#fedimeta — Public Fediverse posts

@sb  the chippy-choppy There won't be many left. Depending on how staunchly and extremely anti-AI you and (aspiring) server admins are, there won't be any left. Because it's technically impossible to set up a Fediverse server with absolutely no AI code underneath whatsoever.

The Linux mainline kernel itself contains AI code now. It's officially allowed as long as it's disclosed as such. Thus, you will have to avoid literally all servers running on Linux.

https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html

https://www.neowin.net/news/linus-torvalds-declares-massive-ai-fueled-code-surges-as-the-new-normal-for-linux/

NetBSD has very strict rules regarding AI-generated code. But it doesn't rule AI-generated code out out of principle because it's AI-generated; it only wants to be safe that nothing that's actually GPL-licensed is slipped in. So, if you're an 100%, ultra-hardcode anti-AI extremist, avoid what few servers run on NetBSD.

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

OpenBSD contains AI-generated code, too. And it has no official stance regarding it. So servers running on OpenBSD are taboo, too.

https://www.osnews.com/story/144935/openbsd-and-slopcode-raindrop-to-a-torrent/

FreeBSD has no stance on AI whatsoever that I could find. However, apparently, the FreeBSD community loves to integrate Claude Code into their systems for automation purposes:

https://aumont.fr/posts/claude-code-freebsd/

https://discoverbsd.com/p/8a7660c31b

But you'll also have to look at the userland, the Web server, the database driver etc.

MariaDB allows AI code. You can safely assume that all MySQL databases on Web servers out there are actually powered by MariaDB.

https://mariadb.org/governance/governance-ai-policy/

Oracle MySQL can integrate AI, so it's safe to assume it contains AI-generated code.

https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/announcing-mysql-ai

PostgreSQL probably allows AI code, too. There are even tools for it.

https://github.com/timescale/pg-aiguide

SQLite is very popular amongst AI users while not having any rules on AI-generated code. Assume it to be tainted.

This leaves you with only one choice: Self-hosting a personal, single-user snac2 server because snac2 doesn't need any database whatsoever. In fact, snac2 is staunchly against AI. And it runs on NetBSD.

https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

But then there's the Web server. Apache may allow AI-generated code if it has been reviewed and made sure that it does not contain anything that's incompatible with the Apache-2.0 license.

https://www.apache.org/legal/generative-tooling.html

nginx welcomes AI and advertises itself as ready for AI, and it takes no anti-AI-code stance. It's most likely already tainted.

https://www.f5.com/de_de/products/nginx.

This basically leaves you with no Web server guaranteed to be 100% free from AI-generated code to run snac2 on. But that doesn't matter because it's impossible to build a Web server devoid of any AI code to install snac2 on.

By the way: Mastodon itself explicitly allows AI code if it's disclosed as such, and if its contributor understands it.

https://github.com/mastodon/.github/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md

In other words, next to all Mastodon servers are running

• AI-generated Mastodon code
• on an AI-generated Web server
• with an AI-generated database driver
• on an AI-generated operating system kernel

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Linux #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #Apache #nginx #MySQL #MariaDB #PostgreSQL #SQLite #Mastodon #snac2 #AI #LLM #LLMs #GenAI #NoAI #AntiAI #AntiLLM

@sb  the chippy-choppy There won't be many left. Depending on how staunchly and extremely anti-AI you and (aspiring) server admins are, there won't be any left. Because it's technically impossible to set up a Fediverse server with absolutely no AI code underneath whatsoever.

The Linux mainline kernel itself contains AI code now. It's officially allowed as long as it's disclosed as such. Thus, you will have to avoid literally all servers running on Linux.

https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html

https://www.neowin.net/news/linus-torvalds-declares-massive-ai-fueled-code-surges-as-the-new-normal-for-linux/

NetBSD has very strict rules regarding AI-generated code. But it doesn't rule AI-generated code out out of principle because it's AI-generated; it only wants to be safe that nothing that's actually GPL-licensed is slipped in. So, if you're an 100%, ultra-hardcode anti-AI extremist, avoid what few servers run on NetBSD.

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

OpenBSD contains AI-generated code, too. And it has no official stance regarding it. So servers running on OpenBSD are taboo, too.

https://www.osnews.com/story/144935/openbsd-and-slopcode-raindrop-to-a-torrent/

FreeBSD has no stance on AI whatsoever that I could find. However, apparently, the FreeBSD community loves to integrate Claude Code into their systems for automation purposes:

https://aumont.fr/posts/claude-code-freebsd/

https://discoverbsd.com/p/8a7660c31b

But you'll also have to look at the userland, the Web server, the database driver etc.

MariaDB allows AI code. You can safely assume that all MySQL databases on Web servers out there are actually powered by MariaDB.

https://mariadb.org/governance/governance-ai-policy/

Oracle MySQL can integrate AI, so it's safe to assume it contains AI-generated code.

https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/announcing-mysql-ai

PostgreSQL probably allows AI code, too. There are even tools for it.

https://github.com/timescale/pg-aiguide

SQLite is very popular amongst AI users while not having any rules on AI-generated code. Assume it to be tainted.

This leaves you with only one choice: Self-hosting a personal, single-user snac2 server because snac2 doesn't need any database whatsoever. In fact, snac2 is staunchly against AI. And it runs on NetBSD.

https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

But then there's the Web server. Apache may allow AI-generated code if it has been reviewed and made sure that it does not contain anything that's incompatible with the Apache-2.0 license.

https://www.apache.org/legal/generative-tooling.html

nginx welcomes AI and advertises itself as ready for AI, and it takes no anti-AI-code stance. It's most likely already tainted.

https://www.f5.com/de_de/products/nginx.

This basically leaves you with no Web server guaranteed to be 100% free from AI-generated code to run snac2 on. But that doesn't matter because it's impossible to build a Web server devoid of any AI code to install snac2 on.

By the way: Mastodon itself explicitly allows AI code if it's disclosed as such, and if its contributor understands it.

https://github.com/mastodon/.github/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md

In other words, next to all Mastodon servers are running

• AI-generated Mastodon code
• on an AI-generated Web server
• with an AI-generated database driver
• on an AI-generated operating system kernel

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Linux #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #Apache #nginx #MySQL #MariaDB #PostgreSQL #SQLite #Mastodon #snac2 #AI #LLM #LLMs #GenAI #NoAI #AntiAI #AntiLLM

@sb  the chippy-choppy There won't be many left. Depending on how staunchly and extremely anti-AI you and (aspiring) server admins are, there won't be any left. Because it's technically impossible to set up a Fediverse server with absolutely no AI code underneath whatsoever.

The Linux mainline kernel itself contains AI code now. It's officially allowed as long as it's disclosed as such. Thus, you will have to avoid literally all servers running on Linux.

https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html

https://www.neowin.net/news/linus-torvalds-declares-massive-ai-fueled-code-surges-as-the-new-normal-for-linux/

NetBSD has very strict rules regarding AI-generated code. But it doesn't rule AI-generated code out out of principle because it's AI-generated; it only wants to be safe that nothing that's actually GPL-licensed is slipped in. So, if you're an 100%, ultra-hardcode anti-AI extremist, avoid what few servers run on NetBSD.

