#guppe — Public Fediverse posts

@maegul @Jeff Sikes @Kainoa @Chris Trottier This would have to happen on the server side. And this, in turn, would work the best if it happened directly on the instance servers, and if it was part of the #Fediverse projects themselves.

We've seen what happens when you rely on a third party. It tends to lean towards something centralised, either because someone deliberately only designs a centralised service for it, e.g. #Mastodon full-text search, or because nobody but the devs can be bothered to run an instance, e.g. #Guppe.

Also, decentralised third-party services will have to be connected to Fediverse instances by the admins manually because the admins will have to decide which instance to connect. Many admins won't take that step at all because they've stopped reading the manual the very moment their instance started working reasonably well, and so they don't even know that they have to connect to such a service.

That said, the Fediverse already speaks one common formatting language, and that's #RichText. #CalcKey translates the #Markdown in out-going messages to Rich Text. #Hubzilla translates the #BBcode in out-going messages to Rich Text. #Streams translates Markdown, BBcode and #HTML to Rich Text. And so forth.

Also, translation between message formats will remain half-useless as long as certain projects show a severe lack of capabilities of displaying messages, and this won't change anytime soon, if ever.

Like it or not, #Mastodon fans, but Mastodon is the worst offender. It can't have more than four images in one post, and it can't embed images within the text. All stuff that has been possible on projects older than Mastodon even before there was Mastodon.

On #Hubzilla (and not only there, but just to take one example), I can design any regular message like a blog post:

Text block 1
Image 1
Text block 2
Image 2
Text block 3
Image 3
Text block 4
Image 4
Text block 5
Image 5
Text block 6
Image 6
Text block 7
Image 7
Text block 8
Image 8
Text block 9

This is perfectly normal. And this is perfectly legit. #Friendica, Hubzilla and #Streams were deliberately designed to make this possible. And while Hubzilla has an optional extra functionality for long-form articles, Friendica and (streams) only have this one way of long-form posting. So, again, this is normal and legit and intentional.

On Mastodon, however, the very same post looks like this:

Text block 1

Text block 2

Text block 3

Text block 4

Text block 5

Text block 6

Text block 7

Text block 8

Text block 9
Image 8 | Image 7
Image 6 | Image 5

The images are ripped out of their context, reversed in their order, and only four even make it into what Mastodon displays.

The only thing a "translator" could possibly do here is put the images in the correct order. Still, only four would make it onto Mastodon timelines due to Mastodon's limitations, only that it'll be the first four instead of the last four. And also due to Mastodon's limitations, they will still end up after the end of the post instead of embedded between text blocks where they belong.

In the opposite direction, from Mastodon to Hubzilla, a "translator" could be a bit more useful. Currently, when a Mastodon toot with multiple images appears on Hubzilla, the images are put ahead of the text and in reverse order. What the "translator" could do (unless Hubzilla introduces that first) is embed the images at the end of the post in "reverse reverse" order. I'd suggest to also resize them (non-destructively; Hubzilla does that by default with its own images) so that four of them can be shown in a 2x2 arrangement just like on Mastodon, but on Hubzilla, that would cost them the alt-text.

@maegul @Jeff Sikes @Kainoa @Chris Trottier This would have to happen on the server side. And this, in turn, would work the best if it happened directly on the instance servers, and if it was part of the #Fediverse projects themselves.

We've seen what happens when you rely on a third party. It tends to lean towards something centralised, either because someone deliberately only designs a centralised service for it, e.g. #Mastodon full-text search, or because nobody but the devs can be bothered to run an instance, e.g. #Guppe.

Also, decentralised third-party services will have to be connected to Fediverse instances by the admins manually because the admins will have to decide which instance to connect. Many admins won't take that step at all because they've stopped reading the manual the very moment their instance started working reasonably well, and so they don't even know that they have to connect to such a service.

That said, the Fediverse already speaks one common formatting language, and that's #RichText. #CalcKey translates the #Markdown in out-going messages to Rich Text. #Hubzilla translates the #BBcode in out-going messages to Rich Text. #Streams translates Markdown, BBcode and #HTML to Rich Text. And so forth.

Also, translation between message formats will remain half-useless as long as certain projects show a severe lack of capabilities of displaying messages, and this won't change anytime soon, if ever.

