come," "We'll first need to get this and that fixed before we're ready for prime time," "Can't someone else take care of that? I'm bad at advertising stuff!" Plus, of course, people who really were bad at advertising stuff to anyone who's neither a developer nor a server admin.

I was thinking about need for decentralized social media since at least 2009, as I was watching the old web to slowly loose any relevance. (My Facebook account was canceled without any explanations as soon as perhaps sometimes like 2010?).

In 2009, there already was StatusNet. Granted, it was so obscure that vastly more people knew the "lighthouse server" Identi.ca than StatusNet itself. StatusNet supported the Twitter client API, but there were vastly more mobile apps that were hard-coded to Identi.ca than such where you could choose a StatusNet server because the huge majority of those who knew Identi.ca didn't even know it was part of a network. Identi.ca held some 90% of all StatusNet users.

By the way, what killed StatusNet was when Identi.ca changed its backend from StatusNet to pump.io and its protocol from OStatus to ActivityPump, thus becoming incompatible with the rest of StatusNet. What remained was largely unable to stand alone. What kind of helped Identi.ca (OStatus as a profile sucked so badly that Evan and Erin themselves had to whip up ActivityPump) did the opposite to StatusNet. A bit later, the FSF scooped it up, forked it to GNU social and eventually merged what was left of StatusNet into GNU social. It got ActivityPub support later on, but it's gone now, too.

Also, in 2010, Mistpark was around, and so was diaspora* (or what already existed of it at that time). diaspora* had tons of advance publicity due to its crowdfunding stunt, but then the four devs didn't manage to deliver before public interest had faded away, even with Mike's help on the protocol (not even kidding here). And speaking of Mike, he built Mistpark, but almost nobody came because he did nothing in terms of advertising. Even though Mistpark of May, 2010 was more powerful than diaspora* is today. Even though Mistpark took two months for a public alpha and four for a stable point release whereas it took diaspora* years to go beyond alpha, not to mention the entire development team being replaced.

I guess you would have been a prime Friendica user candidate. Particularly, you would have been one of those who were happy on a Friendica node without the performance-hogging Facebook connector in times when everyone was seeking out and piling onto the nodes with that connector, just to see them close registration at not even 150 accounts.

I was thinking about basing it on bunch of combined RSS feeds, the publicly compatible vs. the activity stream, which is not so different from from like ActivityPub is made today, except that signing of content with public keys is more advanced concept, that what I was able to imagine.

Well, they say that ActivityPub is glorified RSS with a rubbery spec.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Pleroma #StatusNet #Identi.ca #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #OStatus #ActivityPump #ActivityPub

@Chao-c'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seriously?

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

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

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

Mastodon is simply lights years ahead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@Chao-c'

Also, ALT text translates with the rest of the post, which can be helpful for images which contain only foreign language text.

Hubzilla is the most incompatible ActivityPub software in Fediverse. You do just lot of things wrong, to put it mildly.

You still seem to think that Gargron invented ActivityPub and the Fediverse, that Mastodon is the one and only reference implementation of ActivityPub, and that everything that doesn't work exactly like Mastodon is broken.

Here are the facts:

Mastodon was launched in January, 2016.

Hubzilla was launched in March, 2015. Counting an earlier incarnation named Red, it was created in May, 2012, when Friendica's creator re-wrote his own fork of a Friendica fork of his own.

Mastodon implemented ActivityPub in September, 2017, when the spec wasn't finalised yet.

Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub in July, 2017. Two months before Mastodon. Hubzilla was the first software to ever implement ActivityPub.

Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub strictly by the book. It has always tried to stick as close to the official W3C ActivityPub spec as possible.

Mastodon, in stark contrast, has always been stretching the ActivityPub spec until it broke. Not only that, but it has always been adding stuff outside the spec. First it did so to take over certain features from StatusNet which was its original protocol. More recently, it did so with the very intention to break compatibility with the rest of the Fediverse and make everything that isn't Mastodon look broken. And people like you keep falling for it because they think they know for a fact that Mastodon is the ActivityPub reference implementation.

The whole Fediverse has to break the ActivityPub spec just to be able to federate with Mastodon.

yes, the Hubzilla author is writing Streams, with nomadic identity, but it also means, that he understands, that Hubzilla approach is kind of dead-end.

You know nothing. Whereas I can rattle down the whole history from Mistpark in 2010 to today.

Mike Macgirvin, creator of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte created his post-Hubzilla server applications because he kept advancing the Zot protocol. And he couldn't implement these advancements into Hubzilla because they bore the chance of breaking compatibility with what already existed.

(streams) is not a completely new development, nor is it a straight Hubzilla fork.

