#fediversemeta — Public Fediverse posts

@DavidM_yeg @Dennis What more is needed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@DavidM_yeg @Dennis What more is needed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, what would this app have to look like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, what would this app have to look like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@InnocentZero If you absolutely need a dedicated mobile app with a mobile UI, and you're on Android, then Friendica is without an alternative.

Otherwise I'd recommend Hubzilla (including if you're on an iPhone, for this means that you will have to use the Web interface either way). Yes, it's feature-rich. Yes, it may have a staggering learning curve. Yes, it isn't recommended to use your new channel at default settings, so you will have to put some work into it before you start.

But: You won't be on your own while trying out Hubzilla, even less than on Mastodon. Hubzilla has a small but active community, it has a support forum (@Hubzilla Support Forum), and it probably has the best user documentation of all Fediverse software, fairly recently re-written by @Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂.

Pepe also wrote a step-by-step guide on how to join Hubzilla.

Now, picking a good server is more difficult than on Mastodon, not only because there aren't exactly many. Of course, it's important that you can join it in the first place. Keep an eye on those that require admin approval, though.

Then there's the software version. If a Mastodon server is running an old version, this can mean that the admin disapproves of certain changes such as new features and tries hard to run the last major version (or even the last major version but one) for as long as it's still supported. If a Hubzilla server is running an old version, it's underadministered, full stop.

The current Hubzilla version is 11.2.1. It has been out for so long that even a server running 11.2 should give you to think. By the way, anything newer than this such as 11.5 is a bleeding-edge development version. Daily-driving zotum.net is somewhat like daily-driving mastodon.online: You get all the new features before everyone else, but you're also much more likely to have to deal with breakage, incompatibilities and so forth, including incompatible third-party apps and themes on Hubzilla.

Speaking of apps, they're important, too. Adding /siteinfo/json after the domain of a hub reveals things like the Hubzilla version, the admins along with links to their channels, but also which apps are activated. For example, the MMN Hub might look tempting. But it was only launched last month, even the admin doesn't appear to be really active, a glance at https://hub.mmn.ca/siteinfo/json reveals that it's almost bare-bone, and the small selection of activated apps is kind of weird. It has Articles, it has the LiveJournal crossposter, but it lacks both NSFW and Superblock. Compare this with hub.hubzilla.de and Pepe's own (invite-only) Whoville which even has @Saiwal's great third-party themes installed.

In general, interaction with Lemmy appears to work reasonably well, only that you have to go to the source to get the link in a start post. I may have to check how easy it is to start a new thread on Lemmy from Hubzilla.

Connecting with PeerTube works, too, only that Hubzilla understands PeerTube channels as groups for some reason.

Pixelfed hasn't caused me any trouble yet either, but then, I don't interact with it, I only receive image posts from it.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Lemmy #PeerTube #Pixelfed #Friendica #Hubzilla

@InnocentZero If you absolutely need a dedicated mobile app with a mobile UI, and you're on Android, then Friendica is without an alternative.

Otherwise I'd recommend Hubzilla (including if you're on an iPhone, for this means that you will have to use the Web interface either way). Yes, it's feature-rich. Yes, it may have a staggering learning curve. Yes, it isn't recommended to use your new channel at default settings, so you will have to put some work into it before you start.

But: You won't be on your own while trying out Hubzilla, even less than on Mastodon. Hubzilla has a small but active community, it has a support forum (@Hubzilla Support Forum), and it probably has the best user documentation of all Fediverse software, fairly recently re-written by @Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂.

Pepe also wrote a step-by-step guide on how to join Hubzilla.

Now, picking a good server is more difficult than on Mastodon, not only because there aren't exactly many. Of course, it's important that you can join it in the first place. Keep an eye on those that require admin approval, though.

Then there's the software version. If a Mastodon server is running an old version, this can mean that the admin disapproves of certain changes such as new features and tries hard to run the last major version (or even the last major version but one) for as long as it's still supported. If a Hubzilla server is running an old version, it's underadministered, full stop.

The current Hubzilla version is 11.2.1. It has been out for so long that even a server running 11.2 should give you to think. By the way, anything newer than this such as 11.5 is a bleeding-edge development version. Daily-driving zotum.net is somewhat like daily-driving mastodon.online: You get all the new features before everyone else, but you're also much more likely to have to deal with breakage, incompatibilities and so forth, including incompatible third-party apps and themes on Hubzilla.

Speaking of apps, they're important, too. Adding /siteinfo/json after the domain of a hub reveals things like the Hubzilla version, the admins along with links to their channels, but also which apps are activated. For example, the MMN Hub might look tempting. But it was only launched last month, even the admin doesn't appear to be really active, a glance at https://hub.mmn.ca/siteinfo/json reveals that it's almost bare-bone, and the small selection of activated apps is kind of weird. It has Articles, it has the LiveJournal crossposter, but it lacks both NSFW and Superblock. Compare this with hub.hubzilla.de and Pepe's own (invite-only) Whoville which even has @Saiwal's great third-party themes installed.

In general, interaction with Lemmy appears to work reasonably well, only that you have to go to the source to get the link in a start post. I may have to check how easy it is to start a new thread on Lemmy from Hubzilla.

Connecting with PeerTube works, too, only that Hubzilla understands PeerTube channels as groups for some reason.

Pixelfed hasn't caused me any trouble yet either, but then, I don't interact with it, I only receive image posts from it.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Lemmy #PeerTube #Pixelfed #Friendica #Hubzilla

@Truth & Answers Let me be honest: Mastodon isn't the right thing to rely on for this.

There are two common misconceptions on Mastodon about Mastodon. The first one is that Mastodon is the only free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything. Once Mastodon users are over this, they still think Mastodon is the best free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything.

I've seen Mastodon being advertised by users as a Fediverse alternative to literally everything, including Reddit (because, like, you can communicate, right?) and even YouTube (because, like, you can upload videos, right?).

But again, let me be honest: The only thing that Mastodon can hope to be an alternative to is 𝕏. Because it's a Twitter clone. A purist Twitter clone whose developers intentionally reject feature requests because the requested features don't fit into their image of purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging. They want to keep Mastodon a slightly more glorified SMS than 𝕏.

Mastodon isn't even the only microblogging server application in the Fediverse. It isn't even the best at that. 80-90% of Mastodon's users don't and probably will never realise that Mastodon is an intentionally crippled resource hog. Many believe that Mastodon is the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking.

By the way, even the Mastodon developers claim that Mastodon is fully featured. I've had a Mastodon dev try hard to convince me that Mastodon is fully featured although I've told him that I'm on Hubzilla. He essentially tried to tell me that Mastodon has every last feature that Hubzilla has plus even more on top.

In reality, Mastodon isn't the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking. It isn't even a social network. It's social media, just like 𝕏 is social media. It's designed for pumping out content and being followed because it's designed as a Twitter-like microblogging application. And it isn't even the best at microblogging.

Almost everyone on Mastodon is fully convinced that Mastodon has to be the best. After all, it's the biggest. It's what everyone chose.

No.

Mastodon is the biggest because everyone who wants to leave 𝕏 or Threads or Bluesky is railroaded to Mastodon. It's the biggest because all the newbies are only told about Mastodon. It's the biggest because none of the newbies even learn upon on-boarding that other 𝕏 alternatives exist in the Fediverse, that anything else exists in the Fediverse other than Mastodon. It's the biggest because mainstream media, tech media and even Fediverse activists only ever talk about Mastodon, Mastodon, Mastodon. (Granted, it's also the biggest because it's the only one with an official phone app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Even though that app sucks.)

All these Mastodon users who claim that Mastodon is the best choice don't realise that they themselves did, in fact, not choose Mastodon. They didn't know they had a choice. All they were told about was Mastodon. Seriously, if they'd had a choice, they'd probably be on Sharkey now and not on Mastodon.

I've read what people had to say who moved from Friendica to Misskey. Or to now defunct Calckey/Firefish. Or to Sharkey. Or to Akkoma. All these are microblogging server applications in the Fediverse. But none of them are intentionally crippled to stay close to Twitter, at least not to such a degree as Mastodon.

It was nothing short of eye-opening to them. Only by daily-driving something else than Mastodon did they realise what the non-Mastodon Fediverse can be like. And how crippled Mastodon actually is. That Mastodon is far from being the absolute pinnacle in decentralised social media.

They no longer had only 500 characters. They had thousands of characters. They would have had thousands of characters on every server running that software without having to ask around which one has more than 500 characters. It felt like a restraint being removed which they had never considered a restraint, at least not that much of it.

They saw text formatting which they considered technologically absolutely impossible in the Fediverse when they were on Mastodon. In fact, they had considered text formatting entirely impossible while on Mastodon until they had come across the first message from outside with text formatting. Actual text formatting, not Unicode trickery. Now they suddenly saw a lot of the stuff that Mastodon's HTML sanitiser removes. And they themselves could use it!

If they were on one of the *keys, they no longer had a timeline of single-message piecemeal. For the first time ever, they experienced what it's like to have something else than single-message piecemeal. Namely entire conversations right in front of them, right away. Without having to dig for them first.

They had features which they had always wished the Fediverse may introduce. They never knew that the Fediverse does have these features, only Mastodon doesn't. They had features that were completely unimagiable to them in the Fediverse.

There are users who have moved from Mastodon to something "minimalist" and lightweight like snac or GoToSocial, often on self-hosted, single-user, private servers. Even they suddenly had features they didn't have on Mastodon. Mind you, while not missing a single Mastodon feature (except maybe for a built-in Web UI).

And that's just the microblogging side of the Fediverse. None of this is actual social networking. You know, what Facebook does.

First of all, if it's about following and being followed, it's social media. A social network doesn't have followers. In case you don't know, Facebook doesn't have followers. It has "friends". Bidirectional connections. Not 𝕏/Mastodon-like mutuals which are two connections, one in each direction, but one connection that goes both ways.

Besides, there are even more important social networking features missing from the microblogging side of the Fediverse.

Where are the contact suggestions? Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on how many contacts you have in common with them? Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on what profile information you have in common with them?

Oh, right, the latter is impossible because Mastodon doesn't have profile fields with defined purposes. In fact, where are these? Every good social network has them! But Mastodon only gives you four all-purpose profile fields (just like Mastodon only gives you four of everything, four file attachments, four options in polls...).

Where is the list of unread posts, unread comments and other unnoticed actions? How are you to make sure you really catch everything your friends do? Because you can't do that if all you have is a timeline to scroll through until you no longer see new stuff. If you manage to scroll down that far. And only absolute newbies can do that on Mastodon because they hardly follow anyone.

Where are groups? Seriously, I've lost count of how many times Mastodon users said "the Fediverse" must introduce something like Facebook Groups. The huge majority of Mastodon users is fully convinced that the Fediverse does not have groups in any shape or form because Mastodon doesn't have them.

Where are all these things? In the Fediverse, no less? Where are they?

I'll tell you where they are.

Friendica. Hubzilla. (streams). Forte.

The actual social networking side of the Fediverse (although Hubzilla is more like a social CMS or a "social Swiss army knife" that you can also use as a Facebook-like social networking application). I mean, I've already explained that Friendica was created in 2010 as a Facebook alternative. Not a faithful Facebook clone, though, but better than Facebook.

Mike Macgirvin took over from Facebook what social networks really need. And Farmville isn't that, and spying on your users and passing that data on to the NSA and selling it to the highest bidder isn't that, so he didn't take over that. He didn't want to build a clone that also adopts the bad sides just to be as close to the original as possible.

He took over the detailed profiles with profile fields with dedicated purposes. He took over profile privacy settings. In general, he took over a lot of privacy features. He took over advanced user discovery and connection suggestions. He took over bidirectional connections, only without that silly name "friends". He took over groups with moderation, only that a group on Friendica is just another account with a special automated reposter. He took over enclosed threaded conversations with one post at the top and otherwise only comments. He took over a "timeline" of full conversations as the default. He took over the event calendar. And so forth.

Instead, he added useful stuff on top. He gave Friendica all the posting features to make it fully capable of long-form blogging with all bells and whistles. No character limit (except for in the database, but I think that was over 65,000 back in the day already). All HTML text formatting features (only that Friendica only used BBcode back then; now it can optionally also use Markdown). A post/thread title. Summaries. Embedded images and other media with no limit in number. He even added a spoiler tag like in forums that can hide parts of a message.

He took care of privacy beyond what Facebook had to offer. He introduced a permissions system. Friendica got multiple profile per account, only one of which is public, so that you can show different sides of yourself to different connections.

Now, if you want to embed images or other media in your messages, you have to store them somewhere. And not everyone could be expected to set up a little file space somewhere. So he built a file space into Friendica, one that can even be used as a Dropbox alternative, all the way to restricted access to certain directories.

Mike also added a content warning system that automatically generates content warnings on the reader's side, based on a keyword list. If you need something behind content warnings, add the keywords to the list, and you'll have the respective content warnings, but the next user receiving the self-same post or comment does not have these content warnings if they don't need them.

One important part of what makes Friendica Friendica is being able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. For example, Friendica could federate with StatusNet via the OStatus protocol from the get-go; this is also how it immediately federated with Mastodon when the latter was launched. Mastodon generates an RSS feed, something that many users don't know. Friendica not only generates an Atom feed, but it can subscribe to feeds. Friendica can "federate" with e-mail. Over time, more and more connection features were added, including Tumblr, Twitter (!), Facebook (only for a few years before Facebook crippled it) and a WordPress cross-poster.

Lastly, he made it possible for third parties to add extra features by implementing an add-on system.