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

OpenBSD contains AI-generated code, too. And it has no official stance regarding it. So servers running on OpenBSD are taboo, too.

https://www.osnews.com/story/144935/openbsd-and-slopcode-raindrop-to-a-torrent/

FreeBSD has no stance on AI whatsoever that I could find. However, apparently, the FreeBSD community loves to integrate Claude Code into their systems for automation purposes:

https://aumont.fr/posts/claude-code-freebsd/

https://discoverbsd.com/p/8a7660c31b

But you'll also have to look at the userland, the Web server, the database driver etc.

MariaDB allows AI code. You can safely assume that all MySQL databases on Web servers out there are actually powered by MariaDB.

https://mariadb.org/governance/governance-ai-policy/

Oracle MySQL can integrate AI, so it's safe to assume it contains AI-generated code.

https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/announcing-mysql-ai

PostgreSQL probably allows AI code, too. There are even tools for it.

https://github.com/timescale/pg-aiguide

SQLite is very popular amongst AI users while not having any rules on AI-generated code. Assume it to be tainted.

This leaves you with only one choice: Self-hosting a personal, single-user snac2 server because snac2 doesn't need any database whatsoever. In fact, snac2 is staunchly against AI. And it runs on NetBSD.

https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

But then there's the Web server. Apache may allow AI-generated code if it has been reviewed and made sure that it does not contain anything that's incompatible with the Apache-2.0 license.

https://www.apache.org/legal/generative-tooling.html

nginx welcomes AI and advertises itself as ready for AI, and it takes no anti-AI-code stance. It's most likely already tainted.

https://www.f5.com/de_de/products/nginx.

This basically leaves you with no Web server guaranteed to be 100% free from AI-generated code to run snac2 on. But that doesn't matter because it's impossible to build a Web server devoid of any AI code to install snac2 on.

By the way: Mastodon itself explicitly allows AI code if it's disclosed as such, and if its contributor understands it.

https://github.com/mastodon/.github/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md

In other words, next to all Mastodon servers are running

• AI-generated Mastodon code
• on an AI-generated Web server
• with an AI-generated database driver
• on an AI-generated operating system kernel

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Linux #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #Apache #nginx #MySQL #MariaDB #PostgreSQL #SQLite #Mastodon #snac2 #AI #LLM #LLMs #GenAI #NoAI #AntiAI #AntiLLM

@sb  the chippy-choppy There won't be many left. Depending on how staunchly and extremely anti-AI you and (aspiring) server admins are, there won't be any left. Because it's technically impossible to set up a Fediverse server with absolutely no AI code underneath whatsoever.

The Linux mainline kernel itself contains AI code now. It's officially allowed as long as it's disclosed as such. Thus, you will have to avoid literally all servers running on Linux.

https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html

https://www.neowin.net/news/linus-torvalds-declares-massive-ai-fueled-code-surges-as-the-new-normal-for-linux/

NetBSD has very strict rules regarding AI-generated code. But it doesn't rule AI-generated code out out of principle because it's AI-generated; it only wants to be safe that nothing that's actually GPL-licensed is slipped in. So, if you're an 100%, ultra-hardcode anti-AI extremist, avoid what few servers run on NetBSD.

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

OpenBSD contains AI-generated code, too. And it has no official stance regarding it. So servers running on OpenBSD are taboo, too.

https://www.osnews.com/story/144935/openbsd-and-slopcode-raindrop-to-a-torrent/

FreeBSD has no stance on AI whatsoever that I could find. However, apparently, the FreeBSD community loves to integrate Claude Code into their systems for automation purposes:

https://aumont.fr/posts/claude-code-freebsd/

https://discoverbsd.com/p/8a7660c31b

But you'll also have to look at the userland, the Web server, the database driver etc.

MariaDB allows AI code. You can safely assume that all MySQL databases on Web servers out there are actually powered by MariaDB.

https://mariadb.org/governance/governance-ai-policy/

Oracle MySQL can integrate AI, so it's safe to assume it contains AI-generated code.

https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/announcing-mysql-ai

PostgreSQL probably allows AI code, too. There are even tools for it.

https://github.com/timescale/pg-aiguide

SQLite is very popular amongst AI users while not having any rules on AI-generated code. Assume it to be tainted.

This leaves you with only one choice: Self-hosting a personal, single-user snac2 server because snac2 doesn't need any database whatsoever. In fact, snac2 is staunchly against AI. And it runs on NetBSD.

https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

But then there's the Web server. Apache may allow AI-generated code if it has been reviewed and made sure that it does not contain anything that's incompatible with the Apache-2.0 license.

https://www.apache.org/legal/generative-tooling.html

nginx welcomes AI and advertises itself as ready for AI, and it takes no anti-AI-code stance. It's most likely already tainted.

https://www.f5.com/de_de/products/nginx.

This basically leaves you with no Web server guaranteed to be 100% free from AI-generated code to run snac2 on. But that doesn't matter because it's impossible to build a Web server devoid of any AI code to install snac2 on.

By the way: Mastodon itself explicitly allows AI code if it's disclosed as such, and if its contributor understands it.

https://github.com/mastodon/.github/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md

In other words, next to all Mastodon servers are running

• AI-generated Mastodon code
• on an AI-generated Web server
• with an AI-generated database driver
• on an AI-generated operating system kernel

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Linux #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #Apache #nginx #MySQL #MariaDB #PostgreSQL #SQLite #Mastodon #snac2 #AI #LLM #LLMs #GenAI #NoAI #AntiAI #AntiLLM

@sb  the chippy-choppy There won't be many left. Depending on how staunchly and extremely anti-AI you and (aspiring) server admins are, there won't be any left. Because it's technically impossible to set up a Fediverse server with absolutely no AI code underneath whatsoever.

The Linux mainline kernel itself contains AI code now. It's officially allowed as long as it's disclosed as such. Thus, you will have to avoid literally all servers running on Linux.

https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html

https://www.neowin.net/news/linus-torvalds-declares-massive-ai-fueled-code-surges-as-the-new-normal-for-linux/

NetBSD has very strict rules regarding AI-generated code. But it doesn't rule AI-generated code out out of principle because it's AI-generated; it only wants to be safe that nothing that's actually GPL-licensed is slipped in. So, if you're an 100%, ultra-hardcode anti-AI extremist, avoid what few servers run on NetBSD.

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

OpenBSD contains AI-generated code, too. And it has no official stance regarding it. So servers running on OpenBSD are taboo, too.

https://www.osnews.com/story/144935/openbsd-and-slopcode-raindrop-to-a-torrent/

FreeBSD has no stance on AI whatsoever that I could find. However, apparently, the FreeBSD community loves to integrate Claude Code into their systems for automation purposes:

https://aumont.fr/posts/claude-code-freebsd/

https://discoverbsd.com/p/8a7660c31b

But you'll also have to look at the userland, the Web server, the database driver etc.

