#friendika — Public Fediverse posts

@Gaming on the Fediverse That's quite a bit simplified. For one, four server applications and one protocol were lumped together. Besides, Zap is dead, and Forte isn't even mentioned.

So here's an attempt at telling the whole story (server applications are in bold type, protocols are in bold type and italics):

tl;dr:

2010:

• DFRN
• Mistpark/Friendika/Friendica
  (DFRN)

2011:

• Zot
• Free-Friendika
  (DFRN)
  (forked from Friendika)
• several other Friendika forks
  (DFRN)
  (forked from Friendika)
  (discontinued 2011)
• Red/Red Matrix
  (DFRN, from 2012 Zot)
  (forked from Free-Friendika)
  (rebuilt into Hubzilla 2015)

2015:

• Hubzilla
  (Zot, later Zot6)
  (rebuilt from the Red Matrix)

2018:

Zot6
• Osada
  (Zot6)
  (forked from Hubzilla)
  (discontinued in 2018)
• Zap
  (Zot6)
  (forked most likely from Osada, maybe from Hubzilla)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Osada
  (Zot6)
  (forked from Zap)
  (discontinued in 2019)

2020:

Zot8
• Redmatrix 2020
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Mistpark 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Redmatrix 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Osada
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Redmatrix 2020 or Mistpark 2020)
  (discontinued in 2022)

2022:

• Nomad
  (originally Zot11)
• Roadhouse
  (Nomad)
  (forked from either Redmatrix 2020 or Mistpark 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• (streams)
  (Nomad)
  (forked from Roadhouse)

2024:
Forte
(ActivityPub)
(forked from (streams))[/list]
So as far as Fediverse server applications go, he created Friendica, Free-Friendika, a few more Friendika forks, the Red Matrix, Hubzilla, three Osadas, Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020, Roadhouse, (streams) and Forte. Depending on how you want to count them, that's at least 13 or 14 server applications. Four of these are still being maintained (Friendica by a new team, Hubzilla by another new team, (streams) and Forte by himself).

The long version:

In 2010, he created

• the DFRN protocol
• Mistpark (renamed first into Friendika later in 2010 and then into Friendica in 2011)

In 2011, he made several forks of Friendika. The reason was licensing: Friendika was getting quite some attention. As it was under the MIT license, chances were that it was tempting to fork it and turn the fork into a commercial, proprietary, closed-source monolith or something. On the other hand, the GPL in any shape or form would have hindered further development.

So Mike made a number of forks and relicensed all but one: Free-Friendika kept the MIT license and became the main development platform for Friendika. Friendika itself was relicensed under the AGPLv3.

Shortly afterwards, Mike discontinued all forks except Free-Friendika.

The same year, Mike needed something to keep people from losing everything whenever their Friendika home node was shut down. So he invented nomadic identity and created the Zot protocol.

Also the same year, Mike forked Free-Friendika into Red (spanish la red = the network). It would be renamed Red Matrix in late 2012 because "Red" is hard to Google.

In 2012, Mike rewrote Red almost completely. The whole backend was rebuilt against Zot.

However, the Red Matrix didn't take off. Most Friendica users were hosting their own private nodes. Nomadic identity made no sense for them. Besides, it seemed like many Friendica users didn't understand nomadic identity anyway, so they saw no advantage in the Red Matrix over Friendica, seeing as the features were almost identical otherwise. The Red Matrix had to be made more popular for hosting public servers.

So in 2015, the Red Matrix was rebuilt and greatly expanded into Hubzilla.

In 2018, Mike wanted to develop the Zot protocol further into Zot6. But this would have meant compatibility-breaking changes, also because what he wanted to do with nomadic identity over Zot6 was likely to not work with non-nomadic protocols anymore. So he couldn't do that on Hubzilla.

Instead, he made two new forks:

• first Osada, forked from Hubzilla, which was the original Zot6 development platform and then evolved into a non-nomadic "gateway" between Zot6 and everything else
• then Zap, forked most likely from Osada or maybe from Hubzilla, which got the whole Zot6 feature set, including nomadic identity, but which lost support for any and all non-nomadic protocols

A bit later, Zot6 became compatible enough with non-nomadic protocols. Forwarding content from Zap via Osada to the rest of the Fediverse was clunky anyway, forwarding content from the rest of the Fediverse via Osada to Zap even more so. So Osada was discontinued.

Instead, a new Osada was forked from Zap and got ActivityPub support. This and the branding were the only differences between Osada and Zap.

In 2019, when both Osada and Zap had become stable, Zap got ActivityPub support itself. The only difference between the two was now that Osada servers had ActivityPub turned on by default, and Zap servers had it turned off by default. It simply didn't make much sense to keep both alive, so Osada was discontinued again.

I think it was also in 2019 that Hubzilla was upgraded to Zot6.

In 2020, Mike made three more forks to develop Zot8, at least one of which was forked from Zap, and those that weren't were forked from one another: Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty and Osada.

There was a rumour that Zap was the stable one, Misty was a bit more up-to-date, but potentially less stable, Osada was experimental with ActivityPub support on by default, and Redmatrix 2020 was experimental with ActivityPub support off by default. In fact, however, Misty, Osada and Redmatrix 2020 were absolutely identical in all but branding. Mike kept four server applications around to mess with brand fetishists.

In 2022, Mike forked one of the three into Roadhouse to develop Zot11. But Zot11 was no longer compatible with Zot6 as implemented on Hubzilla and Zap, so he declared it a new protocol named Nomad. Roadhouse got additional support for Zot6.

Now Mike had five server applications, still in order to mess with brand fetishists.

Later the same year, Mike forked Roadhouse into something intentionally nameless and brandless. Again, this was done to troll brand fetishists, this time also to facilitate forking and make people think up their own individual names for the fork rather than keeping the existing one. However, the code repository absolutely required a name, so Mike called it streams.

The community needed something to name this nameless thing by, so they took the name of the repository and wrapped it in parentheses to make sure that this is not actually the name. Ever since, it is colloquially being called (streams). By the way, (streams) is running on what would be Zot12 if it wasn't Nomad now.

On New Year's Eve 2022, Mike discontinued Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Misty, Osada and Roadhouse. (streams) was stable enough, and the other five could be upgraded not only to each other by rebasing the server code, but also to (streams). He asked all admins of Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Misty, Osada and Roadhouse servers to upgrade to (streams).

In 2024, (streams) got bogged down by some identity confusion after the stable release branch introduced decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61, a part of the development of nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Partially in order to be able to sort this out, partially because the time seemed to have come for this to actually work, Mike forked the streams repository into Forte and removed all support for any protocols other than ActivityPub while still keeping it nomadic. And so Forte became the very first Fediverse server application that establishes nomadic identity via ActivityPub.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #DFRN #Zot #Zot6 #Zot8 #Nomad #Mistpark #Friendika #FreeFriendika #Friendica #Red #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Redmatrix2020 #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte

@Gaming on the Fediverse That's quite a bit simplified. For one, four server applications and one protocol were lumped together. Besides, Zap is dead, and Forte isn't even mentioned.

So here's an attempt at telling the whole story (server applications are in bold type, protocols are in bold type and italics):

tl;dr:

2010:

• DFRN
• Mistpark/Friendika/Friendica
  (DFRN)

2011:

• Zot
• Free-Friendika
  (DFRN)
  (forked from Friendika)
• several other Friendika forks
  (DFRN)
  (forked from Friendika)
  (discontinued 2011)
• Red/Red Matrix
  (DFRN, from 2012 Zot)
  (forked from Free-Friendika)
  (rebuilt into Hubzilla 2015)

2015:

• Hubzilla
  (Zot, later Zot6)
  (rebuilt from the Red Matrix)

2018:

Zot6
• Osada
  (Zot6)
  (forked from Hubzilla)
  (discontinued in 2018)
• Zap
  (Zot6)
  (forked most likely from Osada, maybe from Hubzilla)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Osada
  (Zot6)
  (forked from Zap)
  (discontinued in 2019)

2020:

Zot8
• Redmatrix 2020
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Mistpark 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Redmatrix 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Osada
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Redmatrix 2020 or Mistpark 2020)
  (discontinued in 2022)

2022:

• Nomad
  (originally Zot11)
• Roadhouse
  (Nomad)
  (forked from either Redmatrix 2020 or Mistpark 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• (streams)
  (Nomad)
  (forked from Roadhouse)

2024:
Forte
(ActivityPub)
(forked from (streams))[/list]
So as far as Fediverse server applications go, he created Friendica, Free-Friendika, a few more Friendika forks, the Red Matrix, Hubzilla, three Osadas, Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020, Roadhouse, (streams) and Forte. Depending on how you want to count them, that's at least 13 or 14 server applications. Four of these are still being maintained (Friendica by a new team, Hubzilla by another new team, (streams) and Forte by himself).