I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best Facebook alternative possible to use Friendica for a year. Not only dip one toe in to the water, but use it as their one and only daily driver for everything they've used Mastodon for. Not scratching the surface and using it like Twitter while ignoring any and all features the Twitter they remember didn't have, but going all in. In fact, I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is perfect and fully-featured to do the same.

And then there's Hubzilla. It came to exist by Mike forking Friendica in 2011, then forking that fork the same year, then rewriting that fork of a fork in 2012, then repurposing, rebranding, repositioning and greatly expanding it in 2015. Long story.

Hubzilla adds even more stuff on top. Most importantly, it introduced nomadic identity (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity) in 2012.

Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, became the first decentralised social software that uncoupled the identity from the login. This was necessary for nomadic identity, but it also introduced the option to have multiple independent identities, basically what's an account elsewhere, on the same account, the same login. This makes sense, given the many different roles and purposes a Hubzilla channel can have. The big advantage over having multiple separate accounts is that you can switch between the channels on your account without logging out and back in.

Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, got an even more advanced and fine-grained permissions system. Hubzilla has 17 individual permissions on three levels, channel level, contact level, content level. At channel level, each one has seven or eight permission options to choose from, depending on whether or not it makes sense to give a permission to everyone on the Internet.

Mike added optional features to Hubzilla that were previously unseen on social anything, features that you'd rather expect from a CMS and maybe not even from that. Non-federating long-form articles. Planning cards that are based on these articles. Wikis that can be formatted with BBcode or Markdown. Webpages that can be formatted with BBcode, Markdown or HTML, that can include dynamic content from elsewhere on the channel, and that can add extra content to the channel pages.

Hubzilla can even act as groupware. It has a CalDAV calendar server; the event calendar can double as a crude UI for the CalDAV calendars. It has an optional CardDAV addressbook server. Its built-in file storage can be accessed via WebDAV, so you theoretically even have some cloud file space you can mount as a network drive. Rather recently, there was even a way found to tie Collabora Office into Hubzilla.

If you should ever read about Bonfire: Bonfire is Hubzilla ordered from Wish.com. Whatever Bonfire promises to have or to introduce has been available as a rock-solid stable feature on Hubzilla for over a decade. Bonfire only gets away with what it's trying to do because nobody knows Hubzilla.

I think it's safe to say that those who "chose" Mastodon didn't choose it over the rest of the Fediverse because it's better. They "chose" it because they didn't even know they have a choice.

As for your post, the technology for redeveloping socialising is there. And it certainly isn't Mastodon, and it never will be Mastodon. Mastodon can't be that due to its design philosophy, due to it being a Twitter clone, due to its own developers intentionally crippling it.

If you want to move on from 1-way interaction, you have to move on from 1-way connections. Move on from Twitter followers to Facebook friends.

You have to offer better options for the users than shouting into the void, attaching a bunch of hashtags and hoping that some of their followers or someone who is following one of the hashtags happens to be bothered to scroll down their timeline far enough.

You have to make sure that people don't miss content due to basic design and philosophy decisions. You have to make sure that people don't miss content because they simply never know that this content is there in the first place, because they can't scroll down far enough their timelines until they reach that content. You need something else than a timeline of single messages to scroll down with the user not having an idea just how far down that timeline goes. You have to tell the user how much unread content there is, what it is, where it is, and take the user directly to that unread content.

You have to stop presenting content to users as a long list of single posts and more single posts with only tiny details telling them that these posts are, in fact, part of a longer conversation which they don't see. Where they have to click or tap themselves through various UI pages to see that post in its context. Users must see the whole conversation Right. Off. The bat.

You need groups. Not kluged onto something that had no group support whatsoever two seconds earlier, not intentionally crippled, not crippled by the technology they're built upon, not intentionally re-invented to be incompatible with whatever already exists (and this is how Mastodon would do them). But fully functional, on an appropriate base, interoperable, user-moderated, optionally private, optionally hiding from directories.

If you want to go "social", you really have to go social. You have to go Facebook, not Twitter.

Users must find other users based on common interests. Or users living close to them. Or users with lots of contacts in common with them. Not by being on the same local/regional server of the same server about a certain topic. Not by searching for hashtags in the main profile text. But by examining specialised profile fields and the contacts.

Users must have such users suggested to them as new connections. Users must have such users at the top of their directory. This is how Facebook does it. And this is one thing that Facebook has always done right.

Again, Mastodon will never offer any of this. But that doesn't mean that you'll have to compromise and lower your expectations. Because you don't have to. There are server applications in the Fediverse, fully federated with Mastodon, that offer literally all of that. They exist right now. And some of them have existed for longer than Mastodon.

If you need something better than today's Mastodon, stop wishing for a better Mastodon. Instead, use something that's better and more appropriate for the job than Mastodon right now. For it exists right now.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Privacy #Permission #Permissions #Groups #FediverseGroups #FediGroups #NomadicIdentity #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@Truth & Answers Let me be honest: Mastodon isn't the right thing to rely on for this.

There are two common misconceptions on Mastodon about Mastodon. The first one is that Mastodon is the only free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything. Once Mastodon users are over this, they still think Mastodon is the best free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything.

I've seen Mastodon being advertised by users as a Fediverse alternative to literally everything, including Reddit (because, like, you can communicate, right?) and even YouTube (because, like, you can upload videos, right?).

But again, let me be honest: The only thing that Mastodon can hope to be an alternative to is 𝕏. Because it's a Twitter clone. A purist Twitter clone whose developers intentionally reject feature requests because the requested features don't fit into their image of purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging. They want to keep Mastodon a slightly more glorified SMS than 𝕏.

Mastodon isn't even the only microblogging server application in the Fediverse. It isn't even the best at that. 80-90% of Mastodon's users don't and probably will never realise that Mastodon is an intentionally crippled resource hog. Many believe that Mastodon is the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking.

By the way, even the Mastodon developers claim that Mastodon is fully featured. I've had a Mastodon dev try hard to convince me that Mastodon is fully featured although I've told him that I'm on Hubzilla. He essentially tried to tell me that Mastodon has every last feature that Hubzilla has plus even more on top.

In reality, Mastodon isn't the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking. It isn't even a social network. It's social media, just like 𝕏 is social media. It's designed for pumping out content and being followed because it's designed as a Twitter-like microblogging application. And it isn't even the best at microblogging.

Almost everyone on Mastodon is fully convinced that Mastodon has to be the best. After all, it's the biggest. It's what everyone chose.

No.

Mastodon is the biggest because everyone who wants to leave 𝕏 or Threads or Bluesky is railroaded to Mastodon. It's the biggest because all the newbies are only told about Mastodon. It's the biggest because none of the newbies even learn upon on-boarding that other 𝕏 alternatives exist in the Fediverse, that anything else exists in the Fediverse other than Mastodon. It's the biggest because mainstream media, tech media and even Fediverse activists only ever talk about Mastodon, Mastodon, Mastodon. (Granted, it's also the biggest because it's the only one with an official phone app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Even though that app sucks.)

All these Mastodon users who claim that Mastodon is the best choice don't realise that they themselves did, in fact, not choose Mastodon. They didn't know they had a choice. All they were told about was Mastodon. Seriously, if they'd had a choice, they'd probably be on Sharkey now and not on Mastodon.

I've read what people had to say who moved from Friendica to Misskey. Or to now defunct Calckey/Firefish. Or to Sharkey. Or to Akkoma. All these are microblogging server applications in the Fediverse. But none of them are intentionally crippled to stay close to Twitter, at least not to such a degree as Mastodon.

It was nothing short of eye-opening to them. Only by daily-driving something else than Mastodon did they realise what the non-Mastodon Fediverse can be like. And how crippled Mastodon actually is. That Mastodon is far from being the absolute pinnacle in decentralised social media.

They no longer had only 500 characters. They had thousands of characters. They would have had thousands of characters on every server running that software without having to ask around which one has more than 500 characters. It felt like a restraint being removed which they had never considered a restraint, at least not that much of it.

They saw text formatting which they considered technologically absolutely impossible in the Fediverse when they were on Mastodon. In fact, they had considered text formatting entirely impossible while on Mastodon until they had come across the first message from outside with text formatting. Actual text formatting, not Unicode trickery. Now they suddenly saw a lot of the stuff that Mastodon's HTML sanitiser removes. And they themselves could use it!

If they were on one of the *keys, they no longer had a timeline of single-message piecemeal. For the first time ever, they experienced what it's like to have something else than single-message piecemeal. Namely entire conversations right in front of them, right away. Without having to dig for them first.

They had features which they had always wished the Fediverse may introduce. They never knew that the Fediverse does have these features, only Mastodon doesn't. They had features that were completely unimagiable to them in the Fediverse.

There are users who have moved from Mastodon to something "minimalist" and lightweight like snac or GoToSocial, often on self-hosted, single-user, private servers. Even they suddenly had features they didn't have on Mastodon. Mind you, while not missing a single Mastodon feature (except maybe for a built-in Web UI).

And that's just the microblogging side of the Fediverse. None of this is actual social networking. You know, what Facebook does.

First of all, if it's about following and being followed, it's social media. A social network doesn't have followers. In case you don't know, Facebook doesn't have followers. It has "friends". Bidirectional connections. Not 𝕏/Mastodon-like mutuals which are two connections, one in each direction, but one connection that goes both ways.

Besides, there are even more important social networking features missing from the microblogging side of the Fediverse.

Where are the contact suggestions? Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on how many contacts you have in common with them? Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on what profile information you have in common with them?

Oh, right, the latter is impossible because Mastodon doesn't have profile fields with defined purposes. In fact, where are these? Every good social network has them! But Mastodon only gives you four all-purpose profile fields (just like Mastodon only gives you four of everything, four file attachments, four options in polls...).

Where is the list of unread posts, unread comments and other unnoticed actions? How are you to make sure you really catch everything your friends do? Because you can't do that if all you have is a timeline to scroll through until you no longer see new stuff. If you manage to scroll down that far. And only absolute newbies can do that on Mastodon because they hardly follow anyone.

Where are groups? Seriously, I've lost count of how many times Mastodon users said "the Fediverse" must introduce something like Facebook Groups. The huge majority of Mastodon users is fully convinced that the Fediverse does not have groups in any shape or form because Mastodon doesn't have them.

Where are all these things? In the Fediverse, no less? Where are they?

I'll tell you where they are.

Friendica. Hubzilla. (streams). Forte.

The actual social networking side of the Fediverse (although Hubzilla is more like a social CMS or a "social Swiss army knife" that you can also use as a Facebook-like social networking application). I mean, I've already explained that Friendica was created in 2010 as a Facebook alternative. Not a faithful Facebook clone, though, but better than Facebook.

Mike Macgirvin took over from Facebook what social networks really need. And Farmville isn't that, and spying on your users and passing that data on to the NSA and selling it to the highest bidder isn't that, so he didn't take over that. He didn't want to build a clone that also adopts the bad sides just to be as close to the original as possible.

He took over the detailed profiles with profile fields with dedicated purposes. He took over profile privacy settings. In general, he took over a lot of privacy features. He took over advanced user discovery and connection suggestions. He took over bidirectional connections, only without that silly name "friends". He took over groups with moderation, only that a group on Friendica is just another account with a special automated reposter. He took over enclosed threaded conversations with one post at the top and otherwise only comments. He took over a "timeline" of full conversations as the default. He took over the event calendar. And so forth.

Instead, he added useful stuff on top. He gave Friendica all the posting features to make it fully capable of long-form blogging with all bells and whistles. No character limit (except for in the database, but I think that was over 65,000 back in the day already). All HTML text formatting features (only that Friendica only used BBcode back then; now it can optionally also use Markdown). A post/thread title. Summaries. Embedded images and other media with no limit in number. He even added a spoiler tag like in forums that can hide parts of a message.

He took care of privacy beyond what Facebook had to offer. He introduced a permissions system. Friendica got multiple profile per account, only one of which is public, so that you can show different sides of yourself to different connections.

Now, if you want to embed images or other media in your messages, you have to store them somewhere. And not everyone could be expected to set up a little file space somewhere. So he built a file space into Friendica, one that can even be used as a Dropbox alternative, all the way to restricted access to certain directories.

Mike also added a content warning system that automatically generates content warnings on the reader's side, based on a keyword list. If you need something behind content warnings, add the keywords to the list, and you'll have the respective content warnings, but the next user receiving the self-same post or comment does not have these content warnings if they don't need them.

One important part of what makes Friendica Friendica is being able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. For example, Friendica could federate with StatusNet via the OStatus protocol from the get-go; this is also how it immediately federated with Mastodon when the latter was launched. Mastodon generates an RSS feed, something that many users don't know. Friendica not only generates an Atom feed, but it can subscribe to feeds. Friendica can "federate" with e-mail. Over time, more and more connection features were added, including Tumblr, Twitter (!), Facebook (only for a few years before Facebook crippled it) and a WordPress cross-poster.

Lastly, he made it possible for third parties to add extra features by implementing an add-on system.

I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best Facebook alternative possible to use Friendica for a year. Not only dip one toe in to the water, but use it as their one and only daily driver for everything they've used Mastodon for. Not scratching the surface and using it like Twitter while ignoring any and all features the Twitter they remember didn't have, but going all in. In fact, I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is perfect and fully-featured to do the same.

And then there's Hubzilla. It came to exist by Mike forking Friendica in 2011, then forking that fork the same year, then rewriting that fork of a fork in 2012, then repurposing, rebranding, repositioning and greatly expanding it in 2015. Long story.

Hubzilla adds even more stuff on top. Most importantly, it introduced nomadic identity (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity) in 2012.

Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, became the first decentralised social software that uncoupled the identity from the login. This was necessary for nomadic identity, but it also introduced the option to have multiple independent identities, basically what's an account elsewhere, on the same account, the same login. This makes sense, given the many different roles and purposes a Hubzilla channel can have. The big advantage over having multiple separate accounts is that you can switch between the channels on your account without logging out and back in.

Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, got an even more advanced and fine-grained permissions system. Hubzilla has 17 individual permissions on three levels, channel level, contact level, content level. At channel level, each one has seven or eight permission options to choose from, depending on whether or not it makes sense to give a permission to everyone on the Internet.

Mike added optional features to Hubzilla that were previously unseen on social anything, features that you'd rather expect from a CMS and maybe not even from that. Non-federating long-form articles. Planning cards that are based on these articles. Wikis that can be formatted with BBcode or Markdown. Webpages that can be formatted with BBcode, Markdown or HTML, that can include dynamic content from elsewhere on the channel, and that can add extra content to the channel pages.

Hubzilla can even act as groupware. It has a CalDAV calendar server; the event calendar can double as a crude UI for the CalDAV calendars. It has an optional CardDAV addressbook server. Its built-in file storage can be accessed via WebDAV, so you theoretically even have some cloud file space you can mount as a network drive. Rather recently, there was even a way found to tie Collabora Office into Hubzilla.

If you should ever read about Bonfire: Bonfire is Hubzilla ordered from Wish.com. Whatever Bonfire promises to have or to introduce has been available as a rock-solid stable feature on Hubzilla for over a decade. Bonfire only gets away with what it's trying to do because nobody knows Hubzilla.

I think it's safe to say that those who "chose" Mastodon didn't choose it over the rest of the Fediverse because it's better. They "chose" it because they didn't even know they have a choice.

As for your post, the technology for redeveloping socialising is there. And it certainly isn't Mastodon, and it never will be Mastodon. Mastodon can't be that due to its design philosophy, due to it being a Twitter clone, due to its own developers intentionally crippling it.

If you want to move on from 1-way interaction, you have to move on from 1-way connections. Move on from Twitter followers to Facebook friends.

You have to offer better options for the users than shouting into the void, attaching a bunch of hashtags and hoping that some of their followers or someone who is following one of the hashtags happens to be bothered to scroll down their timeline far enough.

You have to make sure that people don't miss content due to basic design and philosophy decisions. You have to make sure that people don't miss content because they simply never know that this content is there in the first place, because they can't scroll down far enough their timelines until they reach that content. You need something else than a timeline of single messages to scroll down with the user not having an idea just how far down that timeline goes. You have to tell the user how much unread content there is, what it is, where it is, and take the user directly to that unread content.

You have to stop presenting content to users as a long list of single posts and more single posts with only tiny details telling them that these posts are, in fact, part of a longer conversation which they don't see. Where they have to click or tap themselves through various UI pages to see that post in its context. Users must see the whole conversation Right. Off. The bat.

You need groups. Not kluged onto something that had no group support whatsoever two seconds earlier, not intentionally crippled, not crippled by the technology they're built upon, not intentionally re-invented to be incompatible with whatever already exists (and this is how Mastodon would do them). But fully functional, on an appropriate base, interoperable, user-moderated, optionally private, optionally hiding from directories.

If you want to go "social", you really have to go social. You have to go Facebook, not Twitter.

Users must find other users based on common interests. Or users living close to them. Or users with lots of contacts in common with them. Not by being on the same local/regional server of the same server about a certain topic. Not by searching for hashtags in the main profile text. But by examining specialised profile fields and the contacts.

Users must have such users suggested to them as new connections. Users must have such users at the top of their directory. This is how Facebook does it. And this is one thing that Facebook has always done right.

Again, Mastodon will never offer any of this. But that doesn't mean that you'll have to compromise and lower your expectations. Because you don't have to. There are server applications in the Fediverse, fully federated with Mastodon, that offer literally all of that. They exist right now. And some of them have existed for longer than Mastodon.

If you need something better than today's Mastodon, stop wishing for a better Mastodon. Instead, use something that's better and more appropriate for the job than Mastodon right now. For it exists right now.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Privacy #Permission #Permissions #Groups #FediverseGroups #FediGroups #NomadicIdentity #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

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

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

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

The Mastodon side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The non-Mastodon side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The conflict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so forth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so forth.

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

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

Countermeasures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mastodon side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The non-Mastodon side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The conflict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so forth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so forth.

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

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

Countermeasures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@Irina I'm pretty certain that there's some Mastodon phone app out there that does this fully automatically, and the users don't know about it.

The best would be to first ask them what app they use and then to ask the app developer(s) to stop this.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #MastodonApp #MastodonApps

@Irina I'm pretty certain that there's some Mastodon phone app out there that does this fully automatically, and the users don't know about it.

The best would be to first ask them what app they use and then to ask the app developer(s) to stop this.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #MastodonApp #MastodonApps

@veroandi_br @Stefan Quite a bit of it could be done with Hubzilla as well. In fact, it's modular and extensible, too, and its number of third-party extensions is practically growing as we speak.

Moderated groups, it has them right now, and they can be moderated by any member anywhere on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte.

Profile for your dog, well, you can create as many channels on one account as you want. Each channel amounts to one Mastodon or Friendica account, feature-wise, only that it isn't its own login, and you can switch between channels without logging out and back in again. You can have one account/one login on one hub, but one channel for yourself, one for each one of your dogs, and if you want to run a forum, that's another channel on the same account.

Maybe it's even possible to build appropriate third-party apps that tie in with the already existing OpenStreetMap app.

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

@Roknrol Here are a few older alt-texts that I've written for original images of my own.

Digital shaded rendering of the main building of the Universal Campus, a downloadable island location for 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. The camera position is about three metres or ten feet above the ground. The camera is tilted slightly upward and rotated slightly to the left from the building's longitudinal axis. The futuristic building is over 200 metres long, stretching far into the distance, and its front is about 50 metres wide. Its structure is mostly textured to resemble brushed stainless steel, and almost everything in-between is grey tinted glass. The main entrance of the building in the middle of the front has two pairs of glass doors. They are surrounded by a massive complex geometrical structure, very roughly reminiscent of a vintage video game spacecraft with the front facing upward. Four huge cylindrical pillars carry the roof end, the outer two of which extend beyond it. All are tilted away from the landing area in front of the building and at the same time outward to the sides. The sides of the building are slightly tilted themselves. In the distance, a large geodesic dome rises from the building. There is a large circular area in front of the main entrance as well as several wide paths. They have light concrete textures, and they are lined with low walls with almost white concrete textures. Furthermore, various shrubs and trees decorate the scenery. A more detailed description including explanations and text transcripts can be found in the post.

Digital rendering from OSgrid, one of the biggest out of thousands of 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. It shows Juno Rowland, a female avatar, standing at the end of a wooden pier with the ocean in the background. The avatar is designed to resemble a woman who is no older than in her 30s. She is slim underneath loose-fitting clothes. She has light to medium-light skin, brown eyes and black hair which is styled as a neck-long bob. She is wearing a black tank top with the logo of the 17th birthday of OSgrid on it, a straight, lower-thigh-length, light-to-medium-light-brown denim miniskirt, a pair of black flat ballet shoes and a golden necklace with the OSgrid logo. The OSgrid logo is made up from five identical parallelograms arranged in a circular, star-like pattern. It is also part of the birthday logo which is mostly two tones of yellowish orange. The writing on the birthday logo reads, from top to bottom, “OSgrid”, “The Open Source Metaverse” and “17th Birthday”. A more detailed description of the image, including explanations, can be found in the post itself. If you are on Mastodon, Misskey or one of their forks, you can find it by opening the summary and content warning which includes, “CW: long (22,270 characters, including 20,377 characters of image descriptions), eye contact”, and then following the actual post text. If you are on Pleroma, Akkoma, another Pleroma fork, Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), the full description will follow right after the images.

Digital rendering from OSgrid, one of the biggest out of thousands of 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. It shows Juno Rowland, a female avatar, standing at the end of a wooden pier with the ocean in the background. The avatar is designed to resemble a woman who is no older than in her 30s. She is slim underneath loose-fitting clothes. She has light to medium-light skin and black hair which is styled as a neck-long bob. She is wearing a black tank top, a straight, lower-thigh-length, light-to-medium-light-brown denim miniskirt, a pair of black flat ballet shoes and a golden necklace. She is looking at the cover of the Leonard Cohen album Recent Songs on a white easel. The cover is a painting of the musician's face. He is shown to be a middle-aged man with light skin, green eyes and black hair in a black shirt. A hummingbird is drawn hovering above his shoulder to the left. The background is medium blue. Cohen's name and the album title are written in the top corners. A more detailed description of the image, including explanations, can be found in the post itself. If you are on Mastodon, Misskey or one of their forks, you can find it by opening the summary and content warning which includes, “CW: long (22,270 characters, including 20,377 characters of image descriptions), eye contact”, and then following the actual post text. If you are on Pleroma, Akkoma, another Pleroma fork, Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), the full description will follow right after the images.

Good? Too long? Still not sufficiently detailed? If the latter, then rest assured: When the alt-text announces an additional, much longer image description in the message text, then there actually is one.

That is, nowadays, my goal is to limit my alt-texts to a maximum of 512 characters. That's because if a post with a longer alt-text arrives on Misskey or Iceshrimp-JS or Sharkey or another Misskey fork, then the alt-text is deleted without any trace. It will look like there has never been any alt-text to begin with.

When I post memes, it's usually easier to keep alt-texts shorter. The tricky part is to still have all the text transcripts in the alt-text because I only write one visual description for each of my meme images unless it's based on a virtual world rendering. I do give some explanations in my meme posts, though.

These two are very recent:

Image macro, based on a screen capture from the Disney and Pixar animated film Finding Nemo. At the top, there is a white space with a two-line caption: “OSgrid: offline for weeks to come,” and “Owners of other grids, looking at OSgrid residents:”. In the screen capture below, ten seagulls are perched on two mooring lines in the background. An eleventh seagull pokes its head into the image from the bottom right. They all look at the camera. Each one is labelled with the question, “Mine?”

Image macro, based on a screen capture from the animated film Finding Nemo. At the top, there is a white space with a two-line caption: “Fediverse admin: announces the end of their instance and asks their users to migrate to other instances,” and “Admins of other instances:”. In the screen capture below, ten seagulls are perched on two mooring lines. An eleventh seagull pokes its head into the image from the bottom right. They all look at the camera. Each one is labelled with the question, “Mine?”

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #Sharkey #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta

@Roknrol Here are a few older alt-texts that I've written for original images of my own.

Digital shaded rendering of the main building of the Universal Campus, a downloadable island location for 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. The camera position is about three metres or ten feet above the ground. The camera is tilted slightly upward and rotated slightly to the left from the building's longitudinal axis. The futuristic building is over 200 metres long, stretching far into the distance, and its front is about 50 metres wide. Its structure is mostly textured to resemble brushed stainless steel, and almost everything in-between is grey tinted glass. The main entrance of the building in the middle of the front has two pairs of glass doors. They are surrounded by a massive complex geometrical structure, very roughly reminiscent of a vintage video game spacecraft with the front facing upward. Four huge cylindrical pillars carry the roof end, the outer two of which extend beyond it. All are tilted away from the landing area in front of the building and at the same time outward to the sides. The sides of the building are slightly tilted themselves. In the distance, a large geodesic dome rises from the building. There is a large circular area in front of the main entrance as well as several wide paths. They have light concrete textures, and they are lined with low walls with almost white concrete textures. Furthermore, various shrubs and trees decorate the scenery. A more detailed description including explanations and text transcripts can be found in the post.

Digital rendering from OSgrid, one of the biggest out of thousands of 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. It shows Juno Rowland, a female avatar, standing at the end of a wooden pier with the ocean in the background. The avatar is designed to resemble a woman who is no older than in her 30s. She is slim underneath loose-fitting clothes. She has light to medium-light skin, brown eyes and black hair which is styled as a neck-long bob. She is wearing a black tank top with the logo of the 17th birthday of OSgrid on it, a straight, lower-thigh-length, light-to-medium-light-brown denim miniskirt, a pair of black flat ballet shoes and a golden necklace with the OSgrid logo. The OSgrid logo is made up from five identical parallelograms arranged in a circular, star-like pattern. It is also part of the birthday logo which is mostly two tones of yellowish orange. The writing on the birthday logo reads, from top to bottom, “OSgrid”, “The Open Source Metaverse” and “17th Birthday”. A more detailed description of the image, including explanations, can be found in the post itself. If you are on Mastodon, Misskey or one of their forks, you can find it by opening the summary and content warning which includes, “CW: long (22,270 characters, including 20,377 characters of image descriptions), eye contact”, and then following the actual post text. If you are on Pleroma, Akkoma, another Pleroma fork, Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), the full description will follow right after the images.

Digital rendering from OSgrid, one of the biggest out of thousands of 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. It shows Juno Rowland, a female avatar, standing at the end of a wooden pier with the ocean in the background. The avatar is designed to resemble a woman who is no older than in her 30s. She is slim underneath loose-fitting clothes. She has light to medium-light skin and black hair which is styled as a neck-long bob. She is wearing a black tank top, a straight, lower-thigh-length, light-to-medium-light-brown denim miniskirt, a pair of black flat ballet shoes and a golden necklace. She is looking at the cover of the Leonard Cohen album Recent Songs on a white easel. The cover is a painting of the musician's face. He is shown to be a middle-aged man with light skin, green eyes and black hair in a black shirt. A hummingbird is drawn hovering above his shoulder to the left. The background is medium blue. Cohen's name and the album title are written in the top corners. A more detailed description of the image, including explanations, can be found in the post itself. If you are on Mastodon, Misskey or one of their forks, you can find it by opening the summary and content warning which includes, “CW: long (22,270 characters, including 20,377 characters of image descriptions), eye contact”, and then following the actual post text. If you are on Pleroma, Akkoma, another Pleroma fork, Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), the full description will follow right after the images.

