#identica — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #identica, aggregated by home.social.
-
Da sind ja noch einige „Leichen“ gelistet, und ja, ich bin seit 2008, oft mit eigenen Instanzen, im #Fediverse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Zuerst auf #Identica, #Pumpio, #StatusNet, #GnuSocial und #Misskey bis vor kurzem noch mit eigenen #Mastodon und #Diaspora Instanzen.
Seit dem 1. April (kein Scherz) gibt es allerdings nur noch zwei Konten. Eines auf Mastodon:
und eines auf Diaspora:
https://diaspora-fr.org/people/5bab36d046bd013d2c390025900e4586
Alles andere kann tatsächlich weg. 😀
-
Da sind ja noch einige „Leichen“ gelistet, und ja, ich bin seit 2008, oft mit eigenen Instanzen, im #Fediverse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Zuerst auf #Identica, #Pumpio, #StatusNet, #GnuSocial und #Misskey bis vor kurzem noch mit eigenen #Mastodon und #Diaspora Instanzen.
Seit dem 1. April (kein Scherz) gibt es allerdings nur noch zwei Konten. Eines auf Mastodon:
und eines auf Diaspora:
https://diaspora-fr.org/people/5bab36d046bd013d2c390025900e4586
Alles andere kann tatsächlich weg. 😀
-
Da sind ja noch einige „Leichen“ gelistet, und ja, ich bin seit 2008, oft mit eigenen Instanzen, im #Fediverse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Zuerst auf #Identica, #Pumpio, #StatusNet, #GnuSocial und #Misskey bis vor kurzem noch mit eigenen #Mastodon und #Diaspora Instanzen.
Seit dem 1. April (kein Scherz) gibt es allerdings nur noch zwei Konten. Eines auf Mastodon:
und eines auf Diaspora:
https://diaspora-fr.org/people/5bab36d046bd013d2c390025900e4586
Alles andere kann tatsächlich weg. 😀
-
Da sind ja noch einige „Leichen“ gelistet, und ja, ich bin seit 2008, oft mit eigenen Instanzen, im #Fediverse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Zuerst auf #Identica, #Pumpio, #StatusNet, #GnuSocial und #Misskey bis vor kurzem noch mit eigenen #Mastodon und #Diaspora Instanzen.
Seit dem 1. April (kein Scherz) gibt es allerdings nur noch zwei Konten. Eines auf Mastodon:
und eines auf Diaspora:
https://diaspora-fr.org/people/5bab36d046bd013d2c390025900e4586
Alles andere kann tatsächlich weg. 😀
-
Da sind ja noch einige „Leichen“ gelistet, und ja, ich bin seit 2008, oft mit eigenen Instanzen, im #Fediverse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Zuerst auf #Identica, #Pumpio, #StatusNet, #GnuSocial und #Misskey bis vor kurzem noch mit eigenen #Mastodon und #Diaspora Instanzen.
Seit dem 1. April (kein Scherz) gibt es allerdings nur noch zwei Konten. Eines auf Mastodon:
und eines auf Diaspora:
https://diaspora-fr.org/people/5bab36d046bd013d2c390025900e4586
Alles andere kann tatsächlich weg. 😀
-
CW: Why Sharkey fails to render hashtags from Friendica, Hubzilla & Co. properly, and how long this bug has been known already; CW: long (over 6,600 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta
So there's that nasty bug on Sharkey that mangles hashtags in messages from Hubzilla and probably also Friendica, (streams) and Forte. They always look like this:
#[Hashtag](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Hashtag)
Basically, Sharkey receives fully standard Rich Text from Hubzilla. It manages to convert this Rich Text into its own Misskey-Flavored Markdown. But then its Markdown parser does not parse it and leaves the Markdown code visible to everyone. It simply doesn't expect there to be a hashtag character in front of an embedded link because, seriously, who'd ever do that and why?!
Friendica would. In fact, Friendica does. It puts the hashtag character in front of the tag, as in outside the tag, as opposed to at the beginning of the tag. It has been doing that since its beginnings in 2010 because it was designed from the get-go to also federate with StatusNet from 2008. And StatusNet does hashtags the same way on its few remaining servers. In fact, so did Identi.ca from 2008, from which StatusNet emerged.
Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do it, too, because they have inherited it from Friendica.
On StatusNet, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, a hashtag in a message looks like this:
#Hashtag
Notice how the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the post text. And not the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is not part of the link. (To Mastodon users who don't know this: If something in a "toot" has a different colour from the rest of the "toot", it's a link. Even if it doesn't show a URL in plain sight.)
On 𝕏, Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, the various Forkeys and a whole lot of other Fediverse software, a hashtag in a message looks like this:
#Hashtag
Notice how now the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is part of the link.
But why did Identi.ca do hashtags differently from Twitter? Because Identi.ca did hashtags before Twitter. AFAIK, when Identi.ca was launched, it had support for hashtags right away. About one year before Twitter.
The hashtag itself had already been invented by the Twitter community. Chris Messina had already codified it in 2007. But it wasn't until 2009 that Twitter actually introduced a technological implementation to support it.
Again, Identi.ca must have had hashtags as early as 2008, and there was no way that Identi.ca creator Evan Prodromou could possibly predict what Twitter would do the following year. So he did what he thought was right and what actually made sense to him.