The long version:

In 2010, he created

• the DFRN protocol
• Mistpark (renamed first into Friendika later in 2010 and then into Friendica in 2011)

In 2011, he made several forks of Friendika. The reason was licensing: Friendika was getting quite some attention. As it was under the MIT license, chances were that it was tempting to fork it and turn the fork into a commercial, proprietary, closed-source monolith or something. On the other hand, the GPL in any shape or form would have hindered further development.

So Mike made a number of forks and relicensed all but one: Free-Friendika kept the MIT license and became the main development platform for Friendika. Friendika itself was relicensed under the AGPLv3.

Shortly afterwards, Mike discontinued all forks except Free-Friendika.

The same year, Mike needed something to keep people from losing everything whenever their Friendika home node was shut down. So he invented nomadic identity and created the Zot protocol.

Also the same year, Mike forked Free-Friendika into Red (spanish la red = the network). It would be renamed Red Matrix in late 2012 because "Red" is hard to Google.

In 2012, Mike rewrote Red almost completely. The whole backend was rebuilt against Zot.

However, the Red Matrix didn't take off. Most Friendica users were hosting their own private nodes. Nomadic identity made no sense for them. Besides, it seemed like many Friendica users didn't understand nomadic identity anyway, so they saw no advantage in the Red Matrix over Friendica, seeing as the features were almost identical otherwise. The Red Matrix had to be made more popular for hosting public servers.

So in 2015, the Red Matrix was rebuilt and greatly expanded into Hubzilla.

In 2018, Mike wanted to develop the Zot protocol further into Zot6. But this would have meant compatibility-breaking changes, also because what he wanted to do with nomadic identity over Zot6 was likely to not work with non-nomadic protocols anymore. So he couldn't do that on Hubzilla.

Instead, he made two new forks:

• first Osada, forked from Hubzilla, which was the original Zot6 development platform and then evolved into a non-nomadic "gateway" between Zot6 and everything else
• then Zap, forked most likely from Osada or maybe from Hubzilla, which got the whole Zot6 feature set, including nomadic identity, but which lost support for any and all non-nomadic protocols

A bit later, Zot6 became compatible enough with non-nomadic protocols. Forwarding content from Zap via Osada to the rest of the Fediverse was clunky anyway, forwarding content from the rest of the Fediverse via Osada to Zap even more so. So Osada was discontinued.

Instead, a new Osada was forked from Zap and got ActivityPub support. This and the branding were the only differences between Osada and Zap.

In 2019, when both Osada and Zap had become stable, Zap got ActivityPub support itself. The only difference between the two was now that Osada servers had ActivityPub turned on by default, and Zap servers had it turned off by default. It simply didn't make much sense to keep both alive, so Osada was discontinued again.

I think it was also in 2019 that Hubzilla was upgraded to Zot6.

In 2020, Mike made three more forks to develop Zot8, at least one of which was forked from Zap, and those that weren't were forked from one another: Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty and Osada.

There was a rumour that Zap was the stable one, Misty was a bit more up-to-date, but potentially less stable, Osada was experimental with ActivityPub support on by default, and Redmatrix 2020 was experimental with ActivityPub support off by default. In fact, however, Misty, Osada and Redmatrix 2020 were absolutely identical in all but branding. Mike kept four server applications around to mess with brand fetishists.

In 2022, Mike forked one of the three into Roadhouse to develop Zot11. But Zot11 was no longer compatible with Zot6 as implemented on Hubzilla and Zap, so he declared it a new protocol named Nomad. Roadhouse got additional support for Zot6.

Now Mike had five server applications, still in order to mess with brand fetishists.

Later the same year, Mike forked Roadhouse into something intentionally nameless and brandless. Again, this was done to troll brand fetishists, this time also to facilitate forking and make people think up their own individual names for the fork rather than keeping the existing one. However, the code repository absolutely required a name, so Mike called it streams.

The community needed something to name this nameless thing by, so they took the name of the repository and wrapped it in parentheses to make sure that this is not actually the name. Ever since, it is colloquially being called (streams). By the way, (streams) is running on what would be Zot12 if it wasn't Nomad now.

On New Year's Eve 2022, Mike discontinued Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Misty, Osada and Roadhouse. (streams) was stable enough, and the other five could be upgraded not only to each other by rebasing the server code, but also to (streams). He asked all admins of Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Misty, Osada and Roadhouse servers to upgrade to (streams).

In 2024, (streams) got bogged down by some identity confusion after the stable release branch introduced decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61, a part of the development of nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Partially in order to be able to sort this out, partially because the time seemed to have come for this to actually work, Mike forked the streams repository into Forte and removed all support for any protocols other than ActivityPub while still keeping it nomadic. And so Forte became the very first Fediverse server application that establishes nomadic identity via ActivityPub.

CC: @Grow Fediverse

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #DFRN #Zot #Zot6 #Zot8 #Nomad #Mistpark #Friendika #FreeFriendika #Friendica #Red #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Redmatrix2020 #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte

@Gaming on the Fediverse That's quite a bit simplified. For one, four server applications and one protocol were lumped together. Besides, Zap is dead, and Forte isn't even mentioned.

So here's an attempt at telling the whole story (server applications are in bold type, protocols are in bold type and italics):

tl;dr:

2010:

• DFRN
• Mistpark/Friendika/Friendica
  (DFRN)

2011:

• Zot
• Free-Friendika
  (DFRN)
  (forked from Friendika)
• several other Friendika forks
  (DFRN)
  (forked from Friendika)
  (discontinued 2011)
• Red/Red Matrix
  (DFRN, from 2012 Zot)
  (forked from Free-Friendika)
  (rebuilt into Hubzilla 2015)

2015:

• Hubzilla
  (Zot, later Zot6)
  (rebuilt from the Red Matrix)

2018:

Zot6
• Osada
  (Zot6)
  (forked from Hubzilla)
  (discontinued in 2018)
• Zap
  (Zot6)
  (forked most likely from Osada, maybe from Hubzilla)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Osada
  (Zot6)
  (forked from Zap)
  (discontinued in 2019)

2020:

Zot8
• Redmatrix 2020
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Mistpark 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Redmatrix 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Osada
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Redmatrix 2020 or Mistpark 2020)
  (discontinued in 2022)

2022:

• Nomad
  (originally Zot11)
• Roadhouse
  (Nomad)
  (forked from either Redmatrix 2020 or Mistpark 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• (streams)
  (Nomad)
  (forked from Roadhouse)

2024:
Forte
(ActivityPub)
(forked from (streams))[/list]
So as far as Fediverse server applications go, he created Friendica, Free-Friendika, a few more Friendika forks, the Red Matrix, Hubzilla, three Osadas, Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020, Roadhouse, (streams) and Forte. Depending on how you want to count them, that's at least 13 or 14 server applications. Four of these are still being maintained (Friendica by a new team, Hubzilla by another new team, (streams) and Forte by himself).

The long version:

In 2010, he created

• the DFRN protocol
• Mistpark (renamed first into Friendika later in 2010 and then into Friendica in 2011)

In 2011, he made several forks of Friendika. The reason was licensing: Friendika was getting quite some attention. As it was under the MIT license, chances were that it was tempting to fork it and turn the fork into a commercial, proprietary, closed-source monolith or something. On the other hand, the GPL in any shape or form would have hindered further development.

So Mike made a number of forks and relicensed all but one: Free-Friendika kept the MIT license and became the main development platform for Friendika. Friendika itself was relicensed under the AGPLv3.

Shortly afterwards, Mike discontinued all forks except Free-Friendika.

The same year, Mike needed something to keep people from losing everything whenever their Friendika home node was shut down. So he invented nomadic identity and created the Zot protocol.

Also the same year, Mike forked Free-Friendika into Red (spanish la red = the network). It would be renamed Red Matrix in late 2012 because "Red" is hard to Google.

In 2012, Mike rewrote Red almost completely. The whole backend was rebuilt against Zot.

However, the Red Matrix didn't take off. Most Friendica users were hosting their own private nodes. Nomadic identity made no sense for them. Besides, it seemed like many Friendica users didn't understand nomadic identity anyway, so they saw no advantage in the Red Matrix over Friendica, seeing as the features were almost identical otherwise. The Red Matrix had to be made more popular for hosting public servers.