Good? Too long? Still not sufficiently detailed? If the latter, then rest assured: When the alt-text announces an additional, much longer image description in the message text, then there actually is one.

That is, nowadays, my goal is to limit my alt-texts to a maximum of 512 characters. That's because if a post with a longer alt-text arrives on Misskey or Iceshrimp-JS or Sharkey or another Misskey fork, then the alt-text is deleted without any trace. It will look like there has never been any alt-text to begin with.

When I post memes, it's usually easier to keep alt-texts shorter. The tricky part is to still have all the text transcripts in the alt-text because I only write one visual description for each of my meme images unless it's based on a virtual world rendering. I do give some explanations in my meme posts, though.

These two are very recent:

Image macro, based on a screen capture from the Disney and Pixar animated film Finding Nemo. At the top, there is a white space with a two-line caption: “OSgrid: offline for weeks to come,” and “Owners of other grids, looking at OSgrid residents:”. In the screen capture below, ten seagulls are perched on two mooring lines in the background. An eleventh seagull pokes its head into the image from the bottom right. They all look at the camera. Each one is labelled with the question, “Mine?”

Image macro, based on a screen capture from the animated film Finding Nemo. At the top, there is a white space with a two-line caption: “Fediverse admin: announces the end of their instance and asks their users to migrate to other instances,” and “Admins of other instances:”. In the screen capture below, ten seagulls are perched on two mooring lines. An eleventh seagull pokes its head into the image from the bottom right. They all look at the camera. Each one is labelled with the question, “Mine?”

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #Sharkey #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta

@Sea @C. Are you absolutely certain that they are all Mastodon accounts? Have you checked their profiles at the sources (in a Web browser, in case you're on a phone with a dedicated Mastodon app) and seen a Mastodon profile page?

I mean, yes, some of them are on Mastodon. But not all Fediverse actors that at least sometimes appear in several instances are on Mastodon.

See, certain non-Mastodon Fediverse server software has a feature called "nomadic identity" (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity). This makes it possible to create clones (live backups sync'd bidirectionally against each other in real time) of one's identity with everything attached to it on other servers. First and foremost, it's Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) that offers this feature, and it has since 2012.

What you see in this case is not two separate Fediverse identities, one of which is an automated reposter bot. It's one cloned nomadic identity, only that Mastodon can't understand it as such because it lacks the technical means to do so.

The idea behind this is resilience by redundancy: One server with your identity goes down, and you lose nothing because you still have the exact self-same identity with everything on at least one other server. Even if that server goes back online, the instance of your identity on it catches up with the others. The whole concept was born from Friendica servers disappearing and their users losing everything.

Fediverse server applications that know nomadic identity see all instances of a cloned identity as one and the same identity.

But Fediverse server applications like Mastodon that don't know nomadic identity see them as separate Fediverse accounts with separate identities.

For example, the Hubzilla channel that I'm replying from right now has one clone, so it has two instances. Mastodon understands them as two individual accounts. So do all Mastodon users, also because the huge majority of them has never heard of nomadic identity.

Thus, there are Mastodon users who follow both my main instance and my clone because they think these are two separate accounts. And now they end up receiving each one of my posts twice. Also, the federated timeline of the Mastodon server that they're on lists each one of my posts twice.

The latter also happens when one user on any given Mastodon server follows my main instance, and another user follows my clone.

Most Mastodon users, upon seeing my posts twice, will assume that I'm running some automated reposting bot (technically speaking, I could, but I don't) that serves to a) increase my reach and b) circumvent mutes and blocks. At least some may be tempted to block both my original instance and my clone.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Hubzilla #Clone #Clones #NomadicIdentity

@Sea @C. Are you absolutely certain that they are all Mastodon accounts? Have you checked their profiles at the sources (in a Web browser, in case you're on a phone with a dedicated Mastodon app) and seen a Mastodon profile page?

I mean, yes, some of them are on Mastodon. But not all Fediverse actors that at least sometimes appear in several instances are on Mastodon.

See, certain non-Mastodon Fediverse server software has a feature called "nomadic identity" (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity). This makes it possible to create clones (live backups sync'd bidirectionally against each other in real time) of one's identity with everything attached to it on other servers. First and foremost, it's Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) that offers this feature, and it has since 2012.

What you see in this case is not two separate Fediverse identities, one of which is an automated reposter bot. It's one cloned nomadic identity, only that Mastodon can't understand it as such because it lacks the technical means to do so.

The idea behind this is resilience by redundancy: One server with your identity goes down, and you lose nothing because you still have the exact self-same identity with everything on at least one other server. Even if that server goes back online, the instance of your identity on it catches up with the others. The whole concept was born from Friendica servers disappearing and their users losing everything.

Fediverse server applications that know nomadic identity see all instances of a cloned identity as one and the same identity.

But Fediverse server applications like Mastodon that don't know nomadic identity see them as separate Fediverse accounts with separate identities.

For example, the Hubzilla channel that I'm replying from right now has one clone, so it has two instances. Mastodon understands them as two individual accounts. So do all Mastodon users, also because the huge majority of them has never heard of nomadic identity.

Thus, there are Mastodon users who follow both my main instance and my clone because they think these are two separate accounts. And now they end up receiving each one of my posts twice. Also, the federated timeline of the Mastodon server that they're on lists each one of my posts twice.

The latter also happens when one user on any given Mastodon server follows my main instance, and another user follows my clone.

Most Mastodon users, upon seeing my posts twice, will assume that I'm running some automated reposting bot (technically speaking, I could, but I don't) that serves to a) increase my reach and b) circumvent mutes and blocks. At least some may be tempted to block both my original instance and my clone.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Hubzilla #Clone #Clones #NomadicIdentity

@Patrick Leavy You don't even have to build it. It already exists in the Fediverse. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Hubzilla, (streams) and forte offer you not only full nomadic identity, but also groups. Optionally private groups. That can optionally hide from Fediverse account/channel directories. Optionally with any number of moderators from anywhere on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

They have the most advanced permissions systems in the whole Fediverse.

They support enclosed threaded one-post-many-comments conversations with thread titles like on Facebook, like on Tumblr, like on any blog out there, like in any forum out there.

The character limit on Hubzilla is over 16 million; on (streams) and Forte, it's over 24 million. The number of options in polls is practically unlimited, as is the number of images that can be embedded in messages. And with "embedded," I mean like in a blog post or on a website with text above and below the images.

At the same time, they're part of the Fediverse. Hubzilla is based on Zot6/an older version of Nomad; ActivityPub can be activated. (streams) is based on Nomad; ActivityPub is optional, but activated by default. Forte is based on ActivityPub. Any Fediverse software that recognises groups recognises their groups as such.

Here is an article with a number of tables in which I've compared the features of Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte:

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

CC: @silverpill

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

@Patrick Leavy You don't even have to build it. It already exists in the Fediverse. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Hubzilla, (streams) and forte offer you not only full nomadic identity, but also groups. Optionally private groups. That can optionally hide from Fediverse account/channel directories. Optionally with any number of moderators from anywhere on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

They have the most advanced permissions systems in the whole Fediverse.

They support enclosed threaded one-post-many-comments conversations with thread titles like on Facebook, like on Tumblr, like on any blog out there, like in any forum out there.

The character limit on Hubzilla is over 16 million; on (streams) and Forte, it's over 24 million. The number of options in polls is practically unlimited, as is the number of images that can be embedded in messages. And with "embedded," I mean like in a blog post or on a website with text above and below the images.

At the same time, they're part of the Fediverse. Hubzilla is based on Zot6/an older version of Nomad; ActivityPub can be activated. (streams) is based on Nomad; ActivityPub is optional, but activated by default. Forte is based on ActivityPub. Any Fediverse software that recognises groups recognises their groups as such.

Here is an article with a number of tables in which I've compared the features of Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte:

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

CC: @silverpill

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

@Patrick Leavy A whole lot. Sorry, but this will be very very very long again.

I don't know if you've read my previous (very long) commentary. But just implementing one or two FEPs won't get you the same full-blown nomadic identity (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity) that Hubzilla (what I'm writing from right now; https://hubzilla.org; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) has had since 2012. And having this level of nomadic identity has to be the goal.

What has to be done is:

Take something like Mastodon.
Non-nomadic.
Where your account, your login, equals your identity.

Make your identity cloneable

Now, before you can make identities nomadic, you have to uncouple them from the login, from the account.

Mastodon has to introduce a sort of container for your identity, like the channels that Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte have always had (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Channels_(Hubzilla_&_(streams))). This is necessary so that a future nomadic Mastodon will know what to clone and what not to clone. For example, cloning your password is dangerous nonsense.

So, everything that makes up your account except for your login credentials will have to be moved into this container.

• your short name
• your long name
• your profile images, including alt-texts
• your profile
• your followers
• your followed
• your toots, including stats like faves, boosts etc.
• copies of the conversation trees of all your toots, including stats like faves, boosts etc. as well as attached files for each message
• all files you've ever attached to toots
• your settings
• your filters
• your mutes
• your blocks
• your server blocks
• etc.

Essentially, everything except for your login credentials will have to be moved from directly residing on your account into that box.

Change your login

Also, your login will have to change from short name + passphrase to e-mail + passphrase. Your short name is part of your identity, it's in the container, it will be cloned, so it can't be used to log you in anymore.

In order for this to work, half of Mastodon's server backend will have to be rewritten.

Decentralised IDs

Next, Mastodon must switch from the Webfinger IDs that it uses now to decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61. For a while, I guess, it will have to use both next to one another. Then it will have to phase out its Webfinger IDs.

The decentralised IDs must be tested against other Fediverse software that already understands them or that's nomadic itself: (streams), Forte, Mitra, Tootik. For example, @silverpill of Mitra and @Mike Macgirvin of (streams) and Forte must test whether their software correctly understands Mastodon's DIDs. And the Mastodon developers must test whether Mastodon correctly understands the DIDs from Fediverse server applications that already use them.

Once it has gotten rid of its Webfinger IDs, the next phase can start.

Implement cloning within Mastodon

The central element of nomadic identity is not the ability to move your identity. That's only a byproduct of cloning your identity.

A clone, in nomadic identity, is a full backup of the container with your identity in it. A real-time, live, bidirectional backup that you can log into and use just like the "original". The clone always has the same idea as the original, regardless of which server it's on.

The key elements of clones and cloning must be implemented and tested:

• cloning an identity container to a different server after registering a new, blank account there
• cloning an identity container to a different server where you already have an account with a different containerised identity
• anything that happens on the original being sync'd to the clone
• anything that happens on the clone being sync'd to the original
• clone going offline, things happening on the original, clone coming back online, things that happened on the original being reliably sync'd to the clone
• original going offline, clone still working with the ID based on the original's domain
• original going offline, things happening on the clone, original coming back online, things that happened on the clone being reliably sync'd to the original
• making additional clones of an identity container that has already been cloned at least once
• the whole syncing shebang from the original to any number of clones
• the whole syncing shebang from one of the clones to the original and also directly to the other clones
• declaring one of the clones the new original, thus changing the ID of both the former original and all clones

Implement moving within Mastodon

Only when cloning works reliably, we can talk about moving, even though that's what everyone on Mastodon is giddy about.

Why? Because moving involves cloning. It's an automated process. At least it is on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, and it really should be one on nomadic Mastodon.

Basically, first you make a clone.
Then you declare the clone the new original, and your old original is demoted to a clone.
Then you have to wait until your change of ID from changing the original has federated to all your followers and followed and everywhere and whatnot.
Then, one last sync so that both the former-clone-now-new-original and the old-original-now-clone are really identical, and you won't lose any data.
Then your old-original-now-clone is deleted. We don't want to leave any dead stuff behind, now, do we?
Lastly, if your old account where your old original used to reside has no other identity on it, the whole account is deleted. In nomadic containerised identity, accounts cannot/should not exist with no identity container on them.

Cloning and moving beyond Mastodon

The last possible step is still utter science-fiction: Cloning or moving from Mastodon to something else that's nomadic and understands FEP-ef61.

Cloning or moving from Mastodon to Mitra. From Mastodon to Tootik. From Mastodon to (streams). From Mastodon to Forte. Oh, and maybe also back to Mastodon.

The difficult part is not only to make Mastodon capable of cloning identity containers to other nomadic software. And to make Mastodon accept identity containers from other nomadic software being cloned to Mastodon. I mean, this would be difficult already. (streams) and Forte are vastly, vastly different from Mastodon.

No, the difficult part is to make these four capable of cloning from or to someplace else. As it stands now, you can only clone from Mitra to Mitra, from Tootik to Tootik, from (streams) to (streams), from Forte to Forte. Even cloning between (streams) and Forte has never been possible, even though they're very similar. Oh, and cloning from and to Hubzilla is another story because Hubzilla doesn't have FEP-ef61 implemented.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Mitra #Tootik #NomadicIdentity

@Patrick Leavy A whole lot. Sorry, but this will be very very very long again.