Like it or not, #Mastodon fans, but Mastodon is the worst offender. It can't have more than four images in one post, and it can't embed images within the text. All stuff that has been possible on projects older than Mastodon even before there was Mastodon.

On #Hubzilla (and not only there, but just to take one example), I can design any regular message like a blog post:

Text block 1
Image 1
Text block 2
Image 2
Text block 3
Image 3
Text block 4
Image 4
Text block 5
Image 5
Text block 6
Image 6
Text block 7
Image 7
Text block 8
Image 8
Text block 9

This is perfectly normal. And this is perfectly legit. #Friendica, Hubzilla and #Streams were deliberately designed to make this possible. And while Hubzilla has an optional extra functionality for long-form articles, Friendica and (streams) only have this one way of long-form posting. So, again, this is normal and legit and intentional.

On Mastodon, however, the very same post looks like this:

Text block 1

Text block 2

Text block 3

Text block 4

Text block 5

Text block 6

Text block 7

Text block 8

Text block 9
Image 8 | Image 7
Image 6 | Image 5

The images are ripped out of their context, reversed in their order, and only four even make it into what Mastodon displays.

The only thing a "translator" could possibly do here is put the images in the correct order. Still, only four would make it onto Mastodon timelines due to Mastodon's limitations, only that it'll be the first four instead of the last four. And also due to Mastodon's limitations, they will still end up after the end of the post instead of embedded between text blocks where they belong.

In the opposite direction, from Mastodon to Hubzilla, a "translator" could be a bit more useful. Currently, when a Mastodon toot with multiple images appears on Hubzilla, the images are put ahead of the text and in reverse order. What the "translator" could do (unless Hubzilla introduces that first) is embed the images at the end of the post in "reverse reverse" order. I'd suggest to also resize them (non-destructively; Hubzilla does that by default with its own images) so that four of them can be shown in a 2x2 arrangement just like on Mastodon, but on Hubzilla, that would cost them the alt-text.

@Ada @defcon42/Mirko @[email protected] To me, it sounds more like some #Mastodon users, especially those who came in through the #TwitterMigration, actually can't stand there being something else in the #Fediverse than their beloved Mastodon. When they caught their first glimpse of the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, they reacted much like the people of Krikkit when they caught their first glimpse of the universe beyond Krikkit: "It has to go!"

They make themselves and each other believe that Mastodon is superior to any other Fediverse project in just about any regard imaginable while apparently completely refusing to learn about those other projects. They're supported in their belief by mass media only ever writing about Mastodon and the number of Mastodon users.

However, mass media only write about Mastodon because they simply don't know a thing about the rest of the Fediverse, and they didn't know a thing about Mastodon until the #TwitterTakeover had actually happened, and the second wave of former #birbsite users had come flooding into Mastodon in such numbers that it was impossible to ignore even for those who act as if #FLOSS doesn't exist.

As for the numbers of Mastodon users, they're so high because I guess more than 90% of all Mastodon users still don't know that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, because they have never heard of anything else in the Fediverse. Mastodon was pretty much the only Fediverse project advertised on #BirbSocial when this was still possible.

There are various reasons why Mastodon users don't spread across the Fediverse in masses. None of it is because Mastodon is superior to everything else because, truth be told, it isn't. I'll come to this later. One reason is, again, that the vast majority of them still don't know anything else. Another one is because it was hard enough to get used to Mastodon after years of using #Twitter, and they don't want to get used to yet another platform. And another one is that it's hard to move from Mastodon to something else and take your account or at least your connections with you.

Another reason may be because people don't need anything beyond microblogging, and that's what Mastodon does. Now, sorry for all those of you who fight tooth and claw to defend Mastodon against the competition, but #Akkoma does microblogging, too. With extra features beyond Mastodon, some of which Mastodon users have been pestering Eugen Rochko to include in Mastodon for ages (e.g. "quote retweet"). All while being more lightweight and requiring fewer server resources than Mastodon. Oh, and it federates with Mastodon.

Other Fediverse projects aren't even competition for Mastodon because they specialise in something else. @Pixelfed specialises in posting pictures, much like #Instagram. @PeerTube specialises in video upload and streaming, not too dissimilarly from #YouTube. #Plume and #WriteFreely specialise in distraction-free traditional blogging, much like #Medium. #Lemmy specialises in groups and posting and discussing news, much like #Reddit or #HackerNews. You can't claim that Mastodon is better at each of these things than these platforms.