MariaDB allows AI code. You can safely assume that all MySQL databases on Web servers out there are actually powered by MariaDB.

https://mariadb.org/governance/governance-ai-policy/

Oracle MySQL can integrate AI, so it's safe to assume it contains AI-generated code.

https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/announcing-mysql-ai

PostgreSQL probably allows AI code, too. There are even tools for it.

https://github.com/timescale/pg-aiguide

SQLite is very popular amongst AI users while not having any rules on AI-generated code. Assume it to be tainted.

This leaves you with only one choice: Self-hosting a personal, single-user snac2 server because snac2 doesn't need any database whatsoever. In fact, snac2 is staunchly against AI. And it runs on NetBSD.

https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

But then there's the Web server. Apache may allow AI-generated code if it has been reviewed and made sure that it does not contain anything that's incompatible with the Apache-2.0 license.

https://www.apache.org/legal/generative-tooling.html

nginx welcomes AI and advertises itself as ready for AI, and it takes no anti-AI-code stance. It's most likely already tainted.

https://www.f5.com/de_de/products/nginx.

This basically leaves you with no Web server guaranteed to be 100% free from AI-generated code to run snac2 on. But that doesn't matter because it's impossible to build a Web server devoid of any AI code to install snac2 on.

By the way: Mastodon itself explicitly allows AI code if it's disclosed as such, and if its contributor understands it.

https://github.com/mastodon/.github/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md

In other words, next to all Mastodon servers are running

• AI-generated Mastodon code
• on an AI-generated Web server
• with an AI-generated database driver
• on an AI-generated operating system kernel

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Linux #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #Apache #nginx #MySQL #MariaDB #PostgreSQL #SQLite #Mastodon #snac2 #AI #LLM #LLMs #GenAI #NoAI #AntiAI #AntiLLM

@happyborg

People can follow hashtags

People on Mastodon can follow hashtags. But just because people on Mastodon can, doesn't mean people everywhere else in the Fediverse can, too.

AFAIK, some of the minimalist microblogging server applications designed for self-hosting don't offer this feature. I'm not sure if Pleroma and Akkoma have it.

Hubzilla, which is what I'm commenting from, definitely doesn't have this feature. And Hubzilla is anything but minimalist. It's the most powerful and versatile of all Fediverse server applications.

Also, if you can follow hashtags, you can only follow hashtags on your home server. But if you're on a small server, hardly any messages with these hashtags wash up there in the first place. You'll miss a lot. If you're on a private, single-user server, following hashtags is completely useless because the only messages with these hashtags that reach the server are those that you receive from your own contacts anyway.

(streams) and Forte, both being streamlined and more advanced Hubzilla descendants, can follow hashtags. But there simply aren't any big (streams) or Forte servers, especially not with lots of traffic from Mastodon. Most of the few (streams) and Forte users run their own single-user servers.

This is also why it doesn't matter much whether snac or GoToSocial users can follow hashtags: These two are almost exclusively used as private, single-user servers because that's what they're designed for first and foremost.

To make it short: Most Fediverse users outside the big Mastodon servers can only follow hashtags by relying on "bots" that forward posts with these hashtags which they find on e.g. mastodon.social.

In fact, this is good for Mastodon users as well. It helps circumvent two of Mastodon's disadvantages.

One is that it has no support for groups whatsoever (the Fediverse does have groups in case you don't know). If Mastodon users need to talk about a certain topic, they can't do so in a group about that topic. All they can do is shout into the ether with certain hashtags and hope that the right person catches their toot.

The other one is that this is highly unlikely on Mastodon itself. On Mastodon, most content remains unseen.

Mastodon doesn't offer a list of unread messages in the timeline, not even a counter. All that Mastodon users can do is scroll down their timeline until they either hit content that they've already seen, or until they've got no more time, or until they want no more. Anything below will remain unseen. It's sad that this counts as the default or even without alternatives in the Fediverse. And most Mastodon users follow so many accounts and channels (plus hashtags occasionally) that they can impossibly read all the messages they receive.

Let's suppose a Mastodon user wants to talk about Hubzilla for some reason. I've seen this happen often enough. The only chance they have, not knowing that the @hubzilla exists, much less that they can join it from Mastodon, is by tooting into the void with the hashtag #Hubzilla and hoping that either one of their followers or someone somewhere out there on their followers' servers follows the hashtag #Hubzilla.

But none of their followers comes online soon enough to scroll down to their toot. They all have tons of other content in their timelines above that toot, so they never scroll all the way down to it. If not, they simply don't know what Hubzilla is. And even if any Mastodon users follow the hashtag #Hubzilla (which I doubt), this still doesn't mean that one of them scrolls all the way down to that toot.

And then there's me. As I've already said, I'm on Hubzilla. I can't follow hashtags directly. Instead, I "follow" the hashtag #Hubzilla by having this hashtag on the FediBuzz relay (https://relay.fedi.buzz/) as a contact. Or, in Mastodon terms, by following it. FediBuzz is not a bot server. It's a relay that server admins can connect their servers to to have more public content on their servers (if their server software supports relays, that is). Something completely normal on Mastodon, especially on small servers.

So when someone on Mastodon toots something with #Hubzilla, I receive it as a new post. But I don't have to scroll down a timeline of unknown length to find it. I have a counter for unread messages and other unnoticed actions. It unfolds into a list of unread messages and other unnoticed actions. From there, I can get directly to that post. I will notice it. And I'll usually be able to help.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Relay #Relays

@happyborg

People can follow hashtags

People on Mastodon can follow hashtags. But just because people on Mastodon can, doesn't mean people everywhere else in the Fediverse can, too.

AFAIK, some of the minimalist microblogging server applications designed for self-hosting don't offer this feature. I'm not sure if Pleroma and Akkoma have it.

Hubzilla, which is what I'm commenting from, definitely doesn't have this feature. And Hubzilla is anything but minimalist. It's the most powerful and versatile of all Fediverse server applications.

Also, if you can follow hashtags, you can only follow hashtags on your home server. But if you're on a small server, hardly any messages with these hashtags wash up there in the first place. You'll miss a lot. If you're on a private, single-user server, following hashtags is completely useless because the only messages with these hashtags that reach the server are those that you receive from your own contacts anyway.

(streams) and Forte, both being streamlined and more advanced Hubzilla descendants, can follow hashtags. But there simply aren't any big (streams) or Forte servers, especially not with lots of traffic from Mastodon. Most of the few (streams) and Forte users run their own single-user servers.

This is also why it doesn't matter much whether snac or GoToSocial users can follow hashtags: These two are almost exclusively used as private, single-user servers because that's what they're designed for first and foremost.

To make it short: Most Fediverse users outside the big Mastodon servers can only follow hashtags by relying on "bots" that forward posts with these hashtags which they find on e.g. mastodon.social.

In fact, this is good for Mastodon users as well. It helps circumvent two of Mastodon's disadvantages.

One is that it has no support for groups whatsoever (the Fediverse does have groups in case you don't know). If Mastodon users need to talk about a certain topic, they can't do so in a group about that topic. All they can do is shout into the ether with certain hashtags and hope that the right person catches their toot.

The other one is that this is highly unlikely on Mastodon itself. On Mastodon, most content remains unseen.