So in 2015, the Red Matrix was rebuilt and greatly expanded into Hubzilla.

In 2018, Mike wanted to develop the Zot protocol further into Zot6. But this would have meant compatibility-breaking changes, also because what he wanted to do with nomadic identity over Zot6 was likely to not work with non-nomadic protocols anymore. So he couldn't do that on Hubzilla.

Instead, he made two new forks:

• first Osada, forked from Hubzilla, which was the original Zot6 development platform and then evolved into a non-nomadic "gateway" between Zot6 and everything else
• then Zap, forked most likely from Osada or maybe from Hubzilla, which got the whole Zot6 feature set, including nomadic identity, but which lost support for any and all non-nomadic protocols

A bit later, Zot6 became compatible enough with non-nomadic protocols. Forwarding content from Zap via Osada to the rest of the Fediverse was clunky anyway, forwarding content from the rest of the Fediverse via Osada to Zap even more so. So Osada was discontinued.

Instead, a new Osada was forked from Zap and got ActivityPub support. This and the branding were the only differences between Osada and Zap.

In 2019, when both Osada and Zap had become stable, Zap got ActivityPub support itself. The only difference between the two was now that Osada servers had ActivityPub turned on by default, and Zap servers had it turned off by default. It simply didn't make much sense to keep both alive, so Osada was discontinued again.

I think it was also in 2019 that Hubzilla was upgraded to Zot6.

In 2020, Mike made three more forks to develop Zot8, at least one of which was forked from Zap, and those that weren't were forked from one another: Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty and Osada.

There was a rumour that Zap was the stable one, Misty was a bit more up-to-date, but potentially less stable, Osada was experimental with ActivityPub support on by default, and Redmatrix 2020 was experimental with ActivityPub support off by default. In fact, however, Misty, Osada and Redmatrix 2020 were absolutely identical in all but branding. Mike kept four server applications around to mess with brand fetishists.

In 2022, Mike forked one of the three into Roadhouse to develop Zot11. But Zot11 was no longer compatible with Zot6 as implemented on Hubzilla and Zap, so he declared it a new protocol named Nomad. Roadhouse got additional support for Zot6.

Now Mike had five server applications, still in order to mess with brand fetishists.

Later the same year, Mike forked Roadhouse into something intentionally nameless and brandless. Again, this was done to troll brand fetishists, this time also to facilitate forking and make people think up their own individual names for the fork rather than keeping the existing one. However, the code repository absolutely required a name, so Mike called it streams.

The community needed something to name this nameless thing by, so they took the name of the repository and wrapped it in parentheses to make sure that this is not actually the name. Ever since, it is colloquially being called (streams). By the way, (streams) is running on what would be Zot12 if it wasn't Nomad now.

On New Year's Eve 2022, Mike discontinued Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Misty, Osada and Roadhouse. (streams) was stable enough, and the other five could be upgraded not only to each other by rebasing the server code, but also to (streams). He asked all admins of Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Misty, Osada and Roadhouse servers to upgrade to (streams).

In 2024, (streams) got bogged down by some identity confusion after the stable release branch introduced decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61, a part of the development of nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Partially in order to be able to sort this out, partially because the time seemed to have come for this to actually work, Mike forked the streams repository into Forte and removed all support for any protocols other than ActivityPub while still keeping it nomadic. And so Forte became the very first Fediverse server application that establishes nomadic identity via ActivityPub.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #DFRN #Zot #Zot6 #Zot8 #Nomad #Mistpark #Friendika #FreeFriendika #Friendica #Red #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Redmatrix2020 #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte

@Gaming on the Fediverse That's quite a bit simplified. For one, four server applications and one protocol were lumped together. Besides, Zap is dead, and Forte isn't even mentioned.

So here's an attempt at telling the whole story (server applications are in bold type, protocols are in bold type and italics):

tl;dr:

2010:

• DFRN
• Mistpark/Friendika/Friendica
  (DFRN)

2011:

• Zot
• Free-Friendika
  (DFRN)
  (forked from Friendika)
• several other Friendika forks
  (DFRN)
  (forked from Friendika)
  (discontinued 2011)
• Red/Red Matrix
  (DFRN, from 2012 Zot)
  (forked from Free-Friendika)
  (rebuilt into Hubzilla 2015)

2015:

• Hubzilla
  (Zot, later Zot6)
  (rebuilt from the Red Matrix)

2018:

Zot6
• Osada
  (Zot6)
  (forked from Hubzilla)
  (discontinued in 2018)
• Zap
  (Zot6)
  (forked most likely from Osada, maybe from Hubzilla)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Osada
  (Zot6)
  (forked from Zap)
  (discontinued in 2019)

2020:

Zot8
• Redmatrix 2020
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Mistpark 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Redmatrix 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Osada
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Redmatrix 2020 or Mistpark 2020)
  (discontinued in 2022)

2022:

• Nomad
  (originally Zot11)
• Roadhouse
  (Nomad)
  (forked from either Redmatrix 2020 or Mistpark 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• (streams)
  (Nomad)
  (forked from Roadhouse)

2024:
Forte
(ActivityPub)
(forked from (streams))[/list]
So as far as Fediverse server applications go, he created Friendica, Free-Friendika, a few more Friendika forks, the Red Matrix, Hubzilla, three Osadas, Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020, Roadhouse, (streams) and Forte. Depending on how you want to count them, that's at least 13 or 14 server applications. Four of these are still being maintained (Friendica by a new team, Hubzilla by another new team, (streams) and Forte by himself).

The long version:

In 2010, he created

• the DFRN protocol
• Mistpark (renamed first into Friendika later in 2010 and then into Friendica in 2011)

In 2011, he made several forks of Friendika. The reason was licensing: Friendika was getting quite some attention. As it was under the MIT license, chances were that it was tempting to fork it and turn the fork into a commercial, proprietary, closed-source monolith or something. On the other hand, the GPL in any shape or form would have hindered further development.

So Mike made a number of forks and relicensed all but one: Free-Friendika kept the MIT license and became the main development platform for Friendika. Friendika itself was relicensed under the AGPLv3.

Shortly afterwards, Mike discontinued all forks except Free-Friendika.

The same year, Mike needed something to keep people from losing everything whenever their Friendika home node was shut down. So he invented nomadic identity and created the Zot protocol.

Also the same year, Mike forked Free-Friendika into Red (spanish la red = the network). It would be renamed Red Matrix in late 2012 because "Red" is hard to Google.

In 2012, Mike rewrote Red almost completely. The whole backend was rebuilt against Zot.

However, the Red Matrix didn't take off. Most Friendica users were hosting their own private nodes. Nomadic identity made no sense for them. Besides, it seemed like many Friendica users didn't understand nomadic identity anyway, so they saw no advantage in the Red Matrix over Friendica, seeing as the features were almost identical otherwise. The Red Matrix had to be made more popular for hosting public servers.

So in 2015, the Red Matrix was rebuilt and greatly expanded into Hubzilla.

In 2018, Mike wanted to develop the Zot protocol further into Zot6. But this would have meant compatibility-breaking changes, also because what he wanted to do with nomadic identity over Zot6 was likely to not work with non-nomadic protocols anymore. So he couldn't do that on Hubzilla.

Instead, he made two new forks:

• first Osada, forked from Hubzilla, which was the original Zot6 development platform and then evolved into a non-nomadic "gateway" between Zot6 and everything else
• then Zap, forked most likely from Osada or maybe from Hubzilla, which got the whole Zot6 feature set, including nomadic identity, but which lost support for any and all non-nomadic protocols

A bit later, Zot6 became compatible enough with non-nomadic protocols. Forwarding content from Zap via Osada to the rest of the Fediverse was clunky anyway, forwarding content from the rest of the Fediverse via Osada to Zap even more so. So Osada was discontinued.

Instead, a new Osada was forked from Zap and got ActivityPub support. This and the branding were the only differences between Osada and Zap.

In 2019, when both Osada and Zap had become stable, Zap got ActivityPub support itself. The only difference between the two was now that Osada servers had ActivityPub turned on by default, and Zap servers had it turned off by default. It simply didn't make much sense to keep both alive, so Osada was discontinued again.

I think it was also in 2019 that Hubzilla was upgraded to Zot6.

In 2020, Mike made three more forks to develop Zot8, at least one of which was forked from Zap, and those that weren't were forked from one another: Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty and Osada.