And then there are the jacks-of-all-trades which are usually filed under either "macroblogging" or "like #Facebook ". They weren't launched to have something that goes beyond Mastodon because their history reaches far back before Mastodon. Mastodon was launched in 2016 (and not 2022 like many believe). #Friendica was launched in early 2010, even before the crowdfunding campaign for the development of #Diaspora started. And in that early stage, Friendica, then still named #Mistpark, was vastly more powerful than Diaspora* ever got and also vastly more powerful than Mastodon 13 years later.

#Hubzilla, created by the same man as Friendica, is the most extreme one of them all. For starters, it eliminates the need for multiple accounts by having multiple independent channels with separate identities on the same account. Each channel can have multiple profiles like on Friendica so you can present your channel differently to individual contacts or groups of them and differently again to the general public.

It can do micro- and macroblogging with 50,000 or more characters and just about everything that can be done with #BBcode (italics, bold type, underline, lists with bullet points or numbers, quotes, code blocks), and you can embed as many pictures as you want in your posts where you want them instead of them automatically being attached to the end of the post.

Group handling in Hubzilla is much easier than list handling in Mastodon. You never have to type the name of a contact to find them. You can edit contacts and add them to groups or remove them, and you can edit groups and add or remove contacts, all with a few mouse clicks. And while Mastodon shows a maximum of four lists on the main page, Hubzilla will give you easy access to all your groups.

On top of that, you can have

• very fine-grained access rights control with pre-definable contact roles
  
• forums (just like Friendica, Hubzilla has #Guppe built in)
  
• more elegant macroblogging with articles which, in addition to BBcode, support #Markdown
  
• simple webpages (or not so simple if you're the admin of a hub, and you can expand it further)
  
• wikis (I'm not even kidding)
  
• a public calendar
  
• a virtually unlimited number of private calendars with #CalDAV connection
  
• a virtually unlimited number of address books with #CardDAV connection
  
• a file server with #WebDAV connection with its own access rights management which also ties in with the Photos and optional Gallery app (Mastodon drops your pictures somewhere, Hubzilla lets you upload them to your personal cloud space where you can access them whenever you want)

All with one run-of-the-mill Hubzilla account. And once per channel, separately.

And as if that wasn't enough, Hubzilla introduced the #Zot protocol and with it a concept named #NomadicIdentity.

Mastodon and Friendica let you have multiple accounts, even on separate instances. They also support migration from one account to another, and unlike Mastodon, Friendica lets you take all your content with you. Hubzilla (and #Streams, the successor of its slimmed-down successor, still created by the same guy) goes even further: Not only can you easily move from one hub to another, you can have channels on multiple hubs and automatically keep them fully in sync! If one hub goes down, it doesn't matter because you've got everything on all your other accounts.

Last but not least, both Friendica and Hubzilla federate with almost everything that moves, even far beyond the #ActivityPub Fediverse. This could be Diaspora*, this could be #GNUsocial, this could be #Wordpress blogs with or without the ActivityPub add-on, this could be RSS feeds (and they both generate feeds themselves, so this is bidirectional, too), this could even be Twitter until the API is shuttered. Friendica even used to federate with Facebook until Facebook put rocks in the way; this is the only connector that Hubzilla didn't take over.

The obvious downside is that for someone who just came in from the #birdcage, all this is utter overkill. In fact, people who are used to Mastodon may find Friendica borderline unusuable due to its many features. And Hubzilla is so infamous for its own clumsy UI capitulating before its sheer power that even Friendica users find it hard to use, fresh converts from Twitter to Mastodon even more so.

Some design decisions may be hard to understand for outsiders. Converts from other Fediverse projects to Hubzilla regularly fail at something as seemingly similar as connecting to users on other ActivityPub-based projects until you tell them that ActivityPub is an optional app on Hubzilla that has to be activated first because Hubzilla concentrates on Zot with its Nomadic Identity.