(streams) is a 2022 fork of Roadhouse.
Which was a 2022 fork of either the third Osada or Mistpark 2020 or Redmatrix 2020.
Which were 2020 forks of Zap (or each other, but at least one of them was forked from Zap).
Which was a 2018 fork of either Hubzilla itself or the first Osada, which was a 2018 fork of Hubzilla.

Osada and Zap were created to develop Zot6. In its early stages of concept, Mike expected Zot6 to be incompatible with everything else. Mind you, he didn't see that as something bad. Advancing Zot was necessary because the then-current version of Zot was less than optimal. And Mike's vision was a decentralised, nomadic network named the "Grid", entirely based on Zot. The Grid would have been vastly superior to the existing Fediverse in every way possible.

So the issue with his early draft of Zot6 was that it was quite incompatible with non-nomadic protocols. Nomadic Zot6 content could not be translated into non-nomadic protocols like the diaspora* protocol or ActivityPub.

Thus, developing Zot6 on Hubzilla was out of question. Zot6 would have broken too much on Hubzilla. Besides, Hubzilla was bad as a platform to experiment on due to its wealth of supported protocols and other features, all of which would have had to be made compatible with Zot6.

And this is the real reason why Mike created Osada and Zap. From how I see it, and how I remember what he talked about back in the day (I was there, yes), he first forked Osada from Hubzilla. Then he ripped everything out that he didn't need, including support for all protocols except for Zot itself, ActivityPub, RSS and Atom, including the CMS stuff like articles, planning cards, notes, wikis and webpages, etc. Then he modified what was left against his early version of Zot6.

Then he discovered that a cloned Osada channel couldn't properly send content via ActivityPub.

Then, shortly afterwards, he forked Osada into Zap. He removed nomadic identity from Osada which kept ActivityPub and ActivityPub support from Zap which stayed nomadic.

The idea was to have a nomadic, cloned channel on Zap as your main channel that would only connect to Hubzilla, Osada and Zap, and to have an additional, non-nomadic channel on Osada that would serve as a "gateway" between nomadic Zap and the non-nomadic ActivityPub Fediverse.

Of course, this was highly impractical. But by 2019, Mike found a way to make Zot6 compatible with non-nomadic protocols. So, in early 2019, Mike discontinued Osada and forked a new Osada from Zap which only differred from Zap by having ActivityPub support while still being nomadic. This enabled Mike to have one development platform for Zot6 in conjunction with non-nomadic protocols and another one on which ActivityPub did not stand in the way.

Later in 2019, both Osada and Zap got stable releases. At that point, Osada and Zap were identical in code. Both had ActivityPub support. It was included into their cores now and no longer an add-on like on Hubzilla. They only had two differences. One was the branding. The other one was that Osada servers had ActivityPub activated by default, and Zap servers had ActivityPub disabled by default. Keeping Osada around was unnecessary now, so ActivityPub was activated by default on Zap, and Osada was discontinued. Zot6 was so stable that it was soon backported to Hubzilla.

Mike wasn't done yet, though. He now wanted to develop Zot8. Again, he did not want to develop protocol changes on stable production software that people potentially daily-drove.

Thus, three new forks emerged in 2020: another Osada, Mistpark 2020 (a.k.a. Misty) and Redmatrix 2020 (named after the Red Matrix, the name that Hubzilla bore from late 2012 to early 2015 between being created as Red and being re-branded into Hubzilla). Mike used them to develop Zot8. They were identical in all but brand identity.

This was fully intentional on Mike's part to confuse the hell out of the brand fetishists that were growing more and more numerous in the Fediverse. His goal was for people to declare Osada or Misty or Redmatrix the best Fediverse software and superior to everything else, just for him to tell them that Osada, Misty and Redmatrix are absolutely identical. In fact, the three remained identical to Zap in features.

Zot8 never got stable because Mike kept advancing it further and further. In early 2022, he was at Zot11. But Zot11 was so incompatible with everything else, including previous Zot versions, that Mike declared it a new protocol of its own and renamed it Nomad. In order to test-drive it, he forked Osada or Misty or Redmatrix into Roadhouse. After all, there were people who were daring enough to daily-drive production channels on Osada, Misty and Redmatrix, albeit only few. Roadhouse was still identical in features to Zap, Osada, Misty and Redmatrix.

It was now possible to crossgrade between Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse by simply rebasing the server code.

Later in 2022, he created a new fork of Roadhouse itself. The reason for this was not further protocol advancement. No, this time, it mostly had branding and licensing reasons.

First of all, he wanted to make that fork as easy for others to fork and adopt as possible. Everything he had developed so far was under the MIT license (he himself had relicensed Friendica under the AGPLv3 in 2011, but he didn't actually develop on Friendica; he developed on a fork named Free-Friendika that was still MIT-licensed and then backported the changes to the Friendica repository, and Red was a Free-Friendika fork). This new repository was released into the public domain. At first, the whole thing was never primarily intended to be installed on servers as it was, but rather to be forked as the base of something new.