Mastodon doesn't offer a list of unread messages in the timeline, not even a counter. All that Mastodon users can do is scroll down their timeline until they either hit content that they've already seen, or until they've got no more time, or until they want no more. Anything below will remain unseen. It's sad that this counts as the default or even without alternatives in the Fediverse. And most Mastodon users follow so many accounts and channels (plus hashtags occasionally) that they can impossibly read all the messages they receive.

Let's suppose a Mastodon user wants to talk about Hubzilla for some reason. I've seen this happen often enough. The only chance they have, not knowing that the @hubzilla exists, much less that they can join it from Mastodon, is by tooting into the void with the hashtag #Hubzilla and hoping that either one of their followers or someone somewhere out there on their followers' servers follows the hashtag #Hubzilla.

But none of their followers comes online soon enough to scroll down to their toot. They all have tons of other content in their timelines above that toot, so they never scroll all the way down to it. If not, they simply don't know what Hubzilla is. And even if any Mastodon users follow the hashtag #Hubzilla (which I doubt), this still doesn't mean that one of them scrolls all the way down to that toot.

And then there's me. As I've already said, I'm on Hubzilla. I can't follow hashtags directly. Instead, I "follow" the hashtag #Hubzilla by having this hashtag on the FediBuzz relay (https://relay.fedi.buzz/) as a contact. Or, in Mastodon terms, by following it. FediBuzz is not a bot server. It's a relay that server admins can connect their servers to to have more public content on their servers (if their server software supports relays, that is). Something completely normal on Mastodon, especially on small servers.

So when someone on Mastodon toots something with #Hubzilla, I receive it as a new post. But I don't have to scroll down a timeline of unknown length to find it. I have a counter for unread messages and other unnoticed actions. It unfolds into a list of unread messages and other unnoticed actions. From there, I can get directly to that post. I will notice it. And I'll usually be able to help.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Relay #Relays

@happyborg

People can follow hashtags

People on Mastodon can follow hashtags. But just because people on Mastodon can, doesn't mean people everywhere else in the Fediverse can, too.

AFAIK, some of the minimalist microblogging server applications designed for self-hosting don't offer this feature. I'm not sure if Pleroma and Akkoma have it.

Hubzilla, which is what I'm commenting from, definitely doesn't have this feature. And Hubzilla is anything but minimalist. It's the most powerful and versatile of all Fediverse server applications.

Also, if you can follow hashtags, you can only follow hashtags on your home server. But if you're on a small server, hardly any messages with these hashtags wash up there in the first place. You'll miss a lot. If you're on a private, single-user server, following hashtags is completely useless because the only messages with these hashtags that reach the server are those that you receive from your own contacts anyway.

(streams) and Forte, both being streamlined and more advanced Hubzilla descendants, can follow hashtags. But there simply aren't any big (streams) or Forte servers, especially not with lots of traffic from Mastodon. Most of the few (streams) and Forte users run their own single-user servers.

This is also why it doesn't matter much whether snac or GoToSocial users can follow hashtags: These two are almost exclusively used as private, single-user servers because that's what they're designed for first and foremost.

To make it short: Most Fediverse users outside the big Mastodon servers can only follow hashtags by relying on "bots" that forward posts with these hashtags which they find on e.g. mastodon.social.

In fact, this is good for Mastodon users as well. It helps circumvent two of Mastodon's disadvantages.

One is that it has no support for groups whatsoever (the Fediverse does have groups in case you don't know). If Mastodon users need to talk about a certain topic, they can't do so in a group about that topic. All they can do is shout into the ether with certain hashtags and hope that the right person catches their toot.

The other one is that this is highly unlikely on Mastodon itself. On Mastodon, most content remains unseen.

Mastodon doesn't offer a list of unread messages in the timeline, not even a counter. All that Mastodon users can do is scroll down their timeline until they either hit content that they've already seen, or until they've got no more time, or until they want no more. Anything below will remain unseen. It's sad that this counts as the default or even without alternatives in the Fediverse. And most Mastodon users follow so many accounts and channels (plus hashtags occasionally) that they can impossibly read all the messages they receive.

Let's suppose a Mastodon user wants to talk about Hubzilla for some reason. I've seen this happen often enough. The only chance they have, not knowing that the @hubzilla exists, much less that they can join it from Mastodon, is by tooting into the void with the hashtag #Hubzilla and hoping that either one of their followers or someone somewhere out there on their followers' servers follows the hashtag #Hubzilla.

But none of their followers comes online soon enough to scroll down to their toot. They all have tons of other content in their timelines above that toot, so they never scroll all the way down to it. If not, they simply don't know what Hubzilla is. And even if any Mastodon users follow the hashtag #Hubzilla (which I doubt), this still doesn't mean that one of them scrolls all the way down to that toot.

And then there's me. As I've already said, I'm on Hubzilla. I can't follow hashtags directly. Instead, I "follow" the hashtag #Hubzilla by having this hashtag on the FediBuzz relay (https://relay.fedi.buzz/) as a contact. Or, in Mastodon terms, by following it. FediBuzz is not a bot server. It's a relay that server admins can connect their servers to to have more public content on their servers (if their server software supports relays, that is). Something completely normal on Mastodon, especially on small servers.

So when someone on Mastodon toots something with #Hubzilla, I receive it as a new post. But I don't have to scroll down a timeline of unknown length to find it. I have a counter for unread messages and other unnoticed actions. It unfolds into a list of unread messages and other unnoticed actions. From there, I can get directly to that post. I will notice it. And I'll usually be able to help.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Relay #Relays

@happyborg

People can follow hashtags

People on Mastodon can follow hashtags. But just because people on Mastodon can, doesn't mean people everywhere else in the Fediverse can, too.

AFAIK, some of the minimalist microblogging server applications designed for self-hosting don't offer this feature. I'm not sure if Pleroma and Akkoma have it.

Hubzilla, which is what I'm commenting from, definitely doesn't have this feature. And Hubzilla is anything but minimalist. It's the most powerful and versatile of all Fediverse server applications.

Also, if you can follow hashtags, you can only follow hashtags on your home server. But if you're on a small server, hardly any messages with these hashtags wash up there in the first place. You'll miss a lot. If you're on a private, single-user server, following hashtags is completely useless because the only messages with these hashtags that reach the server are those that you receive from your own contacts anyway.

(streams) and Forte, both being streamlined and more advanced Hubzilla descendants, can follow hashtags. But there simply aren't any big (streams) or Forte servers, especially not with lots of traffic from Mastodon. Most of the few (streams) and Forte users run their own single-user servers.

This is also why it doesn't matter much whether snac or GoToSocial users can follow hashtags: These two are almost exclusively used as private, single-user servers because that's what they're designed for first and foremost.

To make it short: Most Fediverse users outside the big Mastodon servers can only follow hashtags by relying on "bots" that forward posts with these hashtags which they find on e.g. mastodon.social.

In fact, this is good for Mastodon users as well. It helps circumvent two of Mastodon's disadvantages.