I don't know if you've read my previous (very long) commentary. But just implementing one or two FEPs won't get you the same full-blown nomadic identity (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity) that Hubzilla (what I'm writing from right now; https://hubzilla.org; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) has had since 2012. And having this level of nomadic identity has to be the goal.

What has to be done is:

Take something like Mastodon.
Non-nomadic.
Where your account, your login, equals your identity.

Make your identity cloneable

Now, before you can make identities nomadic, you have to uncouple them from the login, from the account.

Mastodon has to introduce a sort of container for your identity, like the channels that Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte have always had (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Channels_(Hubzilla_&_(streams))). This is necessary so that a future nomadic Mastodon will know what to clone and what not to clone. For example, cloning your password is dangerous nonsense.

So, everything that makes up your account except for your login credentials will have to be moved into this container.

• your short name
• your long name
• your profile images, including alt-texts
• your profile
• your followers
• your followed
• your toots, including stats like faves, boosts etc.
• copies of the conversation trees of all your toots, including stats like faves, boosts etc. as well as attached files for each message
• all files you've ever attached to toots
• your settings
• your filters
• your mutes
• your blocks
• your server blocks
• etc.

Essentially, everything except for your login credentials will have to be moved from directly residing on your account into that box.

Change your login

Also, your login will have to change from short name + passphrase to e-mail + passphrase. Your short name is part of your identity, it's in the container, it will be cloned, so it can't be used to log you in anymore.

In order for this to work, half of Mastodon's server backend will have to be rewritten.

Decentralised IDs

Next, Mastodon must switch from the Webfinger IDs that it uses now to decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61. For a while, I guess, it will have to use both next to one another. Then it will have to phase out its Webfinger IDs.

The decentralised IDs must be tested against other Fediverse software that already understands them or that's nomadic itself: (streams), Forte, Mitra, Tootik. For example, @silverpill of Mitra and @Mike Macgirvin of (streams) and Forte must test whether their software correctly understands Mastodon's DIDs. And the Mastodon developers must test whether Mastodon correctly understands the DIDs from Fediverse server applications that already use them.

Once it has gotten rid of its Webfinger IDs, the next phase can start.

Implement cloning within Mastodon

The central element of nomadic identity is not the ability to move your identity. That's only a byproduct of cloning your identity.

A clone, in nomadic identity, is a full backup of the container with your identity in it. A real-time, live, bidirectional backup that you can log into and use just like the "original". The clone always has the same idea as the original, regardless of which server it's on.

The key elements of clones and cloning must be implemented and tested:

• cloning an identity container to a different server after registering a new, blank account there
• cloning an identity container to a different server where you already have an account with a different containerised identity
• anything that happens on the original being sync'd to the clone
• anything that happens on the clone being sync'd to the original
• clone going offline, things happening on the original, clone coming back online, things that happened on the original being reliably sync'd to the clone
• original going offline, clone still working with the ID based on the original's domain
• original going offline, things happening on the clone, original coming back online, things that happened on the clone being reliably sync'd to the original
• making additional clones of an identity container that has already been cloned at least once
• the whole syncing shebang from the original to any number of clones
• the whole syncing shebang from one of the clones to the original and also directly to the other clones
• declaring one of the clones the new original, thus changing the ID of both the former original and all clones

Implement moving within Mastodon

Only when cloning works reliably, we can talk about moving, even though that's what everyone on Mastodon is giddy about.

Why? Because moving involves cloning. It's an automated process. At least it is on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, and it really should be one on nomadic Mastodon.

Basically, first you make a clone.
Then you declare the clone the new original, and your old original is demoted to a clone.
Then you have to wait until your change of ID from changing the original has federated to all your followers and followed and everywhere and whatnot.
Then, one last sync so that both the former-clone-now-new-original and the old-original-now-clone are really identical, and you won't lose any data.
Then your old-original-now-clone is deleted. We don't want to leave any dead stuff behind, now, do we?
Lastly, if your old account where your old original used to reside has no other identity on it, the whole account is deleted. In nomadic containerised identity, accounts cannot/should not exist with no identity container on them.

Cloning and moving beyond Mastodon

The last possible step is still utter science-fiction: Cloning or moving from Mastodon to something else that's nomadic and understands FEP-ef61.

Cloning or moving from Mastodon to Mitra. From Mastodon to Tootik. From Mastodon to (streams). From Mastodon to Forte. Oh, and maybe also back to Mastodon.

The difficult part is not only to make Mastodon capable of cloning identity containers to other nomadic software. And to make Mastodon accept identity containers from other nomadic software being cloned to Mastodon. I mean, this would be difficult already. (streams) and Forte are vastly, vastly different from Mastodon.

No, the difficult part is to make these four capable of cloning from or to someplace else. As it stands now, you can only clone from Mitra to Mitra, from Tootik to Tootik, from (streams) to (streams), from Forte to Forte. Even cloning between (streams) and Forte has never been possible, even though they're very similar. Oh, and cloning from and to Hubzilla is another story because Hubzilla doesn't have FEP-ef61 implemented.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Mitra #Tootik #NomadicIdentity

@Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ Das versteht nicht zufällig auch Reports von Mastodon, oder?

Bisher glauben Mastodon-Nutzer nämlich, die Admins von Hubzilla-Hubs sind entweder gleichgültig oder zu faul, um sich um solche Meldungen zu kümmern. Sie wissen nicht, daß sie es nicht mit Mastodon-Admins zu tun haben, und noch weniger, daß Mastodon-Reports auf Hubzilla nicht ankommen.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla

@Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ Das versteht nicht zufällig auch Reports von Mastodon, oder?

Bisher glauben Mastodon-Nutzer nämlich, die Admins von Hubzilla-Hubs sind entweder gleichgültig oder zu faul, um sich um solche Meldungen zu kümmern. Sie wissen nicht, daß sie es nicht mit Mastodon-Admins zu tun haben, und noch weniger, daß Mastodon-Reports auf Hubzilla nicht ankommen.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla

@Mark There are two typical ways of getting content onto your timeline.

One, the "normie" way. Follow everyone you come across, and hope that something interesting washes up.

Trouble is, this gives you .1% interesting content and 99.9% cruft. The interesting content is spread among the cruft pretty homogenously.

At the same time, you get tons of content. You'll only be able to scroll down your timeline, let's say, an hour's worth of content a day, and you'll miss the content from the other 23 hours. This also means that you only catch one out of 24 interesting messages on average.

Two, the "pro" way. Use the hashtag search to find people who post certain content and follow them.

Trouble is, they, too, aren't always specialised in that content. From your point of view, they, too, post cruft. Your signal-to-noise ratio is higher, but you still get more noise than signal, more cruft than interesting content.

Now, there's a trick that many Mastodon users don't know because 𝕏 doesn't have that feature: You can follow hashtags.

If you're interested in certain topics, find the corresponding hashtags (it's often more than one) and follow them. This way, you receive content with these hashtags from whoever posts content with these hashtags, but without the uninteresting cruft from the same users.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #FollowHashtags

@Patrick Leavy

Is the #ActivityPub protocol any closer to having data portability?

Have you read about nomadic identity yet? (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity)

There is only one Fediverse server application that offers full-blown server-side nomadic identity via ActivityPub, and that's Forte (https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte). This won't change anytime soon. For there is one critically important thing that has never happened yet, and that's the conversion of non-nomadic, account-equals-identity, ActivityPub-based Fediverse software to fully nomadic, identity-uncoupled-from-accounts, ActivityPub-based Fediverse software.

Forte itself came to exist in 2024 as a fork of something colloquially called (streams) which is already nomadic, but based on its own protocol named Nomad with ActivityPub as an optional secondary protocol. And (streams) is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, the first nomadic Fediverse software, created in 2012 under the name Red and based on a precursor of Nomad.

A very long-term dream is a fully nomadic Fediverse. Not only would all Fediverse server software be every bit as nomadic as Hubzilla, but it'd be possible to move and even clone identities between different server applications. As it stands now, moving and cloning is only possible within Hubzilla, within (streams) and within Forte.

And how about single ID usable in different apps?

This would only be possible in an entirely nomadic Fediverse where you can clone your identity from anywhere to anywhere. And even then you'd have to first register a local account on whichever server you want to use and then clone your existing identity onto this account on this server.

Otherwise, this is not possible. And it isn't possible at all without registering a local account on whichever server you want to create.

I mean, I've read this request countless times.

• Create an account on mastodon.social.
• Go to peertube.tv.
• Log onto peertube.tv with your mastodon.social credentials. Right away. Without first creating an account on peertube.tv.
• Upload a video credited to [email protected].

There are lots of reasons why this is technologically impossible.

First of all: Where would peertube.tv know your mastodon.social login credentials from? Your name and at least the salted hash of your passphrase?

Besides: Where would peertube.tv store your data?

On mastodon.social where your account is?

And, pray tell, where would mastodon.social store a video the same way as PeerTube stores it, all the way to PeerTube's trademark peer-to-peer load balancing? Also, how and why do you think should mastodon.social authorise peertube.tv to directly, remotely write to mastodon.social's local database and data storage?

On peertube.tv?

Well, that'd require peertube.tv to have a record of your identity in its local database. It can't store a video locally. and reference it locally through mastodon.social's local database. So peertube.tv's server backend would have to know you. It would have to have your identity.

Where would it get that?

Again, no, it can't just simply reference mastodon.social's database for that. It'd need that record in its own local database.

Do you really believe that peertube.tv could go and leech all your account credentials from mastodon.social and automagically store them locally? Do you really believe mastodon.social will let it do that?

And do you seriously believe that if free, open-source, amateur-developed server software can easily do that, proprietary, closed-source, professional, military-intelligence-grade (as in FBI, DHS, CIA, NSA, STRATFOR, MI5, MI6, Mossad, Shin Bet), ultra-high-end espionage and surveillance software like Palantir or NSO Pegasus has no way at all of doing that?

No, there's literally only one possible way for peertube.tv to get to know you and know whom this video belongs to if you upload one. And that's by you registering a local account on peertube.tv. Manually.

Okay, now you (or someone else) may come and say, "But Pixelfed can literally do that! I can log onto Pixelfed with my Mastodon account!"

No. No, you can't. Sorry to say, but you can't.

Pixelfed pretends you can. For the sake of convenience and ease-of-use. But it's bogus. All show. A smoke screen.

What Pixelfed actually does when you "log into it with your Mastodon account": It takes your Mastodon login name, it takes your Mastodon passphrase, and it registers a local account on that Pixelfed server with your Mastodon login credentials.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #PeerTube #Pixelfed #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #NomadicIdentity

@Patrick Leavy

Is the #ActivityPub protocol any closer to having data portability?

Have you read about nomadic identity yet? (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity)

There is only one Fediverse server application that offers full-blown server-side nomadic identity via ActivityPub, and that's Forte (https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte). This won't change anytime soon. For there is one critically important thing that has never happened yet, and that's the conversion of non-nomadic, account-equals-identity, ActivityPub-based Fediverse software to fully nomadic, identity-uncoupled-from-accounts, ActivityPub-based Fediverse software.

Forte itself came to exist in 2024 as a fork of something colloquially called (streams) which is already nomadic, but based on its own protocol named Nomad with ActivityPub as an optional secondary protocol. And (streams) is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, the first nomadic Fediverse software, created in 2012 under the name Red and based on a precursor of Nomad.

A very long-term dream is a fully nomadic Fediverse. Not only would all Fediverse server software be every bit as nomadic as Hubzilla, but it'd be possible to move and even clone identities between different server applications. As it stands now, moving and cloning is only possible within Hubzilla, within (streams) and within Forte.

And how about single ID usable in different apps?

This would only be possible in an entirely nomadic Fediverse where you can clone your identity from anywhere to anywhere. And even then you'd have to first register a local account on whichever server you want to use and then clone your existing identity onto this account on this server.

Otherwise, this is not possible. And it isn't possible at all without registering a local account on whichever server you want to create.

I mean, I've read this request countless times.

• Create an account on mastodon.social.
• Go to peertube.tv.
• Log onto peertube.tv with your mastodon.social credentials. Right away. Without first creating an account on peertube.tv.
• Upload a video credited to [email protected].

There are lots of reasons why this is technologically impossible.

First of all: Where would peertube.tv know your mastodon.social login credentials from? Your name and at least the salted hash of your passphrase?

Besides: Where would peertube.tv store your data?

On mastodon.social where your account is?

And, pray tell, where would mastodon.social store a video the same way as PeerTube stores it, all the way to PeerTube's trademark peer-to-peer load balancing? Also, how and why do you think should mastodon.social authorise peertube.tv to directly, remotely write to mastodon.social's local database and data storage?

On peertube.tv?

Well, that'd require peertube.tv to have a record of your identity in its local database. It can't store a video locally. and reference it locally through mastodon.social's local database. So peertube.tv's server backend would have to know you. It would have to have your identity.

Where would it get that?

Again, no, it can't just simply reference mastodon.social's database for that. It'd need that record in its own local database.

Do you really believe that peertube.tv could go and leech all your account credentials from mastodon.social and automagically store them locally? Do you really believe mastodon.social will let it do that?

And do you seriously believe that if free, open-source, amateur-developed server software can easily do that, proprietary, closed-source, professional, military-intelligence-grade (as in FBI, DHS, CIA, NSA, STRATFOR, MI5, MI6, Mossad, Shin Bet), ultra-high-end espionage and surveillance software like Palantir or NSO Pegasus has no way at all of doing that?

No, there's literally only one possible way for peertube.tv to get to know you and know whom this video belongs to if you upload one. And that's by you registering a local account on peertube.tv. Manually.