At least the core and Mike's own add-ons were. What third-party add-ons from Hubzilla times were still there got to keep their maze of licenses. This was intentional on Mike's part, too. It would make it impossible for commercial players to scoop up the whole thing and relicense it into something non-free and commercial without breaking any licenses, or without pumping tons of money into their legal department to work around that maze of licenses.

Also, Mike removed any and all naming and branding from the software. He absolutely intentionally made it nameless. You've read that right. He did this for two reasons. One, whoever wanted to fork it would have to give the fork an individual name and an individual branding. Two, this was to mess with brand fanbois and brand fetishists even more: This thing had no brand to gush over to begin with.

Furthermore, Mike removed all nodeinfo code that he could possibly get away with removing. Again, this was intentional. One intention was to stop this software from automatically joining the "my Fediverse project is bigger than yours" and "my server is bigger than yours" rat races. He intentionally did everything he could to keep this software away from The Federation, Fediverse Observer, FediDB and the like.

The other intention was for the case of commercial players looking for free code to steal. If this software had really taken off and left its stats proving its popularity everywhere, some big commercial player would have been likely to try and steal this software, make it commercial and non-free and release it as their own original creation. So his intention was for them to not even be able to find it in this case. (This, by the way, was the reason why he relicensed Friendica under the AGPLv3, and why he hardly ever spoke about Free-Friendika: Now that Friendica was growing popular, he didn't want big commercial players to scoop up code of his under a license that they could change to non-free.)

This server application became the first and only one in the Fediverse with no fixed server type identifier, in fact, with none at all by default. It has one text field for the server name, just like Mastodon and Friendica and Hubzilla and the like. But it has an additional field where the server type, i.e. the identifier for the software, can be entered. If none is entered, it's derived from the server name. Mike used to have a server that identified as "Y" because, as he said, "Y is not X."

While the application itself is nameless (for it still is), the code repository did require a name of sorts. Mike named the repository "streams".

Now, the community needed something to call that nameless software when they spoke about it. So they unofficially established "(streams)", complete with parentheses that make sure that this is not actually the name of this software. Those who say, "Streams," with a capital S and no parentheses, and who use that term as if it's an official name, usually sincerely believe that this is the official name.

Mike himself uses "streams" without the parentheses because even he needs something to call his own software by. Before Forte was made, he preferred talking about the streams repository without directly mentioning the software. And he himself denied that (streams) is even a project. It's just a bunch of code that runs.

As far as I know, it was now possible to freely crossgrade between six different server applications because they were still identical in features. Only that Mike also had six server applications to take care of now.

So on December 31st, 2022, Mike discontinued Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse. Admins who ran either of these on their servers were recommended to rebase their servers to the streams repository. In this case, by the way, the old branding was kept. I've seen a server that still had "zap" as its subdomain which indicated that it was set up as a Zap server, that had Misty branding, but that actually ran (streams).

From then on, Mike dedicated his time to maintaining and developing only the streams repository. He still occasionally helped Hubzilla out, though.

In 2023, the Mitra creator and developer silverpill approached Mike. The goal was to make Mitra nomadic. I guess earlier attempts using a blockchain and crypto technology didn't come to fruition, so it had to be Mike's way which had proven itself stable for more than a decade. However, Mitra was to remain based on ActivityPub.

It was in this exchange that Mike realised that ActivityPub could indeed be used for nomadic identity if a few things were added to it. One outcome was FEP-ef61 "Portable Objects" which introduced decentralised IDs (DIDs) that would not be bound to any one server domain.

Instead of creating a whole new server application to play with, Mike simply made a "nomadic" branch in the streams repository (even though the software was already nomadic) in which he implemented support for nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Support as in (streams) understanding it while internally still using Nomad for nomadicity.

In June, 2024, Mike considered the "nomadic" branch reliable enough and merged it into the "dev" branch.

In July, 2024, Mike merged the "dev" branch into the "release" branch which caused DIDs as per FEP-ef61 to be rolled out to existing production servers. On accounts created on this new version, channels would have a DID internally. On accounts greated on any previous version, even new channels would keep the old ID system for the time being. This way, existing accounts and channels weren't messed with.

However, what had worked under supervised and restricted lab conditions completely blew up under real-life conditions. Again, I was there on (streams) with a pre-DID account and two channels on it. I still have them. (streams) channels wouldn't federate with anything anymore. It had become impossible to send anything anywhere. What Mike was facing was nothing short of an enigma because not even he knew what was going in.