One is that it has no support for groups whatsoever (the Fediverse does have groups in case you don't know). If Mastodon users need to talk about a certain topic, they can't do so in a group about that topic. All they can do is shout into the ether with certain hashtags and hope that the right person catches their toot.

The other one is that this is highly unlikely on Mastodon itself. On Mastodon, most content remains unseen.

Mastodon doesn't offer a list of unread messages in the timeline, not even a counter. All that Mastodon users can do is scroll down their timeline until they either hit content that they've already seen, or until they've got no more time, or until they want no more. Anything below will remain unseen. It's sad that this counts as the default or even without alternatives in the Fediverse. And most Mastodon users follow so many accounts and channels (plus hashtags occasionally) that they can impossibly read all the messages they receive.

Let's suppose a Mastodon user wants to talk about Hubzilla for some reason. I've seen this happen often enough. The only chance they have, not knowing that the @hubzilla exists, much less that they can join it from Mastodon, is by tooting into the void with the hashtag #Hubzilla and hoping that either one of their followers or someone somewhere out there on their followers' servers follows the hashtag #Hubzilla.

But none of their followers comes online soon enough to scroll down to their toot. They all have tons of other content in their timelines above that toot, so they never scroll all the way down to it. If not, they simply don't know what Hubzilla is. And even if any Mastodon users follow the hashtag #Hubzilla (which I doubt), this still doesn't mean that one of them scrolls all the way down to that toot.

And then there's me. As I've already said, I'm on Hubzilla. I can't follow hashtags directly. Instead, I "follow" the hashtag #Hubzilla by having this hashtag on the FediBuzz relay (https://relay.fedi.buzz/) as a contact. Or, in Mastodon terms, by following it. FediBuzz is not a bot server. It's a relay that server admins can connect their servers to to have more public content on their servers (if their server software supports relays, that is). Something completely normal on Mastodon, especially on small servers.

So when someone on Mastodon toots something with #Hubzilla, I receive it as a new post. But I don't have to scroll down a timeline of unknown length to find it. I have a counter for unread messages and other unnoticed actions. It unfolds into a list of unread messages and other unnoticed actions. From there, I can get directly to that post. I will notice it. And I'll usually be able to help.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Relay #Relays

@happyborg

People can follow hashtags

People on Mastodon can follow hashtags. But just because people on Mastodon can, doesn't mean people everywhere else in the Fediverse can, too.

AFAIK, some of the minimalist microblogging server applications designed for self-hosting don't offer this feature. I'm not sure if Pleroma and Akkoma have it.

Hubzilla, which is what I'm commenting from, definitely doesn't have this feature. And Hubzilla is anything but minimalist. It's the most powerful and versatile of all Fediverse server applications.

Also, if you can follow hashtags, you can only follow hashtags on your home server. But if you're on a small server, hardly any messages with these hashtags wash up there in the first place. You'll miss a lot. If you're on a private, single-user server, following hashtags is completely useless because the only messages with these hashtags that reach the server are those that you receive from your own contacts anyway.

(streams) and Forte, both being streamlined and more advanced Hubzilla descendants, can follow hashtags. But there simply aren't any big (streams) or Forte servers, especially not with lots of traffic from Mastodon. Most of the few (streams) and Forte users run their own single-user servers.

This is also why it doesn't matter much whether snac or GoToSocial users can follow hashtags: These two are almost exclusively used as private, single-user servers because that's what they're designed for first and foremost.

To make it short: Most Fediverse users outside the big Mastodon servers can only follow hashtags by relying on "bots" that forward posts with these hashtags which they find on e.g. mastodon.social.

In fact, this is good for Mastodon users as well. It helps circumvent two of Mastodon's disadvantages.

One is that it has no support for groups whatsoever (the Fediverse does have groups in case you don't know). If Mastodon users need to talk about a certain topic, they can't do so in a group about that topic. All they can do is shout into the ether with certain hashtags and hope that the right person catches their toot.

The other one is that this is highly unlikely on Mastodon itself. On Mastodon, most content remains unseen.

Mastodon doesn't offer a list of unread messages in the timeline, not even a counter. All that Mastodon users can do is scroll down their timeline until they either hit content that they've already seen, or until they've got no more time, or until they want no more. Anything below will remain unseen. It's sad that this counts as the default or even without alternatives in the Fediverse. And most Mastodon users follow so many accounts and channels (plus hashtags occasionally) that they can impossibly read all the messages they receive.

Let's suppose a Mastodon user wants to talk about Hubzilla for some reason. I've seen this happen often enough. The only chance they have, not knowing that the @hubzilla exists, much less that they can join it from Mastodon, is by tooting into the void with the hashtag #Hubzilla and hoping that either one of their followers or someone somewhere out there on their followers' servers follows the hashtag #Hubzilla.

But none of their followers comes online soon enough to scroll down to their toot. They all have tons of other content in their timelines above that toot, so they never scroll all the way down to it. If not, they simply don't know what Hubzilla is. And even if any Mastodon users follow the hashtag #Hubzilla (which I doubt), this still doesn't mean that one of them scrolls all the way down to that toot.

And then there's me. As I've already said, I'm on Hubzilla. I can't follow hashtags directly. Instead, I "follow" the hashtag #Hubzilla by having this hashtag on the FediBuzz relay (https://relay.fedi.buzz/) as a contact. Or, in Mastodon terms, by following it. FediBuzz is not a bot server. It's a relay that server admins can connect their servers to to have more public content on their servers (if their server software supports relays, that is). Something completely normal on Mastodon, especially on small servers.

So when someone on Mastodon toots something with #Hubzilla, I receive it as a new post. But I don't have to scroll down a timeline of unknown length to find it. I have a counter for unread messages and other unnoticed actions. It unfolds into a list of unread messages and other unnoticed actions. From there, I can get directly to that post. I will notice it. And I'll usually be able to help.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Relay #Relays

@Alexander Goeres 𒀯 @everton137 Whether they've adopted Mastodon's culture. And whether they follow all of Mastodon's largely unwritten rules to a tee.

Regardless of whether or not they're actually on Mastodon after all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@silverpill @🫧 Social coding commons @Rimu @elle I guess I can accurately estimate on which side Mastodon is standing. Even though Mastodon can be considered "real ActivityPub" and "implemented".

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #ActivityPub

@Mark Wyner Won’t Comply :vm: First of all, you completely forgot the social media posters. The TOC link leads nowhere.

Also, maybe it's fair to mention that I'm working on an entire wiki about alt-texts and image descriptions, especially for the Fediverse. 46 pages are planned as of now, 24 of them are already written. These will include over 30 pages on how to do things, how not to do things and what never to do at all.

I won't add step-by-step guides for certain frontends. But I've already started adding rules and guidelines for how to describe images appropriately and write alt-texts in a way that won't break stuff anywhere.