There was a rumour that Zap was the stable one, Misty was a bit more up-to-date, but potentially less stable, Osada was experimental with ActivityPub support on by default, and Redmatrix 2020 was experimental with ActivityPub support off by default. In fact, however, Misty, Osada and Redmatrix 2020 were absolutely identical in all but branding. Mike kept four server applications around to mess with brand fetishists.

In 2022, Mike forked one of the three into Roadhouse to develop Zot11. But Zot11 was no longer compatible with Zot6 as implemented on Hubzilla and Zap, so he declared it a new protocol named Nomad. Roadhouse got additional support for Zot6.

Now Mike had five server applications, still in order to mess with brand fetishists.

Later the same year, Mike forked Roadhouse into something intentionally nameless and brandless. Again, this was done to troll brand fetishists, this time also to facilitate forking and make people think up their own individual names for the fork rather than keeping the existing one. However, the code repository absolutely required a name, so Mike called it streams.

The community needed something to name this nameless thing by, so they took the name of the repository and wrapped it in parentheses to make sure that this is not actually the name. Ever since, it is colloquially being called (streams). By the way, (streams) is running on what would be Zot12 if it wasn't Nomad now.

On New Year's Eve 2022, Mike discontinued Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Misty, Osada and Roadhouse. (streams) was stable enough, and the other five could be upgraded not only to each other by rebasing the server code, but also to (streams). He asked all admins of Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Misty, Osada and Roadhouse servers to upgrade to (streams).

In 2024, (streams) got bogged down by some identity confusion after the stable release branch introduced decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61, a part of the development of nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Partially in order to be able to sort this out, partially because the time seemed to have come for this to actually work, Mike forked the streams repository into Forte and removed all support for any protocols other than ActivityPub while still keeping it nomadic. And so Forte became the very first Fediverse server application that establishes nomadic identity via ActivityPub.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #DFRN #Zot #Zot6 #Zot8 #Nomad #Mistpark #Friendika #FreeFriendika #Friendica #Red #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Redmatrix2020 #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte

@Gaming on the Fediverse That's quite a bit simplified. For one, four server applications and one protocol were lumped together. Besides, Zap is dead, and Forte isn't even mentioned.

So here's an attempt at telling the whole story (server applications are in bold type, protocols are in bold type and italics):

tl;dr:

2010:

• DFRN
• Mistpark/Friendika/Friendica
  (DFRN)

2011:

• Zot
• Free-Friendika
  (DFRN)
  (forked from Friendika)
• several other Friendika forks
  (DFRN)
  (forked from Friendika)
  (discontinued 2011)
• Red/Red Matrix
  (DFRN, from 2012 Zot)
  (forked from Free-Friendika)
  (rebuilt into Hubzilla 2015)

2015:

• Hubzilla
  (Zot, later Zot6)
  (rebuilt from the Red Matrix)

2018:

Zot6
• Osada
  (Zot6)
  (forked from Hubzilla)
  (discontinued in 2018)
• Zap
  (Zot6)
  (forked most likely from Osada, maybe from Hubzilla)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Osada
  (Zot6)
  (forked from Zap)
  (discontinued in 2019)

2020:

Zot8
• Redmatrix 2020
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Mistpark 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Redmatrix 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• Osada
  (Zot8)
  (forked from either Zap or Redmatrix 2020 or Mistpark 2020)
  (discontinued in 2022)

2022:

• Nomad
  (originally Zot11)
• Roadhouse
  (Nomad)
  (forked from either Redmatrix 2020 or Mistpark 2020 or (the third) Osada)
  (discontinued in 2022)
• (streams)
  (Nomad)
  (forked from Roadhouse)

2024:
Forte
(ActivityPub)
(forked from (streams))[/list]
So as far as Fediverse server applications go, he created Friendica, Free-Friendika, a few more Friendika forks, the Red Matrix, Hubzilla, three Osadas, Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020, Roadhouse, (streams) and Forte. Depending on how you want to count them, that's at least 13 or 14 server applications. Four of these are still being maintained (Friendica by a new team, Hubzilla by another new team, (streams) and Forte by himself).

The long version:

In 2010, he created

• the DFRN protocol
• Mistpark (renamed first into Friendika later in 2010 and then into Friendica in 2011)

In 2011, he made several forks of Friendika. The reason was licensing: Friendika was getting quite some attention. As it was under the MIT license, chances were that it was tempting to fork it and turn the fork into a commercial, proprietary, closed-source monolith or something. On the other hand, the GPL in any shape or form would have hindered further development.

So Mike made a number of forks and relicensed all but one: Free-Friendika kept the MIT license and became the main development platform for Friendika. Friendika itself was relicensed under the AGPLv3.

Shortly afterwards, Mike discontinued all forks except Free-Friendika.

The same year, Mike needed something to keep people from losing everything whenever their Friendika home node was shut down. So he invented nomadic identity and created the Zot protocol.

Also the same year, Mike forked Free-Friendika into Red (spanish la red = the network). It would be renamed Red Matrix in late 2012 because "Red" is hard to Google.

In 2012, Mike rewrote Red almost completely. The whole backend was rebuilt against Zot.

However, the Red Matrix didn't take off. Most Friendica users were hosting their own private nodes. Nomadic identity made no sense for them. Besides, it seemed like many Friendica users didn't understand nomadic identity anyway, so they saw no advantage in the Red Matrix over Friendica, seeing as the features were almost identical otherwise. The Red Matrix had to be made more popular for hosting public servers.

So in 2015, the Red Matrix was rebuilt and greatly expanded into Hubzilla.

In 2018, Mike wanted to develop the Zot protocol further into Zot6. But this would have meant compatibility-breaking changes, also because what he wanted to do with nomadic identity over Zot6 was likely to not work with non-nomadic protocols anymore. So he couldn't do that on Hubzilla.

Instead, he made two new forks:

• first Osada, forked from Hubzilla, which was the original Zot6 development platform and then evolved into a non-nomadic "gateway" between Zot6 and everything else
• then Zap, forked most likely from Osada or maybe from Hubzilla, which got the whole Zot6 feature set, including nomadic identity, but which lost support for any and all non-nomadic protocols

A bit later, Zot6 became compatible enough with non-nomadic protocols. Forwarding content from Zap via Osada to the rest of the Fediverse was clunky anyway, forwarding content from the rest of the Fediverse via Osada to Zap even more so. So Osada was discontinued.

Instead, a new Osada was forked from Zap and got ActivityPub support. This and the branding were the only differences between Osada and Zap.

In 2019, when both Osada and Zap had become stable, Zap got ActivityPub support itself. The only difference between the two was now that Osada servers had ActivityPub turned on by default, and Zap servers had it turned off by default. It simply didn't make much sense to keep both alive, so Osada was discontinued again.

I think it was also in 2019 that Hubzilla was upgraded to Zot6.

In 2020, Mike made three more forks to develop Zot8, at least one of which was forked from Zap, and those that weren't were forked from one another: Redmatrix 2020, Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty and Osada.

There was a rumour that Zap was the stable one, Misty was a bit more up-to-date, but potentially less stable, Osada was experimental with ActivityPub support on by default, and Redmatrix 2020 was experimental with ActivityPub support off by default. In fact, however, Misty, Osada and Redmatrix 2020 were absolutely identical in all but branding. Mike kept four server applications around to mess with brand fetishists.

In 2022, Mike forked one of the three into Roadhouse to develop Zot11. But Zot11 was no longer compatible with Zot6 as implemented on Hubzilla and Zap, so he declared it a new protocol named Nomad. Roadhouse got additional support for Zot6.

Now Mike had five server applications, still in order to mess with brand fetishists.

Later the same year, Mike forked Roadhouse into something intentionally nameless and brandless. Again, this was done to troll brand fetishists, this time also to facilitate forking and make people think up their own individual names for the fork rather than keeping the existing one. However, the code repository absolutely required a name, so Mike called it streams.

The community needed something to name this nameless thing by, so they took the name of the repository and wrapped it in parentheses to make sure that this is not actually the name. Ever since, it is colloquially being called (streams). By the way, (streams) is running on what would be Zot12 if it wasn't Nomad now.

On New Year's Eve 2022, Mike discontinued Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Misty, Osada and Roadhouse. (streams) was stable enough, and the other five could be upgraded not only to each other by rebasing the server code, but also to (streams). He asked all admins of Zap, Redmatrix 2020, Misty, Osada and Roadhouse servers to upgrade to (streams).