So he started tinkering. In mid-August, Mike forked the streams repository into something named and branded Forte. He did so so he could rip the Nomad protocol out while still keeping the entire functionality. He had to get rid of Nomad because he had discovered that (streams) got confused juggling all the many IDs it had to deal with, so he had to weed out the Nomad and Zot6 IDs to make things easier. But he couldn't possibly have done that on (streams) proper.

This way, Mike created the very first Fediverse server software that uses ActivityPub for full nomadicity, including cloning.

By the end of August, things got back to normal. But Mike, having spent every free minute in the last few weeks to get (streams) back into working condition, was burned out. He sent an open message around in which he declared that he would completely retire from Fediverse development, and both the streams repository and Forte were up for grabs.

But nobody was found who could take over either. (streams) and Forte probably had way fewer than 100 users combined. Those few who would have been able to maintain either didn't have time. One did have time and was willing to do so, but he didn't know how to code. He eventually did start teaching himself, and he occasionally contributes merge requests, but there was no way he could take over as the only dev for either, much less both. So Mike had to go on, whether he wanted or not, albeit at a somewhat slower pace.

This is why Mike is still developing (streams) and Forte to this day.

By the way: The reason why Mike "abandoned" his old software was because he needed to invest all his time into protocol development and advancement. Mike isn't the one to constantly maintain stable server software unless he absolutely has to.

In 2011, he handed Friendica over to two new developers so that he had time to create the Zot protocol.

In 2015 already, he handed Hubzilla over to two new developers so that he had time to explore the advancement of the Zot protocol. He still contributed to Hubzilla's development.

In 2019, he wanted to hand Osada and Zap over to the community, now that they were stable, so he had time to develop Zot8. But the Osada/Zap community was so tiny that he couldn't get a new dedicated developer team together.

In 2024, he wanted to hand (streams) and Forte over to the community because fixing (streams)' huge identity bug, which led to Forte's creation, had burnt him out. He wanted to quit. But, again, he couldn't because (streams) didn't have a single user who had both the time and the knowledge to take over as the new main dev.

Consider this: Gargron was a young man when he made Mastodon. I think he was still at university. Mike Macgirvin made Friendica, he had some three decades of professional work in IT and software under his belly. Gargron was at the beginning of his career. Mike had quit and moved from the USA to the western Australian outback where he has been living as a farmer ever since. He might actually be older than Gargron's parents.

while nomadic identitity would be cool thing, currently it does not exist

Take off your Mastodon glasses and look at the Fediverse and what it actually is like.

Nomadic identity does exist. Not as a vague idea, not as a concept on paper, but as a stable, production-grade feature that has been used to its full extent for well over a decade now. Just because Mastodon doesn't have it, doesn't mean the Fediverse doesn't have it. And just because Mastodon doesn't recognise it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The Fediverse has loads of features which Mastodon users want "the Fediverse" to have. It has features which many Mastodon users have never wanted "the Fediverse" to have such as quote-posts, introduced by Mike Macgirvin on Mistpark in 2010. It even has features that are completely and utterly unimaginable for Mastodon users, and it has had even these since as early as 2010, 2012 or 2015.

Nomadic identity was invented by Mike Macgirvin in 2011 with the Zot protocol.

It was first implemented by him in mid-2012 when he rewrote Red against Zot. This means that Hubzilla itself has been offering full-blown nomadic identity since 2012, almost four years longer than Mastodon has existed.

This very Hubzilla channel that I'm commenting from right here, right now, is actually nomadic. It is cloned across two servers: hub.netzgemeinde.eu and hub.hubzilla.de. And it has been since before Elon Musk announced to take over Twitter in early 2022. When I sent you this comment, it was automatically sync'd over to hub.hubzilla.de. When you sent the comment that I'm replying to, it was automatically sync'd over to hub.hubzilla.de. The clone has actually been of great help at least once.

Unfortunately, non-nomadic software identifies cloned channels as fully separate accounts with fully separate identities. But rest assured: @Jupiter Rowland on hub.hubzilla.de is my clone. It's the live, hot, real-time, bidirectional backup of the main instance of my channel, @Jupiter Rowland on hub.netzgemeinde.eu that you're following now. They're both one and the same channel with one and the same identity, [email protected], even though Mastodon is unable to see it as such. Go check both. You'll see they've got all the same content in them, including comments from others. Including your comment. How else can [email protected] possibly have one of your comments under a post if you've only sent that comment to [email protected] if it weren't for nomadic identity?

Even nomadic identity via ActivityPub is available as a stable, production-grade feature in stable, production-grade software right now as we speak. Forte was the first to be fully nomadic via nothing but ActivityPub, as of mid-August, 2024. Tootik, based on Gemini instead of the World Wide Web, is fully nomadic at server level, too. Mitra is fully nomadic by means of the Minimitra client.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #ActivityPub #Zot #Zot6 #Zot8 #Nomad #Friendica #Red #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Mistpark #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Redmatrix2020 #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Tootik #Mitra #Minimitra #NomadicIdentity

@Chao-c'

People know, that there are alternatives, and explore them.