Even if it's a very incomplete WIP, it's unique in several ways:

• It's the only wiki about alt-texts and image descriptions. Few writers have even only written multiple pages or articles on this subject.
• It's the only guide that takes the existence of the Fediverse outside of Mastodon into consideration. This means that it's also the only guide that doesn't assume that Fediverse equals always having only 500 characters for the message text. It actually recommends an additional, longer image description in the message text in certain situations, regardless of whether or not vanilla Mastodon users can do that.
• It's the only guide that, instead of regurgitating the alt-text rules for webpages and blogs and assuming that they apply to the Fediverse just the same, talks about the peculiarities of posting images into the Fediverse, how Mastodon's alt-text quality criteria are different from the W3C WAI and WCAG alt-text quality criteria, and why it's critically important to know and fulfill Mastodon's requirements for good alt-texts.
• It's probably the only guide that doesn't assume that you can always precisely target a certain audience for your content and make sure that only those receive it who understand it right off the bat.
• It is the only guide that lists over 60 references, including your blog post, but also including university webpages as well as over two dozen guides from Veronica Lewis a.k.a. Veronica with Four Eyes.

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

@Hirad @Mehrad :kde: :emacs: :rstats: Which is curious, seeing as the GNU FM developer also started GNU social and scooped up StatusNet's abandoned code to merge it into GNU social. The idea was to use GNU social in some way to make GNU FM federate.

GNU social even implemented ActivityPub at some point, but GNU FM never did. Now GNU social is dead anyway.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #GNUFM #GNUsocial

@🌴 Seph 💭 👾 That's one nice thing about Hubzilla: You can customise the UI apart from theming. You can completely change the layout. (Not sure if you can do that with Saiwal's themes, but you can with Redbasic.)

By default, a new channel has barely got any icons in the navbar and not even that many in the app menu. The right-hand end of the navbar of a new channel only contains icons for search, HQ, help and the app menu. You can configure under Apps which icons shall appear where. Star them, and they're in the menu. Pin them, and they're on the navbar.

In fact, whereas (I think) Friendica has all its features on all the time, Hubzilla is very modular. Many of its features are optional and off by default; they're called "apps". If you don't need it, don't activate it, and you won't have UI elements for it.

Even the various pages can be rearranged in the PDL editor. You don't need something, throw it out. You only need one sidebar, choose a layout with only one sidebar instead of both. You can do without any sidebars, pick a layout without sidebars.

Saiwal's theme previews have to show what can be done with them. Hence, a lot of UI elements are in place that either can be configured away or have to be configured into place in the first place.

For example, if you look at the AdminLTE preview: You only have to pin the apps that you need all the time. If you want to, you can unpin them all, and they're gone. But then you'll have to go via the Featured Apps menu to get to them. You can slim that down as well, but then you have to open the Apps page to get to them.

The entire wide dark navigation bar on the left can be folded in if you don't need it. Fold it out when you need it.

Main Navigation looks like a homebrew element that doesn't necessarily have to be default. The Archives field can be configured away or has to be configured into place.

The buttons below the posts can't be reduced that much. The speech bubble unfolds the comments. Then come thumb up and (optional, off-by-default) thumb down. Next comes repeat (= share on Friendica). The smiley is for replying with nothing but one emoticon; I think this is actually an optional feature, too.

Now, when I look at the Solidified preview: Almost every other button on the left-hand bar is for an app that isn't even activated by default. Most of the rest are for features that are available right away, but their buttons usually aren't.

Most of what's on the right was probably configured in for the showcase. Even if it's there by default, it can be removed.

The centre only seems cluttered because the posts are arranged across three columns instead of all in one. Even there you can choose how to arrange the posts.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #UtsuktaThemes #AdminLTE #Solidified #Hubzilla

@🌴 Seph 💭 👾 Have you taken a look at Hubzilla yet?

It was created by the same guy as Friendica, and it's a descendent of Friendica. (Forked to Free-Friendika, then forked to Red, both in 2011, then largely rewritten against a brand-new protocol in 2012, then renamed Red Matrix, then greatly expanded in features and renamed Hubzilla in 2015.)

One could say it's Friendica

• entirely running on its own protocol, Zot6
• with nomadic identity that makes it possible to clone your channel across multiple servers and making it resilient against server outage
• with multiple channel (identities, like complete Friendica accounts, but without separate logins) on one account/login, and you can switch between them without logging out and back in again (all with multiple profiles like on Friendica)
• without Bluesky integration
• with less pandering to Mastodon
• with an even better permissions system
• with full (client-side and server-side) OpenWebAuth support
• with polls
• with WebDAV access to your file space
• with a built-in CalDAV calendar server
• with an optional built-in CardDAV addressbook server
• with optional articles, planning cards, wikis and webpages
• with a very extensive, detailed and well-written built-in help system
• with the ability to integrate git repositories with 3rd-party add-ons and themes that can even be upgraded with shell scripts as easily as the whole hub
• with 3rd-party themes available that change the entire UI and UX instead of reskinning the existing UI, especially the Utsukta themes by @Saiwal

It does not provide any previews for links, though I'm sure something like this can be developed as a third-party addon.

If you want to try it, it's quite tricky to find a good hub with 3rd-party themes installed to start on. There aren't any in North America; don't go looking for them.

You may want to get in touch with @pepe about joining his Whoville hub. It's well-equipped, it's well-maintained, but keep in mind it's in Europe.

If you find Hubzilla to your liking, and you want to have your own hub hosted, there appear to be quite a few Hubzilla hosting services. Pick one you like, set up your own hub, activate the add-ons you need, install the third-party themes and add-ons you need, get it to run properly, and then clone your daily-driver production channel over from Whoville. Make the instance on your own hub the main one, and keep the one at Whoville as a clone in case your hoster is offline, or something else is wrong with your hub.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla

@silverpill @Rimu @elle I could come up with a bunch of conspiracy theories for this behaviour.

Enforcement of Mastodon dominance.

A front against Mike Macgirvin, inventor of the most "disruptive" Fediverse software from a Mastodon point of view, as well as all his creations and inventions.

Forcing a grass-roots development under corporate control and eradicating the grass-roots part. Essentially "embrace-extend-extinguish", but trying desperately to speed-run the "embrace" and "extend" parts to cut to the "extinguish" part as quickly as possible.

The only way this could possibly fail is if Mastodon decided not to play along because more people consider Mastodon the ActivityPub reference implementation and Fediverse gold standard than not.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ActivityPub

@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

@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

@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

@Tom Cole It is available everywhere AFAIK.

But: The convenient black "Alt" button in the corner is exclusive to Mastodon's Web interface plus maybe a few phone apps that have adopted it since. Technically speaking, a UI element to show alt-texts is completely unnecessary because alt-text is only a stand-in for the image itself, for when the image cannot be seen for whichever reason. The alt-text as an extra source of information is a purely Mastodon thing where people use it to expand their meagre 500-character limit by up to another 6,000 characters.

Just about everywhere else in the Fediverse, there is no button for showing alt-texts. That's also because there's nowhere in the Fediverse where people really need alt-texts to write around their tiny character limits, so that alt-texts can be what alt-texts are literally everywhere outside of Mastodon: a stand-in for the image and nothing more than that.

The normal way in the Fediverse (and other social networks and social media) for sighted people to access an alt-text is by moving the mouse cursor upon the image and hovering in there, and the alt-text pops up. The alt-text is the title tag at the same time. This has been the case on Mastodon before, I think, version 4.4 as well. I guess Mastodon changed that because just about everyone on Mastodon is on phones, and you don't have a mouse cursor on a phone, so you have to long-press on the image which is a not very intuitive thing to do.