Okay, now you (or someone else) may come and say, "But Pixelfed can literally do that! I can log onto Pixelfed with my Mastodon account!"

No. No, you can't. Sorry to say, but you can't.

Pixelfed pretends you can. For the sake of convenience and ease-of-use. But it's bogus. All show. A smoke screen.

What Pixelfed actually does when you "log into it with your Mastodon account": It takes your Mastodon login name, it takes your Mastodon passphrase, and it registers a local account on that Pixelfed server with your Mastodon login credentials.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #PeerTube #Pixelfed #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #NomadicIdentity

@LillyLyle/Count Melancholia @OhSnap!Dragon Reich's Mastodon account is a fully automated bot.

He has created and set up the bot right after Musk has bought out Twitter when millions of people were escaping from Twitter to Mastodon. The goal was for him to keep his overall numbers of followers or even increase it.

Once that bot worked as intended, he didn't have to log in again.

So the last time he logged in was way before marking automated bots as such became mandatory. In fact, AFAIK, it was before it was even possible to mark a bot as such. That's why his account is not marked as a bot.

If you really want to reach him and tell him something, try 𝕏 or Bluesky.

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

@LillyLyle/Count Melancholia @OhSnap!Dragon Reich's Mastodon account is a fully automated bot.

He has created and set up the bot right after Musk has bought out Twitter when millions of people were escaping from Twitter to Mastodon. The goal was for him to keep his overall numbers of followers or even increase it.

Once that bot worked as intended, he didn't have to log in again.

So the last time he logged in was way before marking automated bots as such became mandatory. In fact, AFAIK, it was before it was even possible to mark a bot as such. That's why his account is not marked as a bot.

If you really want to reach him and tell him something, try 𝕏 or Bluesky.

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

@silverpill @Mario Vavti infosec.exchange doesn't appear to list any Hubzilla hubs as blocked.

That is, I hope that the visible blocklist on Mastodon servers is always in sync with the actual blocklist and not maintained separately, i.e. that shadow-blocking servers isn't possible.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta

@silverpill @Mario Vavti infosec.exchange doesn't appear to list any Hubzilla hubs as blocked.

That is, I hope that the visible blocklist on Mastodon servers is always in sync with the actual blocklist and not maintained separately, i.e. that shadow-blocking servers isn't possible.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta

@HeliosPi

Agreed. I'm also complaining that it takes a lot more time for me to post media with alt-text, proportionally, and doing so doesn't increase attention to that post.

@Aaron Caskey-Demaret

I agree. Alt text may be an amazing multiplier, but zero times anything is still zero 🙂

Sounds like me. My image posts have next to no audience.

Basically, I've got three kinds of image posts.

One, memes about the Fediverse. And I don't mean memes that treat the Fediverse as only Mastodon, or that make the Fediverse being Mastodon with a few things attached as add-ons being the unquestioned standard. I post them on @Jupiter's Fedi-Memes on (streams).

Two, memes about 3-D virtual worlds. I post these on @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet.

Both of them are tricky in various ways. They only get one visual description each, and it goes into the alt-text. The tricky part here is that I no longer let my alt-texts grow longer than 512 characters. That's due to a bug on Misskey and its various forks and forks of forks (Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS etc.): They only support alt-texts with up to 512 characters. They're supposed to truncate longer alt-texts, but instead, they delete longer alt-texts with no trace. So if you write an alt-text that's longer than 512 characters, someone on Misskey or Sharkey or so will think that you haven't written any alt-text at all.

In addition, I have to explain them which I do in the message text and not in the alt-text. My impression of especially Mastodon is that people love receiving explanations along with images that they don't understand right off the bat. I believe it has gotten to the point that these explanations are becoming or have since become almost as mandatory as visual descriptions. And both the Fediverse beyond Mastodon and 3-D virtual worlds are super-obscure topics that require explanations, not to mention that not everyone knows and understands all meme templates. So I have to explain my own image macros plus the topic they're about plus the meme templates I've used.

This is what really requires time and effort. That is, for the meme templates, I resort to links to KnowYourMeme. Some people on Mastodon are staunchly against links to explanations and demand that one explain everything right in the post. I've done that once. The result was six explanations with over 12,000 characters for one single meme template ("One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor"), and I haven't even explained The Lord of the Rings and its characters. I don't really think these people prefer 12,000 characters in one post to one link to KnowYourMeme, even if the two explanations for the topic took up another 12,000+ characters.

Well, and lastly, I sometimes post renderings from 3-D virtual worlds. I post these on @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet, too. If I post them at all, for I haven't posted any in over two years.

That's because the effort is even bigger. Not only do I have to explain them, but I have to describe them twice. The image description in the alt-text is the short one. Again, no explanations, and this time, usually no text transcripts either. And then there's the long, fully detailed image description in the message text. It contains all explanations necessary, and it contains transcripts of any and all bits of text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable or not.

If I'm lucky, I don't have to write much more than 20,000 characters of descriptions, explanations and transcripts for one post. If I'm not so lucky, this block will exceed 60,000 characters and take two full days to research for and write for only one image.

I treat it like muscle, gotta keep my alt-text skills sharp cos one day someone might actually want to read my shitposts.

I actually try to optimise and improve my image descriptions further and further whenever I learn something new, e.g. new image-describing rules or guidelines. And I've learned enough about describing images and writing alt-texts specifically for the Fediverse that I've started putting together a wiki about that special topic.

Maybe I'll start following the advice from Veronica with Four Eyes and give two visual descriptions for each of my image, one in the alt-text, one in the message text for those who are visually impaired enough to not see my images clearly, but not so visually impaired that they require a screen reader to read the text on the screen.

Maybe I might go as far as describing my virtual world renderings three times so that there's an additional shorter description in the message text.

I mean, as you can probably tell from this comment, I don't have to worry about local character limits.

CC: @Em :official_verified:

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

@HeliosPi

Agreed. I'm also complaining that it takes a lot more time for me to post media with alt-text, proportionally, and doing so doesn't increase attention to that post.

@Aaron Caskey-Demaret

I agree. Alt text may be an amazing multiplier, but zero times anything is still zero 🙂

Sounds like me. My image posts have next to no audience.

Basically, I've got three kinds of image posts.

One, memes about the Fediverse. And I don't mean memes that treat the Fediverse as only Mastodon, or that make the Fediverse being Mastodon with a few things attached as add-ons being the unquestioned standard. I post them on @Jupiter's Fedi-Memes on (streams).

Two, memes about 3-D virtual worlds. I post these on @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet.

Both of them are tricky in various ways. They only get one visual description each, and it goes into the alt-text. The tricky part here is that I no longer let my alt-texts grow longer than 512 characters. That's due to a bug on Misskey and its various forks and forks of forks (Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS etc.): They only support alt-texts with up to 512 characters. They're supposed to truncate longer alt-texts, but instead, they delete longer alt-texts with no trace. So if you write an alt-text that's longer than 512 characters, someone on Misskey or Sharkey or so will think that you haven't written any alt-text at all.

In addition, I have to explain them which I do in the message text and not in the alt-text. My impression of especially Mastodon is that people love receiving explanations along with images that they don't understand right off the bat. I believe it has gotten to the point that these explanations are becoming or have since become almost as mandatory as visual descriptions. And both the Fediverse beyond Mastodon and 3-D virtual worlds are super-obscure topics that require explanations, not to mention that not everyone knows and understands all meme templates. So I have to explain my own image macros plus the topic they're about plus the meme templates I've used.

This is what really requires time and effort. That is, for the meme templates, I resort to links to KnowYourMeme. Some people on Mastodon are staunchly against links to explanations and demand that one explain everything right in the post. I've done that once. The result was six explanations with over 12,000 characters for one single meme template ("One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor"), and I haven't even explained The Lord of the Rings and its characters. I don't really think these people prefer 12,000 characters in one post to one link to KnowYourMeme, even if the two explanations for the topic took up another 12,000+ characters.

Well, and lastly, I sometimes post renderings from 3-D virtual worlds. I post these on @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet, too. If I post them at all, for I haven't posted any in over two years.

That's because the effort is even bigger. Not only do I have to explain them, but I have to describe them twice. The image description in the alt-text is the short one. Again, no explanations, and this time, usually no text transcripts either. And then there's the long, fully detailed image description in the message text. It contains all explanations necessary, and it contains transcripts of any and all bits of text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable or not.

If I'm lucky, I don't have to write much more than 20,000 characters of descriptions, explanations and transcripts for one post. If I'm not so lucky, this block will exceed 60,000 characters and take two full days to research for and write for only one image.

I treat it like muscle, gotta keep my alt-text skills sharp cos one day someone might actually want to read my shitposts.

I actually try to optimise and improve my image descriptions further and further whenever I learn something new, e.g. new image-describing rules or guidelines. And I've learned enough about describing images and writing alt-texts specifically for the Fediverse that I've started putting together a wiki about that special topic.

Maybe I'll start following the advice from Veronica with Four Eyes and give two visual descriptions for each of my image, one in the alt-text, one in the message text for those who are visually impaired enough to not see my images clearly, but not so visually impaired that they require a screen reader to read the text on the screen.

Maybe I might go as far as describing my virtual world renderings three times so that there's an additional shorter description in the message text.

I mean, as you can probably tell from this comment, I don't have to worry about local character limits.

CC: @Em :official_verified:

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

@Gerriet Selent

Kann man Hubzilla aif enen Sharing Hosting installieren ?

Sollte wohl gehen. Hubzilla ist genügsam, das braucht nur einen LAMP-Stack.

Das brauchst du aber nicht selbst zu hosten. Hubzilla ist ja Teil des Fediverse; ich schreibe hier gerade von Hubzilla. Du kannst dir also auf einem schon vorhandenen Hubzilla-Hub, z. B. hub.hubzilla.de, ein Konto anlegen und dann einen Kanal, auf dem du dann z. B. Webpages anlegen kannst.

Die offizielle Hubzilla-Website (https://hubzilla.org) läuft ja selbst auch auf einem Hubzilla-Kanal (@Hubzilla Info; @[email protected]), dem man z. B. von Mastodon aus folgen kann.

Hier mal ein paar direkte Links auf mehr Infomaterial:

• Video: Der Einstieg in Hubzilla (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 2)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/wiki/hz-workshop/Videos/Der(20)Einstieg(20)in(20)Hubzilla
• PDF: Webseiten mit Hubzilla (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 8)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/cloud/hz-workshop/Dateien/Workshop%20%238/Webseiten-mit-Hubzilla__Workshop_%238_27-Mai-2026.pdf
• PDF: Webseiten mit Hubzilla, Teil 2 (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 9)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/cloud/hz-workshop/Dateien/Workshop%20%239/Webseiten%20mit%20Hubzilla.pdf
• PDF: Layout-Vorlagen (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 9)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/cloud/hz-workshop/Dateien/Workshop%20%239/Vorlagen-Templates.pdf
• Video: Webseiten mit Hubzilla, Teil 2 (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 9)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/wiki/hz-workshop/Videos/Workshop(20)(23)9(20)-(20)10.06.2026

Alles zu finden auf Hubzilla selbst: https://hub.hubzilla.hu/channel/hz-workshop alias @Hubzilla Workshop (@[email protected]).

Es geht nicht drum, was eine Webseite kann. Wusste gar nicht, das eine Webseite was können muss *gg

Es geht darum eine ganz normale Webseite zu erstellen, ohne viel Schnörkel,

Na ja, könnte ja sein, daß ich dir etwas empfehle, das nicht über HTML + CSS + Bootstrap + eingebundene dynamische Inhalte hinausgeht und du da aber unbedingt etwas mit JavaScript einbauen willst.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #WordPress #Webpages #Hubzilla

@Gerriet Selent

Kann man Hubzilla aif enen Sharing Hosting installieren ?

Sollte wohl gehen. Hubzilla ist genügsam, das braucht nur einen LAMP-Stack.

Das brauchst du aber nicht selbst zu hosten. Hubzilla ist ja Teil des Fediverse; ich schreibe hier gerade von Hubzilla. Du kannst dir also auf einem schon vorhandenen Hubzilla-Hub, z. B. hub.hubzilla.de, ein Konto anlegen und dann einen Kanal, auf dem du dann z. B. Webpages anlegen kannst.

Die offizielle Hubzilla-Website (https://hubzilla.org) läuft ja selbst auch auf einem Hubzilla-Kanal (@Hubzilla Info; @[email protected]), dem man z. B. von Mastodon aus folgen kann.

Hier mal ein paar direkte Links auf mehr Infomaterial:

• Video: Der Einstieg in Hubzilla (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 2)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/wiki/hz-workshop/Videos/Der(20)Einstieg(20)in(20)Hubzilla
• PDF: Webseiten mit Hubzilla (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 8)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/cloud/hz-workshop/Dateien/Workshop%20%238/Webseiten-mit-Hubzilla__Workshop_%238_27-Mai-2026.pdf
• PDF: Webseiten mit Hubzilla, Teil 2 (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 9)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/cloud/hz-workshop/Dateien/Workshop%20%239/Webseiten%20mit%20Hubzilla.pdf
• PDF: Layout-Vorlagen (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 9)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/cloud/hz-workshop/Dateien/Workshop%20%239/Vorlagen-Templates.pdf
• Video: Webseiten mit Hubzilla, Teil 2 (aus dem Hubzilla-Workshop 9)
  https://hub.hubzilla.hu/wiki/hz-workshop/Videos/Workshop(20)(23)9(20)-(20)10.06.2026

Alles zu finden auf Hubzilla selbst: https://hub.hubzilla.hu/channel/hz-workshop alias @Hubzilla Workshop (@[email protected]).