Just because you know, doesn't mean literally everyone knows.

Every single Mastodon newbie is being implied to or outright told that Mastodon is the only thing in the Fediverse. They don't choose Mastodon because it suits them the best. I mean, most of them by far already have problems choosing a Mastodon server. In fact, they don't choose Mastodon within the Fediverse at all. They don't even know they have a choice. If they did, Sharkey and Friendica would be much bigger.

I think it can replace also Facebook and Instagram.

It's a far cry from either.

Pixelfed was created as an Instagram clone and a drop-in replacement for Instagram. You can literally import entire Instagram accounts into Pixelfed.

Friendica was created as early as 2010 as an alternative to Facebook. It has all the features a social network needs. Bidirectional contacts like Facebook friends. Dedicated profile fields as opposed to only a small handful of multi-purpose profile fields. Contact suggestions based on your and their profile. Contact suggestions based on how many contacts you have in common. What everyone believes Google+ has invented with its circles (Mastodon lists on 'roids). Discussion groups. Moderated discussion groups. Private discussion groups. No ridiculously low arbitrary character limit.

I challenge you to use Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte as your only daily driver for a year. Not just dip a toe in, but take off the Mastodon glasses and exclusively daily-drive it. Use it for everything that you use Mastodon for right now without ever falling back to your Mastodon account for that time. And then I want to hear from you whether Mastodon really is a full-blown, fully-featured Facebook alternative and better at being that than Friendica and its family.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Facebook #FacebookAlternative #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte

@Mitch Conner @silverpill Exactly this exists on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. With even more options, actually. Hubzilla calls them "privacy groups", (streams) and Forte call them "access lists".

Now it comes: You can not only post to one specific such group/list. You can also post to several ones. Or to any combination of privacy groups/access lists and single contacts.

Better yet: You can even exclude single contacts or the members of certain privacy groups/access lists. You can post to the members of privacy groups Foo and Bar, except if they're also in privacy group Baz, and except for Alice, and in addition, you can post to Bob and Carol.

In addition, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte don't just define who receives the post. They don't simply flag it a DM either. They flag it "restricted" and only grant the recipients permission to read the post, read any comments and interact with anything in the conversation. In practice, this also means that those who have these permissions can not only interact with the original poster, but just as well with each other, because it isn't a DM.

Anything that doesn't understand these permissions, e.g. Mastodon, do understand it as a DM. This limits their possibilities to interact, but it's the safe way.

And yet, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte still have private and/or secret groups with moderation (like Facebook groups) on top of all this. (streams) and Forte even optionally have two levels of non-moderator users.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #PrivateGroups #Permissions #PrivacyGroups #AccessLists

@william ⁂ maggos @silverpill Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are much closer to Facebook-style social networking than to Twitter-style social media. In fact, they're descendants of Friendica, the first decentralised dedicated Facebook alternative. (Let's set aside that Hubzilla is usually referred to as something like a "social CMS" for a moment.)

They have multiple ways of rendering groups private, all of which go beyond Mastodon's way of making something private by limiting the receiving actors.

For starters, private groups only grant their own members permission to receive any content from the group. Also, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group stream. Furthermore, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group channel profile and its contacts. On Hubzilla, these are all separate options.

On top of all this, they can hide groups from directories. That way, these groups can be made known only by hearsay and/or personal contact to interested users. This doesn't necessarily make them private; it makes them secret.

All these options are available for normal, non-group-actor channels as well, by the way.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #PrivateGroups

@DavidM_yeg @Dennis What more is needed?

A full visual description of the settings, the people (of course, avoiding their gender and describing their skin tone rather than their race), their outfits, the surroundings?

The title of the film, including an explanation what this film is, who made it, what it is about, when it was released, who the characters are and who the actors are?

Regardless of neither of this belonging into the alt-text because information that is neither available in the message text nor plainly visible to sighted users in the image does not belong into the alt-text? Because there are people who cannot access alt-text?

https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/wiki/jupiter_rowland/How(20)to(20)describe(20)images(20)in(20)the(20)Fediverse/Don(27)t(20)explain(20)things(20)or(20)give(20)other(20)information(20)only(20)in(20)alt-text(21)

https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/wiki/jupiter_rowland/How(20)to(20)describe(20)images(20)in(20)the(20)Fediverse/Can(20)everyone(20)access(20)alt-text(3f)

And, pray tell, how is all this supposed to fit in 512 characters or fewer so that Misskey, Calckey, Firefish, Iceshrimp-JS, Sharkey, CherryPick and the other Misskey forks won't discard the alt-text?

https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/wiki/jupiter_rowland/How(20)to(20)describe(20)images(20)in(20)the(20)Fediverse/How(20)long(20)can(20)alt-text(20)be(3f)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #Sharkey #CherryPick #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

@william ⁂ maggos In this regard, Mastodon has only got one major advantage: It has an official app.