Here on Hubzilla where I'm commenting from right now, the alt-text still is the title tag as well. In order to read an alt-text, the mouse cursor has to be hovered above the image. And Hubzilla has no alternative to its Web interface, only different themes for the Web interface. There is no phone app, at least none worth speaking of.

Also, on Hubzilla, we don't need to use alt-texts to write around character limits. Our character limit is 16,777,215, and that's the maximum size of the database field for the message text. Actually, on Hubzilla, alt-texts are included in these over 16 million characters as opposed to separate data fields. Thus, sighted Hubzilla users have no use for alt-texts whatsoever. Thus, there's no reason to make opening alt-texts easier (as if that was Hubzilla's only UI issue). Thus, there's no "Alt" button, and there will never be one.

It's just about the same just about everywhere else from Misskey (hard-coded 3,000 characters) to Akkoma (configurable 5,000 characters) to Friendica (same limit as Hubzilla) to (streams) and Forte (over 24 million characters) to pure long-form blogging stuff like WordPress, Ghost, Write Freely and Plume.

Now I ask you: What are people supposed to do whose both hands had to be amputated due to some accident? Or people with deformed hands who can neither use a smartphone nor a computer mouse nor a trackball nor any other pointing device on a computer? Who operate their computer with e.g. a headpointer, a plastic stick strapped to their forehead with which they poke the keys on their computer? And who are in the Fediverse, but not on Mastodon? How are they supposed to open an alt-text with only a keyboard as an input device?

Or how about people with a severe tremor? Who have big troubles moving a mouse cursor over an image and then keeping it there because it keeps slipping away? Who probably operate their computers via the keyboard and only the keyboard, too?

Or, a wholly different example, how about those who use Linux with a super-minimalist, keyboard-only tiling window manager? Who do have a GUI (albeit a very frugal one), who do use graphical Web browsers, but who deliberately, intentionaly, do not have any kind of pointing device? Who, nonetheless, are ten times faster with only keyboard shortcuts than you and me are with a mouse? How are they supposed to move a mouse cursor over an image without a mouse?

This is something that many Mastodon users don't know:

• Not all Fediverse frontends have an "Alt" button.
• "Alt" buttons make no sense in the non-Mastodon Fediverse. In the non-Mastodon Fediverse, the character limits are so high that nobody has to use alt-texts to write around them. Expanding the character limit with alt-texts is a 100% Mastodon-only thing that simply doesn't translate to places with thousands or millions of characters and never will.
• There are other disabilities out there than visual impairments and neurodivergence. Even in the Fediverse.
• Not everyone in the Fediverse uses a pointing device of whichever sorts.

Oh, and there's one more thing: Misskey and its various forks (Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS, CherryPick etc.) all have a character limit of 512 for alt-texts. They should enforce it the same way as Mastodon enforces its 1,500-character limit for alt-texts, namely by truncating longer alt-texts. This is bad enough already.

However, they all have the same nasty bug that still hasn't been fixed yet AFAIK: Instead of truncating longer alt-texts, they delete them. So if you describe your image in an alt-text of more than 512 characters, users on Misskey, Sharkey & Co. will never know that your image is supposed to have an alt-text. Instead, they may think that you were too lazy to describe your image. And if you use the alt-text to explain your image in over 512 characters, this explanation will never reach users on Misskey, Sharkey & Co.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #i3 #i3wm #Disability #A11y #Accessibility

@caohuak @silverpill Well, to be honest, that crypto stuff doesn't have its bad rep entirely undeservedly. It appears to be used as a cash grab or for get-rick-quick schemes more often than not.

The massive gambling with the big cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum that causes both to be highly volatile.

Gigantic Ethereum mining farms with countless high-end graphics cards that eat up more electricity than a bigger town, often even fossil or nuclear energy because there simply isn't enough renewable energy available where they're located.

NFT hypes. Masses of NFTs that were procedurally generated and sold for insane amounts of money. See Bored Apes. They've made a few people very rich with next to zero effort. Others have lost a lot of money because these NFTs are literally absolutely worthless today.

And this is a field that I'm pretty familiar with: The Metaverse. Mind you, I'm not talking about Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. That isn't the Metaverse. I'm not talking about "the Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Meta Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Facebook Metaverse" a.k.a. "Zuckerberg's Metaverse" either which, by the way, is actually named Horizon.

No, I'm talking about cryptobros jumping upon the Metaverse bandwagon, hoping to squeeze some money out of it.

The blueprint of this all has to be a virtual world named Decentraland which was opened in February, 2020, just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic that caused real-life social interaction to grind to a complete halt and made virtual worlds the more popular.

In fact, it was a crypto platform before it became a virtual world. In 2017 already, its own cryptocurrency MANA, which is on the Ethereum blockchain, was first traded to raise money to get the world itself started. And even as a virtual world, it's a crypto platform because Decentraland is pretty much all about minting and selling NFTs.

Part of its concept is that deeds to parcels of land are minted as NFTs and then sold. And these parcels aren't even that big. Better yet, they were sold before they even existed as actual virtual land. Basically, Decentraland sold deeds to something that they yet had to make. But they got enough customers to bite, including big fashion brands, but also real-estate companies that scooped up land to sell it with a big profit.

Users, especially right-wing extremists, created avatars with slurs for names just to mint them as NFTs and sell them for a fortune. Nothing was done against it. I mean, the more NFTs were sold for MANA, the more MANA was traded, the more volatile it became, the higher profits one could make by trading it.

Decentraland advertises itself as "the first decentralised Metaverse". This is nonsense. Yes, it's "decentralised" in the sense that MANA is not running on the Bitcoin blockchain. Yes, it's also "decentralised" in the sense of being governed by a DAO.

But the virtual world system itself is a centralised, monolithic silo owned and operated by one and the same entity. The actual "first decentralised Metaverse" is made up of the worlds based on OpenSimulator from as early as 2007. This, by the way, is where I regularly am.

It's every bit as decentralised as any Fediverse software out there. As in, you can have an avatar in one world and teleport to another world, on another server, under another domain, owned and operated by other people, appearance, inventory and all. As in, the five developers, including only one actual coder, don't own anything beyond their own patches of land.

Another aspect that makes blatantly clear just how Decentraland is a crypto cash grab more than anything else: The actual world itself is buggy as hell. And precious little is done to fix these bugs. In fact, they don't even seem to matter because Decentraland is not about spending time in-world, which is why it's rather deserted and empty, but about minting, selling and buying NFTs.

As COVID brought with itself a virtual world boom from which even Second Life could profit, crypto-based virtual world started spreading. For example, The Sandbox had already been bought out, and it came back in March as a crypto-based world.

Hundreds of virtual worlds were at least announced in the early 2020s, all copying Decentraland's concept of minting deeds to virtual land as NFTs, backed by nothing more than an announcement and a promise, before even getting started with the actual virtual world. The latter was to be quickly and cheaply cobbled together using some 3-D game engine like Unity or Unreal Engine, neither of which is really fit for virtual worlds in which users can build stuff.