Es geht nicht drum, was eine Webseite kann. Wusste gar nicht, das eine Webseite was können muss *gg

Es geht darum eine ganz normale Webseite zu erstellen, ohne viel Schnörkel,

Na ja, könnte ja sein, daß ich dir etwas empfehle, das nicht über HTML + CSS + Bootstrap + eingebundene dynamische Inhalte hinausgeht und du da aber unbedingt etwas mit JavaScript einbauen willst.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #WordPress #Webpages #Hubzilla

@Early Twix Ich weiß ja auch nicht, ob meine Bildbeschreibungen etwas taugen, vor allem gemäß der Mastodon-Kultur. Ich bin selbst nicht auf Mastodon, aber wenn die eigenen Beiträge auf Mastodon landen, hält man sich entweder an Mastodons Kultur und Mastodons ungeschriebene Regeln, oder man wird massenhaft angegriffen und/oder blockiert.

(Es bringt übrigens nichts, auf dem Kanal, von dem aus ich jetzt gerade kommentierte, nach aktuellen Bildern zu suchen. Alle Bilder hier sind alt. Hier poste ich keine Bilder mehr. Meine wenigen neueren Bilder finden sich auf @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet und @Jupiter's Fedi-Memes on (streams), und die meisten davon sind Memes.)

Andererseits: Wenn ich anderen Leuten Rückmeldungen für ihre Alt-Texte geben würde, würden sehr viel mehr davon mich blockieren und evtl. vorher angreifen als meine Rückmeldung akzeptieren. Ich würde die Alt-Texte nämlich abklopfen nach a) Wahrheitsgehalt, b) Details, c) Einhaltung sehr vieler Regeln und Richtlinien für Bildbeschreibungen und d) Kompatibilität mit einigen Nicht-Mastodon-Fediverse-Serveranwendungen. Die letzteren beiden Punkte sind im Fediverse derart unbekannt, daß Feedback meinerseits fast zwingend zum Verriß werden würde. Deswegen lasse ich es lieber.

CC: @Erdstern @Schauinsland @Ulrike E.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BildbeschreibungenMeta #CWBildbeschreibungenMeta #Inklusion #MastodonKultur

@Roland Häder

So how do they think it can be enforced everywhere?

Just like they try to enforce anything everywhere.

• They'll simply tell you to do it.
• They'll lecture you about it.
• They'll call you out if you don't do it.
• Once they've caught you not doing it repeatedly, they'll insult you as ableist.
• They'll block you. Before they block you, they'll announce in public that they'll block you because you're an ableist swine who refuses to add alt-text to his images, and they'll mention you so that you can see it.
  If you're only here to get and stay in contact with a select few people, none of whom are on Mastodon, you might not care.
  But if you need a certain amount of reach especially on Mastodon, this is bad.

I've seen all the above actually happen.

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

@Roland Häder

So how do they think it can be enforced everywhere?

Just like they try to enforce anything everywhere.

• They'll simply tell you to do it.
• They'll lecture you about it.
• They'll call you out if you don't do it.
• Once they've caught you not doing it repeatedly, they'll insult you as ableist.
• They'll block you. Before they block you, they'll announce in public that they'll block you because you're an ableist swine who refuses to add alt-text to his images, and they'll mention you so that you can see it.
  If you're only here to get and stay in contact with a select few people, none of whom are on Mastodon, you might not care.
  But if you need a certain amount of reach especially on Mastodon, this is bad.

I've seen all the above actually happen.

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

@eshep

I've not yet seen any posts, attacking or otherwise, taking this stance

Not yet.

Right now, this feature is only available in a development version of Mastodon and only on mastodon.social. Next will be the daredevil servers that run development code to be ahead of release in features.

But eventually, a new stable release will be rolled out with this feature. More and more servers will be upgraded to this new version with this feature. Once typical activist servers like beige.party introduce it, my prediction will come true.

I have family who have varying levels of blindness who consume media from all over the internet. All of them have been quite thrilled about the state of these new robot assistants we all now have such easy access to.

Specifically assigned "alt-text" is never necessary.

People who aren't sighted are usually happy about image-describing AI because it's better than nothing, and without image-describing AI, they've got literally nothing.

In fact, however, image-describing AI is just barely better than nothing, if at all. It describes stuff that doesn't matter. It doesn't describe stuff that does matter. Most importantly, it's unreliable and inaccurate. It hallucinates and describes stuff wrongly. However, people who aren't sufficiently sighted don't know. They can't verify whether what the AI says is true because they can't see the image well enough to be able to compare it with the description.

100% hand-written alt-text is always more reliable, more accurate and more fit for the context than AI-generated alt-text will ever be.

I know from first-hand experience. I've tasked an image-describing AI with describing an image which I've described manually with no AI help first, and then I've analysed the AI description and compared it with both the actual image and my descriptions. I've even done that twice. The results were abysmal.

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

@eshep

I've not yet seen any posts, attacking or otherwise, taking this stance

Not yet.

Right now, this feature is only available in a development version of Mastodon and only on mastodon.social. Next will be the daredevil servers that run development code to be ahead of release in features.

But eventually, a new stable release will be rolled out with this feature. More and more servers will be upgraded to this new version with this feature. Once typical activist servers like beige.party introduce it, my prediction will come true.

I have family who have varying levels of blindness who consume media from all over the internet. All of them have been quite thrilled about the state of these new robot assistants we all now have such easy access to.

Specifically assigned "alt-text" is never necessary.

People who aren't sighted are usually happy about image-describing AI because it's better than nothing, and without image-describing AI, they've got literally nothing.

In fact, however, image-describing AI is just barely better than nothing, if at all. It describes stuff that doesn't matter. It doesn't describe stuff that does matter. Most importantly, it's unreliable and inaccurate. It hallucinates and describes stuff wrongly. However, people who aren't sufficiently sighted don't know. They can't verify whether what the AI says is true because they can't see the image well enough to be able to compare it with the description.

100% hand-written alt-text is always more reliable, more accurate and more fit for the context than AI-generated alt-text will ever be.

I know from first-hand experience. I've tasked an image-describing AI with describing an image which I've described manually with no AI help first, and then I've analysed the AI description and compared it with both the actual image and my descriptions. I've even done that twice. The results were abysmal.

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

@Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: By the way, forgot to mention this:

There are already Mastodon servers whose rules explicitly forbid common users policing others. Only a) the actual server rules must be enforced, b) only by actual server personnel and c) only against users on the same server.

This means if you are not a moderator, and/or if you police a rule or "rule" that is not part of the server rules, and/or if you police someone from another server, you may be sanctioned for it.

I dare say the very existence of this rule says a lot, even though it isn't nearly as widespread as I wish it was.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #MastodonHOA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CC: @Jan Wildeboer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CC: @Jan Wildeboer

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

@🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp Let me give you an example. Something that I've actually posted myself.

Here's the image (CW: eye contact): https://streams.elsmussols.net/photos/jupiter_rowland/image/ff28c33e-f633-4801-ad2b-c3dcd40d7bf9

Here's the alt-text:

Image macro, based on a screen capture from the Disney and Pixar animated film Finding Nemo. At the top, there is a white space with a two-line caption: “OSgrid: offline for weeks to come,” and “Owners of other grids, looking at OSgrid residents:”. In the screen capture below, ten seagulls are perched on two mooring lines in the background. An eleventh seagull pokes its head into the image from the bottom right. They all look at the camera. Each one is labelled with the question, “Mine?”

Do you understand the image without explanations?

I guarantee you that there are loads of people who don't even understand the template, and that next to nobody out there understands the topic. Not without an explanation.

So here's the explanation in the post text, including a link to the corresponding KnowYourMeme page:

Explanation:

The image macro is based on the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template (link CW: eye contact; https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mine-mine-mine-seagulls).

OSgrid (https://osgrid.org) is a 3-D virtual world, based on OpenSimulator (http://opensimulator.org; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSimulator; https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/ba1b1cb6-7c18-410e-8752-df4b4face2e0), a free, open-source server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life (https://www.secondlife.com; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life). Like Second Life and all other OpenSimulator-based worlds, it is called a "grid" because it is divided into square regions bordering on each other.

Launched in July, 2007, OSgrid was the first public OpenSimulator grid, it is the oldest and one of the biggest by both land area and users. This means that while it's running bleeding-edge developer versions of OpenSimulator, it also carries around a whole lot of old ballast. It is notorious for going offline for maintenance and for this maintenance often lasting for a week or several, and it is just as notorious for going offline with no announcement and either only a very belated explanation by the admins or none at all.

The last prolonged downtime before this one was in 2025. It included OSgrid's entire asset server being wiped clean, and all avatars in OSgrid having their inventories emptied almost completely. It was scheduled, but due to OSgrid's instability at the time, it happened spontaneously and way ahead of schedule. The OSgrid admins could not say for how long OSgrid would be offline, but they estimated the downtime to exceed one month. In addition, for several years before that shutdown, each OSgrid shutdown had led to more and more lost assets already.

This drove many OSgrid residents away from OSgrid and to other OpenSimulator grids. Most of them, OSgrid included, are connected by the so-called Hypergrid which makes it possible for avatars from one grid to teleport to other grids, so it doesn't matter much which grid your avatar is registered on when you want to travel to certain locations or events. Many of those who had left OSgrid when it was offline returned after it went online again because the asset server had been promised to work as intended now.

Still, with OSgrid's track record of unreliability and, most importantly, losing assets, some residents fear that the current downtime might break more than it will fix. Not few think that if they've lost their whole inventories "unannounced" last time, they will lose their whole inventories actually unannounced this time. And so they're looking for a new home again.

Of course, this has the owners and admins of many other grids wishing for as many OSgrid residents as possible to join their grids. The advertising of other grids in the wake of OSgrid's downtime has already begun.

Now, there are people who say that linking to external explanations is ableist crap because that's inconvenient, and because these external websites may not be sufficiently accessible. Oh, and links don't work in alt-text (only that the above link went into the post text where links do work). So if you post something that needs to be explained, explain it yourself.

Sure, but that'll be an explanation of the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template. In addition, there will have to be one explanation for Reddit and one for reaction images because people won't understand the template explanation otherwise. On top of that, there will have to be an explanation for image boards, Futaba Channel and 4chan because people won't understand the reaction image explanation otherwise. In fact, I might also have to explain the film Finding Nemo.

For comparison, I've once posted something based on "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor". It was the only time I've explained the whole thing myself. That was one explanation for my image, six for the template, two for the topic (and that was actually Fediverse-related, but still obscure), that's nine altogether. I haven't even explained The Lord of the Rings, the character Boromir and that particular situation. Still, that was 25,000 characters of explanation overall, half of which accounted for the six explanations for the template.

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

@🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp Let me give you an example. Something that I've actually posted myself.

Here's the image (CW: eye contact): https://streams.elsmussols.net/photos/jupiter_rowland/image/ff28c33e-f633-4801-ad2b-c3dcd40d7bf9

Here's the alt-text:

Image macro, based on a screen capture from the Disney and Pixar animated film Finding Nemo. At the top, there is a white space with a two-line caption: “OSgrid: offline for weeks to come,” and “Owners of other grids, looking at OSgrid residents:”. In the screen capture below, ten seagulls are perched on two mooring lines in the background. An eleventh seagull pokes its head into the image from the bottom right. They all look at the camera. Each one is labelled with the question, “Mine?”

Do you understand the image without explanations?

I guarantee you that there are loads of people who don't even understand the template, and that next to nobody out there understands the topic. Not without an explanation.

So here's the explanation in the post text, including a link to the corresponding KnowYourMeme page:

Explanation:

The image macro is based on the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template (link CW: eye contact; https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mine-mine-mine-seagulls).

OSgrid (https://osgrid.org) is a 3-D virtual world, based on OpenSimulator (http://opensimulator.org; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSimulator; https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/ba1b1cb6-7c18-410e-8752-df4b4face2e0), a free, open-source server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life (https://www.secondlife.com; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life). Like Second Life and all other OpenSimulator-based worlds, it is called a "grid" because it is divided into square regions bordering on each other.

Launched in July, 2007, OSgrid was the first public OpenSimulator grid, it is the oldest and one of the biggest by both land area and users. This means that while it's running bleeding-edge developer versions of OpenSimulator, it also carries around a whole lot of old ballast. It is notorious for going offline for maintenance and for this maintenance often lasting for a week or several, and it is just as notorious for going offline with no announcement and either only a very belated explanation by the admins or none at all.

The last prolonged downtime before this one was in 2025. It included OSgrid's entire asset server being wiped clean, and all avatars in OSgrid having their inventories emptied almost completely. It was scheduled, but due to OSgrid's instability at the time, it happened spontaneously and way ahead of schedule. The OSgrid admins could not say for how long OSgrid would be offline, but they estimated the downtime to exceed one month. In addition, for several years before that shutdown, each OSgrid shutdown had led to more and more lost assets already.

This drove many OSgrid residents away from OSgrid and to other OpenSimulator grids. Most of them, OSgrid included, are connected by the so-called Hypergrid which makes it possible for avatars from one grid to teleport to other grids, so it doesn't matter much which grid your avatar is registered on when you want to travel to certain locations or events. Many of those who had left OSgrid when it was offline returned after it went online again because the asset server had been promised to work as intended now.

Still, with OSgrid's track record of unreliability and, most importantly, losing assets, some residents fear that the current downtime might break more than it will fix. Not few think that if they've lost their whole inventories "unannounced" last time, they will lose their whole inventories actually unannounced this time. And so they're looking for a new home again.