In 2024, (streams) got bogged down by some identity confusion after the stable release branch introduced decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61, a part of the development of nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Partially in order to be able to sort this out, partially because the time seemed to have come for this to actually work, Mike forked the streams repository into Forte and removed all support for any protocols other than ActivityPub while still keeping it nomadic. And so Forte became the very first Fediverse server application that establishes nomadic identity via ActivityPub.

CC: @Grow Fediverse

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #DFRN #Zot #Zot6 #Zot8 #Nomad #Mistpark #Friendika #FreeFriendika #Friendica #Red #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Redmatrix2020 #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte

@prex Sit down, get a snack and a drink, for this will be long.

I wish someone made the federated G+

"The federated G+" was literally made before Google+ itself.

diaspora*

Have you ever heard of diaspora*?

If not, let me take you back to 2010. Back then, it first came out that Facebook was spying on its users and selling their private data. In spring, four students asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding for an ambitious project: a free, open-source, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised alternative to Facebook named diaspora*.

The word spread like wild fire. Tech media jumped upon it. Non-tech mass media jumped upon it. These four guys were about to develop a Facebook killer! Of the requested $12,000, they got over $200,000.

They started working in May, 2010. In October, they presented a first very early alpha version of diaspora* that could only run on Macs as servers. It would take the likely suicide of the project founder, the replacement of the whole development team and several years to even release a first beta. To this day, diaspora* did not have a 1.0 stable release.

In general, diaspora* did not become the huge, super-popular Facebook killer. It always remained obscure.

Google+

Then came Google. They saw that people wanted to move away from Facebook, but they thought they had nowhere to go. And Google wanted to exploit the self-same source of income as Facebook. So they launched Google+.

Google+ was a blatant, full-on, all-out rip-off of diaspora*. The circles that almost everyone "knows" were invented by Google? diaspora*'s aspects, stolen by Google. Google's entire new corporate UI design with the black navigation bar at the top? diaspora*'s design.

Like, cirlces? So ahead of its times!

Again: diaspora* had Google+'s circles before Google+ had circles. diaspora* has aspects, and Google stole them and named them circles.

Google got away with it easily. Nobody knew diaspora*. Nobody knew what diaspora* looks like. And diaspora* itself had other things to take care of than a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against a power-mongering Silicon Valley teracorporation or even a C&D against Google.

The slow death of diaspora*

But seriously, diaspora* isn't worth looking at nowadays. It may have released a 0.9 beta last year, skipping 0.8 altogether. But it's withering away.

Shortly before New Year's Eve 2024, three major diaspora* pods shut down. According to one statistics website, diaspora* lost more than half its user accounts within three days. For April 1st, 2025, the shutdown of diasp.org, one of the biggest and most important pods, has been announced. JoinDiaspora, the old lighthouse pod, has been gone for quite a while now.

But diaspora*'s issues lie not only in its slow development, but also in its design decisions. It's beautiful, but it's minimalist to the point of being lack-lustre. Also, diaspora* does not support ActivityPub and never will. It only supports its own protocol. The developers have explicitly decided against supporting ActivityPub because Fediverse projects don't "implement ActivityPub", they "implement Mastodon". This, however, also means that diaspora* cannot connect to most of the Fediverse by far.

Friendica

But: There's even better than diaspora* and Google+ that's free, open-source, decentralised and federated. And it was there before Google+. I'm not kidding.

Remember, it took four students, $200,000 of crowd-funding and five months (May to October, 2010) to create a first, very unfinished preview of diaspora*.

But the same year, it took one developer and protocol designer with some three decades of experience (@Mike Macgirvin 🖥️), zero crowd-funding and only four months (March to July, 2010) to create a first, very fleshed-out and useable release of something initially called Mistpark.

At this point, when the four diaspora* creators were still tinkering, Mistpark was already more powerful than both diaspora* and Mastodon are today. It already had everything a social network needs. It had diaspora*'s aspects before diaspora* had aspects and long before Google+ had circles; only it called them lists. And Mistpark's lists were diaspora*'s aspects and Google+'s circles on coke.

Since early 2012, Mistpark has been known as Friendica (official website). Since mid-January, 2025, it is the primary go-to alternative to Facebook in the Fediverse. And it has continuously been fully federated with Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has been around. Since January, 2016. Again, I'm not kidding.

Friendica's descendants

But Mike didn't stop there. He went on and improved the same concept further and further by forking his own creations and advancing them technologically.

In 2011, he invented the concept of nomadic identity (something that Bluesky claims to have invented much later, but has yet to prove to be functional) to make identites more resilient against server shutdown, and he created another all-new communication protocol named Zot (today known as Nomad) for that purpose.

In 2012, he handed Friendica over to the community and forked it into something called Red, later the Red Matrix. It was the first not only decentralised, but nomadic social server application in the world. In 2015, it was redesigned, vastly expanded in features and renamed Hubzilla (official website).

To this day, Hubzilla is the one most powerful and feature-rich Fediverse server application. It is not a vague concept or in early development; instead, it has been a rock-solid multi-purpose daily driver for longer than Mastodon has been around.

Another one of its key features is what's the second-most advanced and fine-grained permissions system in the Fediverse, something that Mastodon doesn't have at all. Its privacy groups are diaspora*'s aspects or Google+'s circles on coke and 'roids because you can do things with them that are impossible even on Friendica, much less diaspora* or Google+, not to mention what Mastodon calls lists. They aren't called privacy groups for nothing.

In 2018, Mike handed the development of Hubzilla over to the community to concentrate on the further advancement of Zot. This led to:

• Osada (2018, discontinued in 2019)
• Zap (2018, discontinued in 2022)
• another Osada (2019, discontinued later in 2019)
• yet another Osada (2020, discontinued in 2022)
• Redmatrix 2020 (2020, discontinued in 2022)
• Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty (2020, discontinued in 2022)
• Roadhouse (2021, discontinued in 2022)
• (streams) (code repository, 2021)
• Forte (code repository, 2024)

Except for the first Osada, all of them were or still are nomadic. Except for Zap until some point in 2019, all of them supported or still support ActivityPub. And they all had or still have an advanced permissions system which, at least on (streams) and Forte, even slightly surpasses Hubzilla's. Their access lists are at least on par with Hubzilla's privacy groups.

Finally

If you're looking for a decentralised Google+ drop-in replacement, that'd be diaspora*. But diaspora* is dying, and it will never federate with Mastodon.

If you're also interested in something that's even better than Google+, check Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams).

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Google+ #GooglePlus #diaspora* #Mistpark #Friendika #Friendica #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Redmatrix2020 #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lists #Aspects #Circles #PrivacyGroups #AccessLists

@prex Sit down, get a snack and a drink, for this will be long.

I wish someone made the federated G+

"The federated G+" was literally made before Google+ itself.

diaspora*

Have you ever heard of diaspora*?

If not, let me take you back to 2010. Back then, it first came out that Facebook was spying on its users and selling their private data. In spring, four students asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding for an ambitious project: a free, open-source, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised alternative to Facebook named diaspora*.

The word spread like wild fire. Tech media jumped upon it. Non-tech mass media jumped upon it. These four guys were about to develop a Facebook killer! Of the requested $12,000, they got over $200,000.

They started working in May, 2010. In October, they presented a first very early alpha version of diaspora* that could only run on Macs as servers. It would take the likely suicide of the project founder, the replacement of the whole development team and several years to even release a first beta. To this day, diaspora* did not have a 1.0 stable release.

In general, diaspora* did not become the huge, super-popular Facebook killer. It always remained obscure.

Google+

Then came Google. They saw that people wanted to move away from Facebook, but they thought they had nowhere to go. And Google wanted to exploit the self-same source of income as Facebook. So they launched Google+.

Google+ was a blatant, full-on, all-out rip-off of diaspora*. The circles that almost everyone "knows" were invented by Google? diaspora*'s aspects, stolen by Google. Google's entire new corporate UI design with the black navigation bar at the top? diaspora*'s design.

Like, cirlces? So ahead of its times!

Again: diaspora* had Google+'s circles before Google+ had circles. diaspora* has aspects, and Google stole them and named them circles.

Google got away with it easily. Nobody knew diaspora*. Nobody knew what diaspora* looks like. And diaspora* itself had other things to take care of than a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against a power-mongering Silicon Valley teracorporation or even a C&D against Google.

The slow death of diaspora*

But seriously, diaspora* isn't worth looking at nowadays. It may have released a 0.9 beta last year, skipping 0.8 altogether. But it's withering away.