Also, just because these projects offer so much power, that doesn't mean that everyone needs it. If you do, it can be convenient to have it all under one login. But if all you're looking for is a bit of microblogging and online socialising, you don't need to drag a CMS and a full-blown cloud server with all bells and whistles along with you that just clutter up the UI. In that case, projects like Mastodon and Akkoma win because they're more approachable.

And while Friendica, Hubzilla & Co. can do threaded discussions and even have something like forums, Lemmy can do this more elegantly because it specialises in it. While you can use Hubzilla's private calendar feature for event planning, it's easier to do the same with #Mobilizon which, again, specialises in it. Or you can host podcasts on Friendica, Hubzilla & Co, but you can host them better on #Funkwhale and even better on #Castopod.

Wanting the Fediverse to be only Mastodon hinders development, namely the development of new projects within the Fediverse that may be able to do all-new things that we haven't seen in the Fediverse yet. Things that, sorry to say again, you'll never be able to do with Mastodon.

P.S.: For extra kicks, don't just read this on Mastodon. Open my original post; there you can see what Hubzilla is capable of, and what Mastodon strips away.

@Ada @defcon42/Mirko @[email protected] To me, it sounds more like some #Mastodon users, especially those who came in through the #TwitterMigration, actually can't stand there being something else in the #Fediverse than their beloved Mastodon. When they caught their first glimpse of the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, they reacted much like the people of Krikkit when they caught their first glimpse of the universe beyond Krikkit: "It has to go!"

They make themselves and each other believe that Mastodon is superior to any other Fediverse project in just about any regard imaginable while apparently completely refusing to learn about those other projects. They're supported in their belief by mass media only ever writing about Mastodon and the number of Mastodon users.

However, mass media only write about Mastodon because they simply don't know a thing about the rest of the Fediverse, and they didn't know a thing about Mastodon until the #TwitterTakeover had actually happened, and the second wave of former #birbsite users had come flooding into Mastodon in such numbers that it was impossible to ignore even for those who act as if #FLOSS doesn't exist.

As for the numbers of Mastodon users, they're so high because I guess more than 90% of all Mastodon users still don't know that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, because they have never heard of anything else in the Fediverse. Mastodon was pretty much the only Fediverse project advertised on #BirbSocial when this was still possible.

There are various reasons why Mastodon users don't spread across the Fediverse in masses. None of it is because Mastodon is superior to everything else because, truth be told, it isn't. I'll come to this later. One reason is, again, that the vast majority of them still don't know anything else. Another one is because it was hard enough to get used to Mastodon after years of using #Twitter, and they don't want to get used to yet another platform. And another one is that it's hard to move from Mastodon to something else and take your account or at least your connections with you.

Another reason may be because people don't need anything beyond microblogging, and that's what Mastodon does. Now, sorry for all those of you who fight tooth and claw to defend Mastodon against the competition, but #Akkoma does microblogging, too. With extra features beyond Mastodon, some of which Mastodon users have been pestering Eugen Rochko to include in Mastodon for ages (e.g. "quote retweet"). All while being more lightweight and requiring fewer server resources than Mastodon. Oh, and it federates with Mastodon.

Other Fediverse projects aren't even competition for Mastodon because they specialise in something else. @Pixelfed specialises in posting pictures, much like #Instagram. @PeerTube specialises in video upload and streaming, not too dissimilarly from #YouTube. #Plume and #WriteFreely specialise in distraction-free traditional blogging, much like #Medium. #Lemmy specialises in groups and posting and discussing news, much like #Reddit or #HackerNews. You can't claim that Mastodon is better at each of these things than these platforms.

And then there are the jacks-of-all-trades which are usually filed under either "macroblogging" or "like #Facebook ". They weren't launched to have something that goes beyond Mastodon because their history reaches far back before Mastodon. Mastodon was launched in 2016 (and not 2022 like many believe). #Friendica was launched in early 2010, even before the crowdfunding campaign for the development of #Diaspora started. And in that early stage, Friendica, then still named #Mistpark, was vastly more powerful than Diaspora* ever got and also vastly more powerful than Mastodon 13 years later.

#Hubzilla, created by the same man as Friendica, is the most extreme one of them all. For starters, it eliminates the need for multiple accounts by having multiple independent channels with separate identities on the same account. Each channel can have multiple profiles like on Friendica so you can present your channel differently to individual contacts or groups of them and differently again to the general public.