The best outcome was an actual virtual world which was barely in a functional state. It only existed for there to be something backing the NFTs. Oftentimes, the financial assets behind the world were kept in cryptocurrencies, hoping that they rise in value which would create more financial assets out of nothing. But when the cryptocurrency crashed, it became impossible to pay for the operation of the world or whatever employees it had. Crypto crashes kept killing crypto-based worlds left and right. It didn't help that most crypto-based virtual worlds used existing cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin.

In many other cases, however, there never was an actual virtual world to begin with. They never got it running. So their customers were sitting their with their expensive NFT land deeds and waiting for the actual land to be made. The longer it took for an announced virtual world to materialise, the harder it got to sell more NFT land deeds because the more unlikely it became that the actual land would ever exist. If plummeting land sales didn't put an end to the endeavour, the next crypto crash did.

I think there were even scammers among these cryptobros. They, too, announced a hot new crypto-based virtual world. They, too, started selling land deeds as NFTs. But they never had the intention to actually create and launch a virtual world. They sold shit-tons of NFTs for shit-tons of crypto money. Then they waited for the cryptocurrency to soar. If they were smart, they traded it all for millions in fiat money and made away with it to someplace offshore. If they weren't, if they wanted to keep on gambling, they, too, lost almost everything in a crypto crash.

Lastly: Around 2021/2022, many cryptobros staunchly insisted in virtual worlds absolutely requiring a blockchain, a cryptocurrency and NFTs for everything. According to them, it's technologically absolutely impossible to build virtual worlds without even only one of these. This was to keep people from getting interested (and invested) in non-crypto virtual worlds.

As a matter of fact, however, there are lots of virtual worlds that don't use a blockchain, that don't have a cryptocurrency, that don't have NFTs for anything. Second Life doesn't, and it never has since its launch in 2002. And Second Life still generates more revenue per user and month than Facebook, legally even.

OpenSim doesn't anywhere. Sansar didn't. High Fidelity didn't. Vircadia doesn't. Overte doesn't. Roblox doesn't. VRChat doesn't. Rec Room didn't. (Formerly Mozilla) Hubs doesn't. Horizon doesn't. Just to name a few. Some of these don't have any in-world payment system at all.

All these blatant lies, the total neglect of the actual virtual worlds and their misuse as a money printer don't really make me trust in crypto. Neither do the rampant gambling and the volatility.

Oh, and don't get me started about land prices in Decentraland vs Second Life vs OpenSim.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #VirtualWorlds #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #Decentraland #TheSandbox #Blockchain #Crypto #Cryptocurrency #Cryptocurrencies #NFT #NFTs #Cryptobros #Cryptomining #CryptoScam #CryptoCrash #NFTCrash

@silverpill @Connected Places The problem with the Mastodon client API is still that it's a Mastodon API. As in, geared towards only one Fediverse server application. In fact, as in, geared towards a very lack-lustre server application that lacks features which have been present in many other places in the Fediverse for years.

This means that you can use a whole lot of microblogging server applications with Mastodon clients. You can even use Friendica with some Mastodon clients. But then you're limited to the features which Mastodon has as well because the Mastodon client API doesn't support any features that Mastodon doesn't have. Why should it, after all?

At the end of the day, the Mastodon client API is designed and maintained by the Mastodon developers. It's them who decide what it can do and what it can't do. For one, they won't waste their time adding features to it that Mastodon itself doesn't have. Besides, if they did, they'd support Mastodon's direct competition and strengthen their advantages over Mastodon when they could throw rocks into their paths instead like they've always done.

This, by the way, is also one reason why both the developers of Hubzilla and the developer of (streams) and Forte refuse to implement the Mastodon client API. It simply wouldn't cover at least 90% of the features of these server applications, including features which you'll need all the time, everyday. That, and they don't want their software to end up at the mercy of Mastodon's developers and Mastodon's product politics by making it depend on Mastodon's technology. They'd rather have no native mobile app at all (and currently they do).

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

@Jörgi It does work Fediverse-wide, i.e. as a Hubzilla user, I can send posts and other content specifically to those in a certain privacy group (= Mastodon list on coke and 'roids from before there was even Mastodon), regardless of where they are. They could be on Hubzilla, on Friendica, on Mastodon, on Misskey, on Pixelfed, doesn't matter.

But there is one limitation.

Most Fediverse server software out there will understand anything coming from Hubzilla with limited permissions as a one-on-one DM. This means that in a thread with limited permissions, e.g. Mastodon users will only be able to discuss with the thread starter, but not with the others who were granted permission to receive the start post.

If I have a privacy group with Alice and Bob in it, and both are on Mastodon, and I send a post to only this privacy group, Alice and Bob will both receive the post as a DM. They will only be able to have a conversation with me. Alice won't know that Bob got the post, Bob won't know that Alice got the post, and Alice and Bob will not be able to converse with each other within this conversation thread.

It's only Hubzilla and its still existing descendants, (streams) and Forte, that fully understand this special permission setting because they have a permission system that's very similar to Hubzilla's whereas Mastodon & Co. don't have any permission system to begin with.

So if Alice is on Hubzilla, and Bob is on (streams), and one of them replies to me, the other one can and will see that reply and will be able to interact with that reply. Like, Alice can reply to me, Bob can reply to Alice, and absolutely nobody else in the Fediverse will see my post or Alice's reply or Bob's reply.

By the way: (streams) and Forte literally have "privacy by default". While privacy groups are an optional, off-by-default feature on Hubzilla, access lists (practically the same) are part of the core on (streams) and Forte. And all your posts go to an access list named "Friends" by default unless you go and configure your channel to post in public by default. Conveniently, all your new connections are automatically added to the "Friends" access list by default.

Is it part of the protocol? That's where it should be defined

For the longest time, namely until last August, it wasn't available on ActivityPub-based software at all. For Hubzilla itself is not based on ActivityPub.

It was first implemented in an early "pre-cursor" version of Hubzilla from 2012 that was built on a protocol specifically designed by Hubzilla's creator for a) privacy by design and, especially, b) resilience against server shutdown. That was five years before ActivityPub was first shown and six years before it became a standard. The protocol was (originally) named Zot, and Hubzilla is still based on Zot6 with ActivityPub being supported via an optional add-on that's on by default for servers, but off by default for new channels. (By the way, Hubzilla was the first software to ever implement ActivityPub.)

There's also (streams) from October, 2021, a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla by Hubzilla's own creator which is based on what's actually a newer version of Zot, but which has advanced so much that it's incompatible with Hubzilla's Zot6, so it's named Nomad now. (streams) has Nomad as its base protocol, it also supports Zot6, and it optionally supports ActivityPub, only that ActivityPub is built into the core now and always on by default.

ActivityPub-based software with this permission system did not exist until August, 2024 when the self-same creator forked the streams repository into something new named Forte, ripped out any and all support for protocols that aren't ActivityPub and ported all of (streams)' features to ActivityPub.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Permission #Permissions #PrivacyGroups #AccessLists #Privacy #PrivacyByDesign #PrivacyByDefault