Shortly before New Year's Eve 2024, three major diaspora* pods shut down. According to one statistics website, diaspora* lost more than half its user accounts within three days. For April 1st, 2025, the shutdown of diasp.org, one of the biggest and most important pods, has been announced. JoinDiaspora, the old lighthouse pod, has been gone for quite a while now.

But diaspora*'s issues lie not only in its slow development, but also in its design decisions. It's beautiful, but it's minimalist to the point of being lack-lustre. Also, diaspora* does not support ActivityPub and never will. It only supports its own protocol. The developers have explicitly decided against supporting ActivityPub because Fediverse projects don't "implement ActivityPub", they "implement Mastodon". This, however, also means that diaspora* cannot connect to most of the Fediverse by far.

Friendica

But: There's even better than diaspora* and Google+ that's free, open-source, decentralised and federated. And it was there before Google+. I'm not kidding.

Remember, it took four students, $200,000 of crowd-funding and five months (May to October, 2010) to create a first, very unfinished preview of diaspora*.

But the same year, it took one developer and protocol designer with some three decades of experience (@Mike Macgirvin 🖥️), zero crowd-funding and only four months (March to July, 2010) to create a first, very fleshed-out and useable release of something initially called Mistpark.

At this point, when the four diaspora* creators were still tinkering, Mistpark was already more powerful than both diaspora* and Mastodon are today. It already had everything a social network needs. It had diaspora*'s aspects before diaspora* had aspects and long before Google+ had circles; only it called them lists. And Mistpark's lists were diaspora*'s aspects and Google+'s circles on coke.

Since early 2012, Mistpark has been known as Friendica (official website). Since mid-January, 2025, it is the primary go-to alternative to Facebook in the Fediverse. And it has continuously been fully federated with Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has been around. Since January, 2016. Again, I'm not kidding.

Friendica's descendants

But Mike didn't stop there. He went on and improved the same concept further and further by forking his own creations and advancing them technologically.

In 2011, he invented the concept of nomadic identity (something that Bluesky claims to have invented much later, but has yet to prove to be functional) to make identites more resilient against server shutdown, and he created another all-new communication protocol named Zot (today known as Nomad) for that purpose.

In 2012, he handed Friendica over to the community and forked it into something called Red, later the Red Matrix. It was the first not only decentralised, but nomadic social server application in the world. In 2015, it was redesigned, vastly expanded in features and renamed Hubzilla (official website).

To this day, Hubzilla is the one most powerful and feature-rich Fediverse server application. It is not a vague concept or in early development; instead, it has been a rock-solid multi-purpose daily driver for longer than Mastodon has been around.

Another one of its key features is what's the second-most advanced and fine-grained permissions system in the Fediverse, something that Mastodon doesn't have at all. Its privacy groups are diaspora*'s aspects or Google+'s circles on coke and 'roids because you can do things with them that are impossible even on Friendica, much less diaspora* or Google+, not to mention what Mastodon calls lists. They aren't called privacy groups for nothing.

In 2018, Mike handed the development of Hubzilla over to the community to concentrate on the further advancement of Zot. This led to:

• Osada (2018, discontinued in 2019)
• Zap (2018, discontinued in 2022)
• another Osada (2019, discontinued later in 2019)
• yet another Osada (2020, discontinued in 2022)
• Redmatrix 2020 (2020, discontinued in 2022)
• Mistpark 2020 a.k.a. Misty (2020, discontinued in 2022)
• Roadhouse (2021, discontinued in 2022)
• (streams) (code repository, 2021)
• Forte (code repository, 2024)

Except for the first Osada, all of them were or still are nomadic. Except for Zap until some point in 2019, all of them supported or still support ActivityPub. And they all had or still have an advanced permissions system which, at least on (streams) and Forte, even slightly surpasses Hubzilla's. Their access lists are at least on par with Hubzilla's privacy groups.

Finally

If you're looking for a decentralised Google+ drop-in replacement, that'd be diaspora*. But diaspora* is dying, and it will never federate with Mastodon.

If you're also interested in something that's even better than Google+, check Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams).

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Google+ #GooglePlus #diaspora* #Mistpark #Friendika #Friendica #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Redmatrix2020 #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lists #Aspects #Circles #PrivacyGroups #AccessLists

@Katharsisdrill Yes, Diaspora* is two months younger than Mistpark.

But Diaspora* of 2024 is no match for Mistpark of 2010, feature-wise. Mistpark, on the other hand, evolved into Friendica which federated with everything that moved, then into Hubzilla, the nomadic Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, and lastly, into the streams repository which is the home of the technologically most advanced Fediverse software to date.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mistpark #Friendika #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)

@Yohan Yuki Xieㆍ사요한・謝雪矢 I'm not even sure if Laconi.ca/StatusNet could quote, much less quote-post. It wanted to be microblogging, and it supported the Twitter API from some point on, but it didn't aim to be a Twitter clone.

As for Friendica or rather Mistpark, I'm convinced it had quote-posts already when it was first released in July, 2010. It didn't try to mimic Twitter either, though, because it was positioned as an alternative to Facebook.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #Laconica #Laconi.ca #StatusNet #Mistpark #Friendika #Friendica

@Scott M. Stolz It's a bit murky what exactly happened back then.

Friendica started as Mistpark before a German told Mike what a German understands when reading that word, namely manure park. It was then renamed to Friendika because the desired Friendica domain was still blocked.

Free Friendika was a fork of Friendika by someone who wasn't content with Friendika's license. Free Friendika was on GitHub right away while Friendika wasn't. The fork involved copying Friendika's whole repository to GitHub.

Friendika was renamed Friendica in 2011 or 2012 when that name had become available.

It was afterwards that Friendica's own code repository was migrated to GitHub. Due to a GitHub "quirk", Friendica was automatically declared a fork of Free Friendika which is technically false.

What exactly happened license-wise is murky to me. Friendica can't have started under the AGPL because that'd exclude re-licensing a fork. But interestingly, Hubzilla is MIT-licensed.

So whatever license Friendica started out under, it might have been the community which put it under the AGPL after taking over from Mike who was now tinkering with the Zot protocol.

Looking at the licenses, it's very likely that Mike didn't fork Friendica Red off Friendica but off Free Friendika, itself a hard fork of Friendika. Thus, some improvements on Friendica never made it to Friendica Red.

I also guess it was named Friendica Red first and then renamed Red (from spanish la red = "the net") after the whole backend had been re-written against Zot, and the whole thing had stopped being Friendica in the first place. The re-naming to Red Matrix must have been a kind of marketing decision.

It's even unclear what exactly was the base for Osada later. Case in point: Well after the release of Hubzilla, Mike's own instances were still all branded "Red Matrix" although this project should have been abandoned in early 2015 when Hubzilla was created from it.

So either the Red Matrix was renamed Hubzilla and reworked into what was Hubzilla 1.0 in July, but Mike kept the "Red Matrix" brand for his own instances. In this case, Osada was forked from Hubzilla, and most everything added from the Red Matrix to Hubzilla was removed again from Hubzilla to Osada.

Or Hubzilla was forked from the Red Matrix, mostly soft-forked, the Red Matrix became Hubzilla's smaller and more experimental brother, and Mike's own instances all became testbeds for development that would have been more difficult with the extra Hubzilla cruft in the way. In this case, chances are bigger that Mike forked Osada from the Red Matrix which had never had all that extra Hubzilla stuff that Osada never had either.

Either way, the path from Mistpark to Hubzilla is both very complicated and very murky, and so I guess it's kind of justified to simplify it a bit. At the same time, it's too short to simplify it the same the path from either the Red Matrix or Hubzilla to (streams) can be simplified because the latter has had many more forks in it ("a fork of a fork... of a fork of {Hubzilla|the Red Matrix}").

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Forks #Mistpark #Friendika #FreeFriendika #Friendica #RedMatrix #Hubzilla

@Steffen Voß #Friendika kann ich gar nicht mehr so richtig. Statt dessen erzähle ich was von #Hubzilla, von nomadischen Identitäten und Open Web Auth ;-)

@Codex ☯️♈☮ @CynthesisToday I think the #Fediverse is the easiest to understand for those who halfway know their way around computer stuff if you start at the protocol level.

#ActivityPub is a digital communications protocol standard. Like e-mail or RSS or Atom or XMPP or Matrix, for example. Or like #StatusNet or the #Diaspora protocol or #DFRN or #Zot, now known as #Nomad in its latest incarnation.