Phone users used to see Twitter as a phone app that they loaded from their app store. Mastodon is the only *blogging thing in the Fediverse that they can load from their app store.

This is one reason why just about all Mastodon newbies use the official app and why they're on mastodon.social (it's the default in the official app, and since they don't know what this setting does, they leave it on default).

Mastodon even gets away with an official app that's far from good, much less fully features. All the newbies don't have anything to compare with. If Mastodon is a phone app to them, then the official app's feature set is Mastodon's feature set. If a feature isn't implemented in the official app, then Mastodon doesn't have it. I dare say that well over 80% of all Mastodon users have never in their lives used Mastodon's Web UI.

If someone takes the step and moves from the official Mastodon app to Ivory or Mona or IceCubes or Tusky or Fedilab or something like this, it's almost always the first time in their lives that they use an online service through an app that has a different name than the online service. Many people couldn't even imagine doing that.

This means that if Friendica and Hubzilla want to be more successful, growing beyond Mike's old "if you build it, they'll come" credo and advertising more isn't sufficient. People must be able to load Friendica/Hubzilla onto their phones from their app store. This requires an official app named "Friendica"/"Hubzilla" with a native, up-to-date iOS UI in the Apple App Store and one with a native, up-to-date Android UI in the Google Play Store. The existence of an official phone app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store is essential for being considered existent in the first place.

A commonplace attitude on Friendica and even more so on Hubzilla is that both can be installed as a PWA. But seriously, 99.9% of all phone users don't even know that PWAs exist. They don't know what that is. Not to mention that they expect and demand a native mobile UI in the style of their phone OS and not a generic Web UI.

Now, what would this app have to look like?

If the advantages of Friendica and Hubzilla over Mastodon are to be emphasised and underlined, and if this app is to become people's one and only daily driver UI, it will have to be fully featured. Minus the settings for the Web UI (e.g. the theme settings and the PDL editor on Hubzilla), minus stuff that you'll never need if you only ever use the phone app and never the server UI (e.g. Webpages on Hubzilla), but otherwise fully featured. This would also demonstrate just how vastly more powerful Friendica and Hubzilla are than Mastodon.

The obvious downside is that such an app would be a feature monster. Bigger and more feature-laden than any Android e-mail app or OpenStreetMap editor.

There has been some talk about building an official Hubzilla phone app. Some Hubzilla users have proposed an app that only offers the very basics. However, their idea behind this is not to make the app easier for newbies to use, but to make it easier for the developers to build. They're often still stuck in the early 2010s when phone apps for websites were considered gimmicks. They think that people will only use the app when they're out and about, and when they're back home, they'll sit down behind their computers and use the Web interface. Thus, phone apps only need the most basic features implemented.

But 2026 is not 2011. The huge majority of Mastodon users only use Mastodon through a phone app. Even when they're at home. As I've said: If the app doesn't have a feature, the whole product doesn't have the feature, regardless of whether or not the feature is implemented in the server backend and even in the Web frontend.

Besides, even Friendica's basic features that you'll need all the time are a lot. Hubzilla's basic features that you'll need all the time are even more numerous.

Shall people be limited to posting in public when they're on a phone because the phone app doesn't have any permission settings?

Shall people be limited to posting to their contacts when they're on a phone because someone decided that support for groups would make the phone app too complex?

Shall people wait until they're home, and they've got some time to fire up a computer, open a Web browser and log onto the Web interface to accept connection requests because the phone app doesn't have any connection settings? What if they don't have a computer?

Let's face it, social networking itself is a complex thing. And I mean actual social networking. Not misusing glorified SMS as a social network. Real social networking. Facebook-level social networking. Google+-level social networking. MySpace-level social networking.

Thus, a social networking phone app with all features necessary for real social networking has to be complex. This isn't a Friendica/Hubzilla issue. Don't believe that the official Facebook apps are simple.

This is also why so many prefer 𝕏 over Facebook. Facebook is complex. Facebook isn't just register, follow, post. 𝕏 is much more simple. 𝕏 is glorified SMS. 𝕏 is literally just register, follow, tweet. Facebook is rocket science whereas 𝕏 is for dumb-dumbs.

And it's because Mastodon is so lacking that it's for dumb-dumbs by Fediverse standards. In fact, if you don't read those panicky "it's too complicated because you have to know what a server is" posts, if you just load the app and create an account, Mastodon, through the official app, is for dumb-dumbs by all standards.