It can do micro- and macroblogging with 50,000 or more characters and just about everything that can be done with #BBcode (italics, bold type, underline, lists with bullet points or numbers, quotes, code blocks), and you can embed as many pictures as you want in your posts where you want them instead of them automatically being attached to the end of the post.

Group handling in Hubzilla is much easier than list handling in Mastodon. You never have to type the name of a contact to find them. You can edit contacts and add them to groups or remove them, and you can edit groups and add or remove contacts, all with a few mouse clicks. And while Mastodon shows a maximum of four lists on the main page, Hubzilla will give you easy access to all your groups.

On top of that, you can have

• very fine-grained access rights control with pre-definable contact roles
  
• forums (just like Friendica, Hubzilla has #Guppe built in)
  
• more elegant macroblogging with articles which, in addition to BBcode, support #Markdown
  
• simple webpages (or not so simple if you're the admin of a hub, and you can expand it further)
  
• wikis (I'm not even kidding)
  
• a public calendar
  
• a virtually unlimited number of private calendars with #CalDAV connection
  
• a virtually unlimited number of address books with #CardDAV connection
  
• a file server with #WebDAV connection with its own access rights management which also ties in with the Photos and optional Gallery app (Mastodon drops your pictures somewhere, Hubzilla lets you upload them to your personal cloud space where you can access them whenever you want)

All with one run-of-the-mill Hubzilla account. And once per channel, separately.

And as if that wasn't enough, Hubzilla introduced the #Zot protocol and with it a concept named #NomadicIdentity.

Mastodon and Friendica let you have multiple accounts, even on separate instances. They also support migration from one account to another, and unlike Mastodon, Friendica lets you take all your content with you. Hubzilla (and #Streams, the successor of its slimmed-down successor, still created by the same guy) goes even further: Not only can you easily move from one hub to another, you can have channels on multiple hubs and automatically keep them fully in sync! If one hub goes down, it doesn't matter because you've got everything on all your other accounts.

Last but not least, both Friendica and Hubzilla federate with almost everything that moves, even far beyond the #ActivityPub Fediverse. This could be Diaspora*, this could be #GNUsocial, this could be #Wordpress blogs with or without the ActivityPub add-on, this could be RSS feeds (and they both generate feeds themselves, so this is bidirectional, too), this could even be Twitter until the API is shuttered. Friendica even used to federate with Facebook until Facebook put rocks in the way; this is the only connector that Hubzilla didn't take over.

The obvious downside is that for someone who just came in from the #birdcage, all this is utter overkill. In fact, people who are used to Mastodon may find Friendica borderline unusuable due to its many features. And Hubzilla is so infamous for its own clumsy UI capitulating before its sheer power that even Friendica users find it hard to use, fresh converts from Twitter to Mastodon even more so.

Some design decisions may be hard to understand for outsiders. Converts from other Fediverse projects to Hubzilla regularly fail at something as seemingly similar as connecting to users on other ActivityPub-based projects until you tell them that ActivityPub is an optional app on Hubzilla that has to be activated first because Hubzilla concentrates on Zot with its Nomadic Identity.

Also, just because these projects offer so much power, that doesn't mean that everyone needs it. If you do, it can be convenient to have it all under one login. But if all you're looking for is a bit of microblogging and online socialising, you don't need to drag a CMS and a full-blown cloud server with all bells and whistles along with you that just clutter up the UI. In that case, projects like Mastodon and Akkoma win because they're more approachable.

And while Friendica, Hubzilla & Co. can do threaded discussions and even have something like forums, Lemmy can do this more elegantly because it specialises in it. While you can use Hubzilla's private calendar feature for event planning, it's easier to do the same with #Mobilizon which, again, specialises in it. Or you can host podcasts on Friendica, Hubzilla & Co, but you can host them better on #Funkwhale and even better on #Castopod.

Wanting the Fediverse to be only Mastodon hinders development, namely the development of new projects within the Fediverse that may be able to do all-new things that we haven't seen in the Fediverse yet. Things that, sorry to say again, you'll never be able to do with Mastodon.

P.S.: For extra kicks, don't just read this on Mastodon. Open my original post; there you can see what Hubzilla is capable of, and what Mastodon strips away.