The server application projects that are based on ActivityPub are different server-side software implementations of the same protocol. Some have more features, some have fewer, some specialise in particular tasks which is possible because ActivityPub is not specialised itself, not a one-trick pony.

Like, for XMPP, you have jabberd and ejabberd and Openfire and Prosody and Tigase. For e-mail, you've got various mail servers and MTAs.

The main difference here is that ActivityPub is so versatile in its capabilities that it can be used for a whole lot of different things. #Mastodon, #Pleroma, #Akkoma, #MissKey, #CalcKey etc. were made for microblogging. But ActivityPub can also be used for actual blogging platforms like #Plume or #WriteFreely, for video streaming like in the cases of #PeerTube and #Owncast, for audio streaming like in the cases of #Funkwhale and #Castopod and for link aggregators/discussion communities like in the cases of #Lemmy and #kbin. Only to name a few examples.

Still, there are enough parts of this protocol fixed so that all these projects, all these implementations of ActivityPub can connect to one another and ideally communicate with one another.

Now, why is all this made so that they can connect to one another?

That's because they all use the same protocol. The alternative would have been to do like Mike MacGirvin did with DFRN for #Mistpark, later #Friendika, today known as #Friendica, and create a whole new protocol from scratch, even though StatusNet was readily available. Well, only that Mike's intention was to federate Friendica with everything that moved, regardless of protocol.

Okay, better comparison: The alternative would have been to do like the four Diaspora* creators and create a whole new protocol from scratch with no intention whatsoever to connect to the outside world.

Well, instead, all those clones of YouTube and Instagram and Reddit and GoodReads and so forth chose ActivityPub. It was a win-win situation: They could use an existing protocol which actually worked for them instead of taking upon themselves designing a whole new protocol first and then their server application on top. And they could expect a wider audience, namely everything else that uses ActivityPub. Two birds, one stone.

Oh, and by the way: Neither the Fediverse nor ActivityPub was designed around Mastodon, nor was ActivityPub designed by Eugen Rochko (Mike Macgirvin did have some saying in it, though, AFAIK), and quite a few Fediverse projects already existed before Mastodon. Pleroma is three and a half weeks older. MissKey is two years older AFAIK. #Hubzilla was forked from Friendica four years before Mastodon came out. This means that Friendica has to be even older: six years older than Mastodon.

None of these projects will ever give in to Mastodon's limitations and reduce their own feature set for the convenience of Mastodon users. Oh, and neither will the projects that came after Mastodon. If something from another Fediverse project doesn't look good on Mastodon, it's Mastodon's problem.

@Chris Trottier @Fediverse News Back in 2010, when mainstream mass media were raving about the crowd-funding campaign for #Diaspora, he dropped the 1.0 version of #Mistpark which, at this point already, was more powerful in every possible way than Diaspora* would be a decade later. Mistpark would soon be renamed #Friendika which then became #Friendica.

In 2011, over a decade before #Bluesky, he invented #NomadicIdentity with the #Zot protocol.

In 2012, still over a decade before Bluesky, he forked Friendica into Friendica Red, then renamed Red (from Spanish "la red" = "the network"), then renamed #RedMatrix. In 2015, it went stable and was renamed #Hubzilla. Two stable point releases within five and a half years with no budget while crowd-funded Diaspora* was still a rather lack-lustre public alpha. And that's still several months before #Mastodon.

Friendica, Hubzilla, #Zap (EOL) and #Streams are only the four stable projects he created, all without crowd-funding. This does not include the various experimental projects that led to everything post-Friendica, all of which are past their EOL now that (streams) is out: #Osada, #Misty a.k.a. #Mistpark2022, #Roadhouse plus re-emerged Redmatrix and Osada. And even Zap started out as an experiment and was eventually declared stable after fully merging with Osada.

@mike

Streams is basically an acknowledgement that my work has no value to anybody but me.

The lack of popularity for #Friendica, #Hubzilla, #Zap & Co. never came from nobody caring.

It always came from nobody even knowing that they exist in the first place.

In 2010, people were ready and willing to pump a few hundred thousand US dollars into the development of #Diaspora. They hoped that Diaspora* would be a free, decentralised Social Web revolution. But the development of Diaspora* took an eternity, and out came something lack-lustre and underwhelming that spent several years in public alpha.

Why didn't people save their money and use #Friendika instead which was everything they had dreamed of and then some? Which was vastly more powerful in spring 2010 before Diaspora* was developed than Diaspora* itself would ever become? Why was Diaspora* developed in the first place? Why was the wheel re-invented, but worse?

Because nobody knew that Friendika existed. That's why. Diaspora* made it into all big news because its developers a) announced to mass media that they want to compete with #Facebook and b) asked people for crowdfunding, hence the big publicity campaign. If Friendika had been as well-known as, for example, #Firefox, Diaspora* wouldn't exist.

I myself only found Friendika back in the day by actively searching the Web for decentralised social network platforms. It was a thorough, intense search. And I eventually stumbled upon it.

As for Hubzilla, I happened upon it on Friendica when someone mentioned it.

As for #Osada and #Zap, I think it was you who mentioned them within the Hubzilla dev bubble which I occasionally got a glance into. Someone from that bubble also led me to #Misty a.k.a. #Mistpark2020.

As for #Roadhouse and #Streams, I discovered them on Zotlabs by chance. And their Zotlabs pages were never filled with any information on what they are and what they do.

I didn't find out about any of these projects through any form of advertising or publicity campaign, nor did I learn about any of them through tech media.

Only once do I recall that any of these projects has ever been presented at a FLOSS or hacker event. That was years ago at the #ChaosCommunicationCongress where a panel about Friendica was held. But even that panel was like Friendica devs talking to other devs about developing Friendica and Friendica node admins talking to other LAMP stack admins about installing and running Friendica nodes. What Friendica can do was only mentioned briefly. The first step, namely getting people interested in using Friendica as end users to see what it's good for, was skipped entirely. And there was no info booth, there was no promotional material, there were no flyers, no nothing. Even #OpenStreetMap had flyers.

#Mastodon was just lucky. For starters, it was the first free and decentralised microblogging service that was launched in years. The whole #StatusNet and #GNUsocial things had been so long ago that even those few who had come across it barely remembered, so Mastodon didn't seem like it was aping them. And it must have attracted enough disgruntled #birdsite users already then to gain a critical mass.

Before 2022, we already had a situation in which the vast majority of Mastodon users believed that the #Fediverse was Mastodon, and Mastodon was the Fediverse, and there was nothing else out there. Pleroma was already vastly superior to Mastodon technologically, but Mastodon had the critical mass. Still, Mastodon itself was so obscure that #TimBernersLee had never heard of it, much less of any of your projects or Diaspora*, and therefore decided to re-invent the free, open-source, non-commercial, decentralised social wheel all from scratch once more.

When the #TwitterTakeover started looming on the horizon, people started recommending Mastodon on #Twitter. And pretty much only Mastodon because that was all they knew. Again, critical mass. This critical mass enlarged itself in several waves.

I guess not a single birdsite refugee had ever heard of any Fediverse project beyond Mastodon when they joined it, and I guess over 80% still never have. And they keep wondering how people can toot more than 500 characters, whether their Mastodon instance has different settings and such. I know from personal experience that it often takes several attempts to explain to people that, no, I am not on Mastodon, and Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance.

Mass media don't make it any better. Both general news media and tech media have meanwhile picked up the Mastodon phenomenon, and many have accepted that Mastodon is here to stay. Still, all general news media and nearly all tech media "know" that Mastodon is the Fediverse and vice versa, and that there isn't anything else out there. Some media outlets have joined the Fediverse themselves. They could be way better off with #Akkoma or #Pixelfed or Hubzilla or their own take on Streams. But they're on Mastodon. Why? Because that's all they knew when they got there. Because they've settled with Mastodon before even knowing that there are projects that'd suit them better. And they'll probably never know.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming you personally. I'm not even sure if it's good style for the main dev of a project to go peddling their own work. Making your projects known should have been a task for the whole community. Not only the devs, not only the hub admins, but the users. Because if someone can talk to aspiring users, it's actual users. "If you build it, they will come" has failed, and we should have seen this coming.

Large-scale migration away from proprietary, commercial projects and towards free, open-source, non-commercial alternatives only happens under pressure from outside and even then not always. Large-scale adoption of Firefox in Germany happened when the most widely-used browser was #InternetExplorer 6 which was not only hopelessly outdated but so insecure that the malware spread through it alone caused millions upon millions of Euros in damage. And it only happened because the reaction upon this was our Mother Of The Nation, Federal Chancellor #AngelaMerkel, herself telling the Germans to move from IE6 to Firefox.