However, those who actually are on Facebook are willing to put up with something more complex. They need something more complex than glorified SMS for dumb-dumbs. They need the extra features that Facebook has that 𝕏 doesn't, even if these are the very features that deny Facebook the "for dumb-dumbs" attribute.

Send them to Mastodon, and they'll be irritated and even repelled because this feature isn't there, and that feature isn't there, and that feature is cut down beyond recognition, and they can't find any interesting people (not because Mastodon is decentralised, and the interesting people are on other servers, but because Mastodon's directory sucks arse in comparison with Facebook's), and what's with that stupid character limit?

On Friendica and Hubzilla, this feature and that feature have been there for longer than Mastodon itself, that feature is even more powerful than on Facebook proper, interesting people are being shoved into their faces once they've filled out their profile, even more so once they've got some connections, and there is no character limit worth speaking of.

But as long as Friendica and Hubzilla don't have official, fully daily-driveable phone apps named "Friendica" and "Hubzilla" respectively, they simply don't exist.

Granted, there's another obstacle. Many Mastodon users say the Fediverse needs a Facebook alternative. If you tell them about Friendica and its descendants, some will be very thankful because they've genuinely never heard of any of these.

Others will tell you that they know Friendica and maybe even Hubzilla. But they also say that none of these are Facebook alternatives. For when they say, "alternative," what they really mean is, "1:1 clone, just with a different name and decentralised and with ActivityPub and without spying and without the recent enshittification and without the evil CEO, otherwise absolutely identical."

One big aspect of this is that, as they say, the Fediverse needs an alternative to Facebook Groups. Friendica groups are exactly that because they were designed to be exactly that. Hubzilla forums, (streams) groups, Forte groups, all just that. But according to these people, they don't count because they aren't handled in precisely the same way as Facebook groups. Facebook groups aren't separate accounts. And different equals bad.

What really has me shake my head is that those who want a 1:1 Facebook clone continue to use Mastodon as a Facebook alternative. Even though Friendica and its family are vastly closer to Facebook regardless. Even though Mastodon not only doesn't have groups at all, but it doesn't even have any support for external groups. Is shouting into the void with a bunch of hashtags and hoping the right people will hear you really that much better than a Friendica group or a Hubzilla forum or maybe a PieFed community?

By the way: Just how faithful a Twitter clone is Mastodon really, seeing as Misskey and the Forkeys have the odd Twitter feature that Mastodon still lacks, seeing as even Mastodon gradually becomes more complex than 𝕏, much more so than when-it-still-was-good Twitter?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #PieFed #Privacy #Permission #Permissions #Groups #FediverseGroups #FediGroups #App #PhoneApp #iPhoneApp #iOSApp #AndroidApp #SocialNetwork #SocialNetworking #Twitter #𝕏 #Facebook #FacebookGroups

@Danny Boling ☮️ @ADHDeanASL I'm already trying my best. I'm probably way ahead of your requirements. And I'm still constantly trying to up my game and be ahead of everyone's requirements.

I've been "studying" alt-texts and image descriptions both generally and in the Fediverse/in Mastodon's culture for a few years. I've read over 50 alt-text guides on the Web; here's a list I've compiled, complete with links: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/wiki/jupiter_rowland/How(20)to(20)describe(20)images(20)in(20)the(20)Fediverse/Other(20)resources(20)on(20)image(20)descriptions(20)and(20)alt-text.

In case the page behind this link wasn't obvious enough: Yes, I'm working on a wiki about image descriptions and alt-texts in the Fediverse. I take this topic that seriously. As it stands now, I have a bit over 30 rules that had better or actually must be followed when describing images and writing alt-texts in and for the Fediverse.

When I post images, I try hard to follow all these rules. I take into consideration who may receive my image post, what they know about what's in the image, what they don't know, what they may want to know and how curious they may potentially be about the topic, and I write my image descriptions accordingly. I also take the special culture in the Fediverse and particularly on Mastodon into consideration, especially Mastodon's fondness of very detailed image descriptions as well as Mastodon's dislike of having to ask for further information; at least I perceive the latter.

This is also why I rarely post images anymore. (Don't go looking for recent images on this channel that I'm commenting from right now. I've quit posting images here two years ago. I post them elsewhere in the Fediverse now and even that only rarely.) Posting and describing images properly is a huge undertaking if your image posts are all about super-obscure topics. And mine are.

The only images I've posted over the last two years are memes. They're fairly easy to handle. They only need one visual description, ideally a fairly short one even, and it goes into the alt-text. Still, they require explanations if folks won't understand them right off the bat. And they certainly won't understand my memes about the Fediverse or about very obscure 3-D virtual worlds.