Of course, this has the owners and admins of many other grids wishing for as many OSgrid residents as possible to join their grids. The advertising of other grids in the wake of OSgrid's downtime has already begun.

Now, there are people who say that linking to external explanations is ableist crap because that's inconvenient, and because these external websites may not be sufficiently accessible. Oh, and links don't work in alt-text (only that the above link went into the post text where links do work). So if you post something that needs to be explained, explain it yourself.

Sure, but that'll be an explanation of the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template. In addition, there will have to be one explanation for Reddit and one for reaction images because people won't understand the template explanation otherwise. On top of that, there will have to be an explanation for image boards, Futaba Channel and 4chan because people won't understand the reaction image explanation otherwise. In fact, I might also have to explain the film Finding Nemo.

For comparison, I've once posted something based on "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor". It was the only time I've explained the whole thing myself. That was one explanation for my image, six for the template, two for the topic (and that was actually Fediverse-related, but still obscure), that's nine altogether. I haven't even explained The Lord of the Rings, the character Boromir and that particular situation. Still, that was 25,000 characters of explanation overall, half of which accounted for the six explanations for the template.

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

@🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp I'm not talking about the visual description in the alt-text.

I'm talking about a wholly separate explanation in the post text body. Like, where you'd write the actual toot. Where you probably only have 500 characters. Where you wrote the above comment. It's there where I want to put the explanation.

The story behind this is as follows:

I keep reading from Mastodon users that alt-texts (yes, actual alt-texts in this case) are useful for sighted people, too, because alt-texts can give them explanations and help them understand what they're looking at. This means that images must not only be described, but also explained if necessary.

On the one hand, I keep telling Mastodon users again and again that explanations do not belong into the alt-text because there are people who can't access and read alt-texts; Mastodon users tend to be very defensive of using alt-texts to extend their 500-character limit by another 1,500 characters per image.

Still, on the other hand, this means that especially Mastodon users want images that they don't understand to come with explanations right away. In particular, neurodivergent people often need explanations, in-depth explanations even. It appears to have gotten to a point where posting an image that needs explanations without explanations is considered just as careless and almost as ableist as posting an image without accurate and sufficiently detailed alt-text.

At the same time, whenever I post an image of any kind, memes included, they're about such obscure topics that they need an explanation. Also, not everyone is always familiar with every meme template, so I have to give an explanation for the meme templates I've used as well. So I always explain whatever might need to be explained.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp I'm not talking about the visual description in the alt-text.

I'm talking about a wholly separate explanation in the post text body. Like, where you'd write the actual toot. Where you probably only have 500 characters. Where you wrote the above comment. It's there where I want to put the explanation.

The story behind this is as follows:

I keep reading from Mastodon users that alt-texts (yes, actual alt-texts in this case) are useful for sighted people, too, because alt-texts can give them explanations and help them understand what they're looking at. This means that images must not only be described, but also explained if necessary.

On the one hand, I keep telling Mastodon users again and again that explanations do not belong into the alt-text because there are people who can't access and read alt-texts; Mastodon users tend to be very defensive of using alt-texts to extend their 500-character limit by another 1,500 characters per image.

Still, on the other hand, this means that especially Mastodon users want images that they don't understand to come with explanations right away. In particular, neurodivergent people often need explanations, in-depth explanations even. It appears to have gotten to a point where posting an image that needs explanations without explanations is considered just as careless and almost as ableist as posting an image without accurate and sufficiently detailed alt-text.

At the same time, whenever I post an image of any kind, memes included, they're about such obscure topics that they need an explanation. Also, not everyone is always familiar with every meme template, so I have to give an explanation for the meme templates I've used as well. So I always explain whatever might need to be explained.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp Question about describing memes, just to be on the safe side.

Let's assume my character limit is not 500, but practically unlimited. Like, tens of thousands of times higher than on Mastodon.

Let's also assume I don't have a problem with writing a whole lot of text, for while most of the Fediverse is fumbling around on a phone screen, I'm blind-typing on a hardware keyboard.

How would you recommend me to explain meme templates in the post text (in addition to the visual description + text transcripts in the alt-text)?

• not at all (leaves people clueless)
• with one link to KnowYourMeme per used template (links are inconvenient, and the linked websites aren't necessarily sufficiently accessible)
• no links, but a full, in-depth set of KnowYourMeme-level explanations down to the basics (that's 10,000+ extra characters in that one post)
• same, but chopped into bits of no more than 500 characters (that's a thread of 30, 40, 50, 60 or more short posts)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

@Phantasm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CC: @Pawlicker

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

@Phantasm

The protocol is described as a social networking protocol in its abstract. That people managed to bolt on forums and marketplaces on top of it is more of a testament to its stupid levels of extensibility.

Where do you think ActivityPub came from?

It wasn't Eugen Rochko who invented it.

It was invented by @Erin Kissane and @Evan Prodromou. The same Evan Prodromou who started the Fediverse as early as 2008 with the microblogging website Identi.ca, the software Laconi.ca which it is based on and the server application StatusNet based on Laconi.ca. And I know from personal, first-hand experience that StatusNet had groups.

Also, the very first server application that implemented ActivityPub was Hubzilla in July, 2017, two months before Mastodon which started out on the same protocol as StatusNet. And Hubzilla's forums very much support ActivityPub, just like Hubzilla has full support for other ActivityPub-based groups.

The reason why Mastodon doesn't have groups isn't because ActivityPub doesn't really support them. It's because Twitter has never had groups.

And to me social media qualifies as anything that isn't a blog that allows comments. Since that is its dictionary definition more or less. AIM was social media, Twitter is social media, Fediverse is social media. They are all medias that allow social interactions.

Still, there's a big difference between how Twitter, Mastodon, Pleroma and Mitra work and how Facebook, Friendica, Hubzilla and its descendants work. And how Reddit, Hacker News, Lemmy and Mbin work.

In stark contrast what many believe, ActivityPub was never meant to be a pure microblogging protocol.

>It would have allowed for discussions with restricted permissions, made absolutely impenetrable even for Mastodon users. It would even have allowed for discussion groups which would have been both fully private and hidden from all directories. Most importantly, it would have empowered its users to moderate their own streams themselves with a whole arsenal of countermeasures, all the way up to the thermonuclear option of turning ActivityPub off entirely.

You can't have any of this when using ActivityPub.

Except for the thermonuclear option, Forte (https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte) does literally all of this with ActivityPub, only ActivityPub and nothing but ActivityPub. Forte does not even support any other protocols. Yet, its permissions system is the exact same as that on (streams) (https://codeberg.org/streams/streams) which it was forked from and very similar to that on Hubzilla which is a common ancestor of both.

Don't mix up ActivityPub and Mastodon.

And if you turn off ActivityPub federation then you've created a website with comments.

No. I still have a Hubzilla hub that's fully federated with the other Hubzilla hubs and with all (streams) servers via the Zot6 protocol. I still have a network referred to as "The Grid".

I have two channels, one on Hubzilla, one on (streams), that are members of a (streams) group that used to have ActivityPub turned off. The group is not on the same server as my (streams) channel.

In fact, if I turn off ActivityPub federation on this channel, I also remain connected to diaspora*, Friendica and Socialhome via the diaspora* protocol.

It's so hilarious how you who obviously has never even only tried Friendica are trying to explain Hubzilla to me who has been continuously daily-driving Hubzilla for about as long as Mastodon has existed. Who is renowned as a core member of the German-speaking Hubzilla community (and Hubzilla is bigger in Germany than anywhere else) and someone who can explain Hubzilla to others.

There is nothing private on this network besides end-to-end-encrypted DMs which are very much in a prototype stage still.

How easy would say is it to find a hidden, private Forte group, join it and lay its conversations open without a Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte channel?

Even stuff like Conversation Containers aren't private despite the federation being done only by one party being the sole authority over the conversation. It is trivial to leak those posts as long as they've been sent to one or more malicious instances. They have the same issue as Mastodon lockposts in that regard. The only meaningful difference between the two is that a Conversation Container can stay in the same audience throughout the whole conversation, ie. only for the followers of OP for example, Mastodon lockposts don't have that capability.

Well, Conversation Containers weren't invented for privacy purposes. The whole FEP was created to cast the way Hubzilla and (streams) handle conversations, as in how they do natively and elegantly what Mastodon is trying hard to kluge together, into a FEP for others to implement.

>Mastodon is not the gold standard and reference implementation of ActivityPub.

ActivityPub is Mastodon no matter how much that fact sucks.

You obviously haven't seen Lemmy from close either.

Inb4 "Lemmy is broken by design because it implements vanilla ActivityPub tailored to the requirements of a Reddit clone rather than being built against Mastodon."

Essentially, what Mastodon does has little to do with ActivityPub. Mastodon is half stretching the ActivityPub spec almost until it breaks and half semi-proprietary stuff that has literally nothing to do with ActivityPub whatsoever. For example, Webfinger is not required as per ActivityPub. But it's a hard requirement in order to be able to federate with Mastodon.

Mastodon is far from being the most vanilla W3C ActivityPub implementation out there. And it's far from being the most feature-complete W3C ActivityPub implementation.

The problem which the Fediverse has is that next to nobody even looks at the W3C ActivityPub spec. Almost everyone only looks at the Mastodon source code instead. Except maybe for those who either have been developing Fediverse software for longer than Eugen Rochko or who develop Fediverse software that doesn't necessarily need full Mastodon compatibility. And then you see all those Mastodon users whine who believe that everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon is bolted onto Mastodon as an add-on.

>It's a highly Mastodon-centric notion that everything in the Fediverse that doesn't strictly "implement Mastodon" is broken.

If you can't federate with 95+% of the network it's broken in the context of Fediverse.

• 20.11% of all active instances excluding (streams) and Forte, behind WordPress and Ghost
• 54.62% of all actors excluding (streams) and Forte
• 68% of all monthly active accounts excluding Misskey, various Misskey forks, GoToSocial, (streams) and Forte
• source of 61.6% of all sent objects exclusing (streams) and Forte

Source: FediIndex.

CC: @Pawlicker

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@Pawlicker @Phantasm Not the whole Fediverse is social media.

Social media is all about unidirectional followers and churning out content to as many people as possible. Mastodon is social media. It's modelled after Twitter which is social media. So are basically all other microblogging server applications in the Fediverse.

In stark contrast, Hubzilla, as well as its ancestors and descendants, is not social media. It is not modelled after Twitter. It is not nomadic Mastodon with unlimited characters. It doesn't even have unidirectional following. Intentionally in all cases. Also, something that has been around for longer than Mastodon can't be modelled after Mastodon.

Rather, at its core, it's modelled after the Facebook of the 2010s. The Facebook of the 2010s was not social media. It was a social network, dedicated to bidirectional interactions between people. To this day, Facebook doesn't have unidirectional following. Instead, it has "friends" which are always bidirectional.

Likewise, Hubzilla has bidirectional "contacts" as a default. Mind you, these are nothing like your usual Fediverse microblogging mutuals. They aren't one following connection plus one being-followed connection. They're one and exactly one connection which goes both ways.

Also, unlike most other Fediverse software, Hubzilla is extremely flexible in its use-cases. Unlike on most other Fediverse server applications, Hubzilla isn't hard-coded to always be public unless it's a DM which still is quasi-public. It can very much be used for enclosed communities as well, protected by a staggeringly advanced permissions system.

Let me put it this way: BlackMastodon was a disaster. Why? Because Mastodon has nothing much between fully public and mention-driven DMs, and its only ways of self-moderation are muting, blocking and calling the mods.

BlackZilla would have been a success (unless phone apps with native mobile UIs would have been a hard requirement). It would have allowed for discussions with restricted permissions, made absolutely impenetrable even for Mastodon users. It would even have allowed for discussion groups which would have been both fully private and hidden from all directories. Most importantly, it would have empowered its users to moderate their own streams themselves with a whole arsenal of countermeasures, all the way up to the thermonuclear option of turning ActivityPub off entirely.

Just because you use software that can federate with Mastodon, doesn't mean it has to work like Mastodon, and it means even less that it has to always work like Mastodon. Mastodon is not the gold standard and reference implementation of ActivityPub. It's a highly Mastodon-centric notion that everything in the Fediverse that doesn't strictly "implement Mastodon" is broken.

By the way: The way that permissions are worded on (streams) and Forte make much clearer what they're actually for than the way they're worded on Hubzilla. They aren't always there to prevent everyone from doing things. Rather, they're there to keep your stream clean from unwanted content.

Yes, if I disallow comments on a post, anyone on Mastodon can still reply to it, not even knowing that they aren't allowed to do that. But if they do reply, who'll see that reply?

Anyone else in the conversation who's on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte or Lemmy or /kbin or Mbin or PieFed or anything else that knows a thing or two about enclosed threaded conversations won't. That's because they all receive the reply not from the Mastodon poster, but from me. But I don't let that reply from Mastodon in. And if I don't let it in, it won't spread to the users on the aforementioned applications.

That is the intention. And it has been since Mike Macgirvin designed Friendica 16 years ago.

Really: If Hubzilla has enclosed conversations backed by a FEP created on (streams) and an advanced permissions system, and Mastodon doesn't have either, and this causes malfunctions, it's Hubzilla that's broken.

If Mastodon has quote-post controls backed by a FEP created on GoToSocial, and Hubzilla neither has nor supports them, and this causes malfunctions, it's Hubzilla that's broken.

Simply because both Hubzilla devs oh-so-staunchly refuse to "implement Mastodon" and rip all that stuff out that Mastodon doesn't support.

It has stopped being funny long ago.

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