And the mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon only happened for two reasons: One, Twitter was threatening to get more and more hard to take. Two, Twitter didn't and still doesn't really have a commercial, corporate-owned, centralised competitor. All possible Twitter alternatives are decentralised #FLOSS. There was nowhere else to go than down the Fediverse route.

Right now, however, I don't see a #Facebook takeover that'd turn it into yet another Nazi hive and cause people to flee to Friendica and/or Hubzilla. Nor does #OlafScholz tell people to quit Facebook and join Friendica/Hubzilla instead. He doesn't even tell people to join Mastodon.

No, growth for Friendica, Hubzilla and Streams still has to come from within. And again, this won't be a task for the core devs. All they'll have to do is tell the community what there is to advertise. But I don't expect anything really new to come anytime soon, seeing as Streams seems to be a be-all, end-all project that can be turned into anything without involvement by the core devs. So we already know what there basically is to advertise. And when it comes to cool new features, we learn about them quickly when new versions come around, and the devs do talk about these beforehand.

So the first step would be to get these projects known outside the #DFRN, #Zot and #Nomad bubble. This would lead us into two different, bigger bubbles. One is the Fediverse which, as I've already mentioned, the vast majority of its own users still sees as synonymous with Mastodon. Granted, we'd have tough competition there, for if someone desires more than 500 characters per post, maybe they're better off with Akkoma or a different Mastodon instance. And federation with Diaspora* is no longer a unique selling point because hardly anyone uses Diaspora* exclusively anymore, so I guess hardly anyone misses the Diaspora* connector on Streams. But maybe a "federated social Swiss army knife" like Friendica or even Hubzilla or a "federated social construction kit" like Streams is exactly what some people are looking for. Remember that the Fediverse alone covers millions of people. 1% of them is slowly but steadily closing in on being 100,000.

The other bubble is the FLOSS scene. This may be more difficult because, curiously, the FLOSS scene barely knows about the Fediverse, even about Mastodon, and thus has barely adopted it. This will be somewhat tougher. Some people in that scene reject social media altogether because they associate social media with corporate spyware, and they've convinced themselves that they don't need any social media (or their social media hub is either a git repository hoster, ironically often a #Microsoft property, or a mailing list). Others have a general dislike towards GUIs, only using ultra-minimalist #i3wm and no pointing devices themselves. Or they cling to the UNIX philosophy that each tool has to be able to only do one thing which gets to the point that they actually use different tools for receiving, composing and sending e-mails. Even Friendica can do too much for their tastes.

Still, I think that other people in the FLOSS bubble may be more welcoming, also because the Fediverse is yet another rather successful attempt at competing against corporate monopolies with FLOSS, with decentralised FLOSS à la #XMPP or #Matrix even. Also, while the #GAFAM bubble sees us as a bunch of idealistic but ultimately successless basement-dwelling nerds, the FLOSS bubble will see us as some of their own ilk doing more cool stuff in addition to all the cool stuff that has already been done. Not to mention that the FLOSS bubble has its own news outlets. We just must not repeat the mistake of only trying to talk to potential devs or potential instance admins. We have to reach out to aspiring end users first and foremost. Devs and admins will come in their wake. FLOSS people aren't keen on developing something they've never even tried using.

Media coverage outside the FLOSS bubble might give us an even wider audience. Sure, it may appear like even specialised tech media aren't interested in anything that isn't commercial. And some outlets do flat-out refuse to publish anything about anything FLOSS, or they only write about whoever pays them to write about them. But generally, they don't have an aversion against FLOSS alternatives to commercial products. Mass media helped Firefox spread. Mass media helped Diaspora* exceed their crowd-funding goal buy suggesting it'll be a Facebook killer. And mass media are right now accepting Mastodon and the Fediverse as the next big thing instead of some wacky nerd stuff. It may actually happen that media outlets which still reject the Fediverse in favour of Twitter will be seen as not only backwards-oriented, but outright right-wing.

It's hard to say how easy it'd be in 2023 to even only get tech media to write about Friendica, Hubzilla or even Streams. On the one hand, there may still be an attitude of, "Nobody wants to read about it if it wasn't launched with venture capital." On the other hand, the Fediverse itself has more than one foot in the door, what with journalists joining Mastodon and entire media outlets launching their own instances. All we have to do is get the knowledge into their heads that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Maybe they'll find this discovery so amazing that they'll write about it.

I think Friendica would be the easiest case. Okay, it'll be hard to treat something as cool new stuff if it has been around for 13 years or so. But it isn't so modular, it's more like an all-in-one "black box" of the kind that non-techy types prefer, and it concentrates on social networking and doesn't overwhelm its users with features, at least not that much. Also, it's the closes to being "to Facebook what Mastodon is to Twitter."

Hubzilla could mainly score with its sheer, all-encompassing power. It's certainly the most powerful, most versatile Fediverse project. This, however, may make it too powerful for casuals. It's also more modular than Friendica which means that many cool features, even including #ActivityPub support, have to be activated by the user. That said, Hubzilla's main issues, its user interface which capitulates before its vast amount of features, its documentation which reads more like a technical spec than a user manual and its outdated and less-than-welcoming representation on the Web, are being tackled as we speak (or rather type). Thanks to @Scott M. Stolz, Hubzilla may soon have one or multiple user interfaces that make it much easier to harness its vast power and flexibility.

Streams, or (streams) as some spell it, is still the odd one out. I must admit that even experienced Hubzilla veterans often have a hard time understanding what it actually is, much less Mastodon users, not to mention the GAFAM-only bubble. While bone-stock Streams itself is easier to use than Hubzilla, partly thanks to a reworked UI, partly thanks to lots of features having been cut and therefore no longer cluttering the UI, the whole concept may be confusing to many. It's not only even less of a "black box" than Hubzilla, it isn't a project or even a platform like Mastodon or Friendica at all; it's only a code repository which you can yoink and make something nice out of. Streams says, "Fork me!" It wasn't made to be run vanilla as a Zap successor which is a rather subversive idea. In fact, running Streams as-is is subverting the subversion again; it doesn't help that vanilla Streams makes for a decent Fediverse server already.

So Streams will be difficult to explain even to tinker-happy FLOSS people, its main target audience, and even more so to those who have only just left the commercial, corporate software bubble they had called their cosy home for many years and managed to wrap their minds around Mastodon. What Streams needs more than Hubzilla is reference implementations that show in practice rather than in theory what can be done with it. I mean, it's hard enough to grasp that Hubzilla can serve as a macroblog or a wiki until you've seen it happen with your own eyes.

A typical Hubzilla reference implementation would be a regular instance with all bells and whistles with open registration (until it's full, that is). People can join it, play around with it and make it their social homebase. Along with it, there could be Hubzilla instances that aren't social networking platforms but something different, yet still "powered by Hubzilla" as would be written on them. These could show Hubzilla's versatility. Something you were told is "something like Facebook" suddenly powers a blog. Or a community webpage, including a public event calendar. Or a wiki. Or a personal website with a personal DAV cloud server silently running in the background. Things that make Hubzilla get away with ActivityPub being optional, especially if these websites have nomadic clones. In this case, #Zot only serves to keep the clones in sync.

With Streams, the focus should be vice-versa. It'd be more important to show off what can be done on top of Streams or by forking Streams and making something nice and "unexpected" with it, preferably with multiple identical nomadic clones to show off what #Nomad can do, but still with a "powered by Streams" badge on it. A social networking platform or two could come later and mainly to demonstrate that Streams can do that, too. If this came first, Streams would be reduced to being "the next Friendica" or the next attempt at a Facebook competitor, and nobody would try to use it for anything else. Rather than that, Streams deserves a reputation as "nomadic WordPress" at the very least.

There's a lot that can be done to help these projects gain popularity. Some of it is already being done, especially for Hubzilla. And Streams can be given some time to take off, new as it is. Sitting around and waiting for people to come only gains us those who came from Twitter to Mastodon and then happened upon Friendica or Hubzilla through posts with over 500 characters.

@rf @L29Ah @Vacya_Porolon @wiecek можешь поднять свой инстанс:
Не можешь
- #Mastodon не запускается из-под своего официального #Docker
- #Friendika пиздец кал говна по всем параметрам
- #Pleroma — не щупал чё как по запуску