In order to keep my meme posts a bit less extensive, I resort to linking to KnowYourMeme for explanations of meme templates. The alternative that many would prefer would be for me to explain the meme templates in the post, but that would add another five-digit number of characters to the post. Been there, actually done that: "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor" required over 12,000 characters of explanation.

I'd also post renderings from the 3-D virtual worlds that I sometimes meme about. But the effort to do so is a whole lot bigger. That's because I describe each one of my virtual world renderings twice. One is the "short" description that goes into the alt-text. The other one is the "long", actually fully detailed description that goes into the message text. The latter contains transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image, readable in the image or not. It also contains all explanations necessary to understand the image and its descriptions.

I haven't posted any virtual world renderings in two years now. I've been working on and off on a series of simple avatar portraits in slightly different outfits for over a year and a half now, and even the first image with three portraits isn't done yet, much less all four image for the first post or actually all images in the series.

My personal record of fairly uninterrupted image-describing is two full days, once for three images with some 73,000 characters of long descriptions, once for a single image with over 60,000 characters of long description. The latter does not include distilling the short description for the alt-text from the long description; I had to do that the morning of the third day.

Why they have to be that long? Here's my explanation: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/95b6e36d-7fcd-4791-8cc1-c93e8b9975a3.

Unfortunately, I don't have any example of a 3-D virtual world rendering that's recent enough that the image descriptions aren't painfully outdated.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

@calends :trantifa: 🏴️ Line breaks and the quotation marks from your keyboard are both terrible ideas in alt-text. Both are not officially count as elements supported in alt-text, and especially line breaks in alt-text are an invention by complete laypeople on Mastodon.



Line breaks are a bad idea because screen readers will consider each paragraph in your alt-text an individual alt-text for an individual image. And screen readers tend to start reading out alt-texts for images with something like, "Graphic."

So if your alt-text has three paragraphs, a screen reader will start reading out each one with, "Graphic."

Reference #1: Steve Faulkner (@Steve Faulkner), Short note on coding alt-text, TPGI, September 15th, 2015; https://www.tpgi.com/short-note-on-coding-alt-text/.

Reference #2: Adrian Roselli, Long alt, adrianroselli.com, April 20th, 2024, last update November 8th, 2024; https://adrianroselli.com/2024/04/long-alt.html



Double quotes from your keyboard are an even worse idea. That's because they can make certain Fediverse server applications malfunction. I'm not even joking here.

First of all, there's Hubzilla, the most feature-rich Fediverse server software of all and one of the most technologically advanced (https://hubzilla.org; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla). I'm commenting from Hubzilla right now.

When there are keyboard double quotes in an alt-text, Hubzilla renders them as their corresponding HTML entities: ". A screen reader will read them out as something like, "And quot," and raise its voice afterwards unless a full stop follows.

And then there are (streams) (https://codeberg.org/streams/streams; https://joinfediverse.wiki/(streams)) and Forte (https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte), both descendants of Hubzilla, created and still maintained by Hubzilla's original creator.

These two use keyboard double quotes as alt-text delimiters internally. So when they encounter the first keyboard double quote in an alt-text, they will assume that this is where the alt-text ends. They will not render the parts of the alt-text starting with that first keyboard double quote. Instead, they will silently discard them.

Quotation marks are unnecessary in alt-text anyway. In stark contrast to what everyone on Mastodon believes, alt-text is mostly for screen reader applications. But if you absolutely need quotation marks in alt-text, either use single quotes or typographically correct quotes (“” or »« or «»).

One more thing: You've mentioned "supplemental info". I sincerely hope that you aren't talking about explanations for the image itself.

Explanations, credits, license information and any other information that is neither present in the message text nor visible to sighted users in the image does not belong into alt-text.

Explanations and other extra information must always go into the message text where everyone can access it who can access the message!

Why? Because there are people who cannot access alt-texts. I'm still not joking.

I've explained this in my WIP wiki about image descriptions and alt-texts in the Fediverse: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/wiki/jupiter_rowland/How(20)to(20)describe(20)images(20)in(20)the(20)Fediverse/Can(20)everyone(20)access(20)alt-text(3f)

Reference: kwbell.eu (@KB), 'Alt' text for Mastodon images, April 9th, 2023, last edited June 1st, 2023

Another reference: these actual Mastodon posts which are comments on one of my posts from a few years ago, posted by a user whose hands don't work sufficiently enough to have the physical ability to open an alt-text.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@gnomicutterance/110685869957855464
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@gnomicutterance/110690586917684870
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@gnomicutterance/110690592405651398
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@gnomicutterance/110690603250669254
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@gnomicutterance/110691919197248049

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #A11y #Accessibility