But nowadays, everybody "knows" that Twitter had the world's very first hashtag implementation ever because nobody, even in the Fediverse, has ever heard of Identi.ca. I mean, the majority of Fediverse users "know" that the Fediverse started with Mastodon.
You know, just like Officer James Barrett "knew" that there is no intelligent life outside Earth only a few minutes before he became Agent J of the Men In Black.
This is also why just about all Fediverse software that does hashtags the Twitter way expects everything to do hashtags the Twitter way. It does not expect hashtags to be done differently. And when a message comes in from Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte with hashtags in it, it fails at varying degrees of ungracefully.
Hashtags with the hashtag character outside the link are older than hashtags with the hashtag character inside that they're not only completely unexpected, that they cause software to malfunction, but the same software often can't even handle that malfunction. It's a miracle that the Friendica/Hubzilla family doesn't cause Fediverse servers to crash or even server databases to go corrupt by simply sending hashtags.
Mastodon used to be an exception of sorts, but only because, before version 4.0 from October, 2022, its HTML "sanitiser" actually ripped out any and all rich text code from incoming messages and left nothing but plain text behind. And then it didn't recognise hashtags in messages from outside Mastodon as hashtags at all.
When Mastodon 4.0 came and supported some rich text, including embedded links, it went haywire, of course. But then someone from Friendica and Hubzilla went in and complained about this malfunction and explained what happened, why it happened and why it was not Friendica and Hubzilla that did things wrong. Besides, if something utterly defaces "toots", then Mastodon developers do step in to stop it. After all, Mastodon has a few more of them at hand, paid, full-time professionals even. You have to give it that.
Which takes us back to Sharkey. Sharkey is developed by a small handful of individuals in their spare time. Granted, it's a soft fork of Misskey, so a lot of development work is done by the Misskey devs and taken over by the Sharkey devs, but they still have to weave the code changes coming from Misskey in and make them work with what's different on Sharkey.
So it turned out that (Link content warning: eye contact) this bug has already been filed to the Sharkey devs in October, 2024. All that has happened since then until today was that Hazelnoot added two labels. But the bug report came with no explanations. In fact, it misattributed one of my Hubzilla posts as a Friendica post.
And in fact, it turned out that this is actually (Link content warning: Microsoft GitHub link, eye contact) a Misskey bug which has been filed in January, 2024, two years ago. The bug report is a bit more elaborate, but the reporter still knew precious little about what's going on. So I wrote a comment in which I explained the bug from a Friendica/Hubzilla POV as well as what's going on on the technical side, and why the error has to be on Misskey's side.
I hope this will finally help get the bug fixed. Unfortunately, this fix would come too late for Iceshrimp. Iceshrimp-JS is a true Forkey, but in maintenance mode, so I guess only security patches and critical bugfixes will be merged from Misskey, if anything. And Iceshrimp.NET is a complete rewrite of a pre-this-fix Misskey fork, so the Iceshrimp devs probably don't know about this issue either. If it fails ungracefully upon receiving hashtags with the hashtag character outside, it will require its own bug report.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Twitter #𝕏 #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #Iceshrimp.NET #Identi.ca #Laconi.ca #StatusNet #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte -
CW: Why Sharkey fails to render hashtags from Friendica, Hubzilla & Co. properly, and how long this bug has been known already; CW: long (over 6,600 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta
So there's that nasty bug on Sharkey that mangles hashtags in messages from Hubzilla and probably also Friendica, (streams) and Forte. They always look like this:
#[Hashtag](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Hashtag)
Basically, Sharkey receives fully standard Rich Text from Hubzilla. It manages to convert this Rich Text into its own Misskey-Flavored Markdown. But then its Markdown parser does not parse it and leaves the Markdown code visible to everyone. It simply doesn't expect there to be a hashtag character in front of an embedded link because, seriously, who'd ever do that and why?!
Friendica would. In fact, Friendica does. It puts the hashtag character in front of the tag, as in outside the tag, as opposed to at the beginning of the tag. It has been doing that since its beginnings in 2010 because it was designed from the get-go to also federate with StatusNet from 2008. And StatusNet does hashtags the same way on its few remaining servers. In fact, so did Identi.ca from 2008, from which StatusNet emerged.
Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do it, too, because they have inherited it from Friendica.
On StatusNet, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, a hashtag in a message looks like this:
#Hashtag
Notice how the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the post text. And not the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is not part of the link. (To Mastodon users who don't know this: If something in a "toot" has a different colour from the rest of the "toot", it's a link. Even if it doesn't show a URL in plain sight.)
On 𝕏, Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, the various Forkeys and a whole lot of other Fediverse software, a hashtag in a message looks like this:
#Hashtag
Notice how now the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is part of the link.
But why did Identi.ca do hashtags differently from Twitter? Because Identi.ca did hashtags before Twitter. AFAIK, when Identi.ca was launched, it had support for hashtags right away. About one year before Twitter.
The hashtag itself had already been invented by the Twitter community. Chris Messina had already codified it in 2007. But it wasn't until 2009 that Twitter actually introduced a technological implementation to support it.
Again, Identi.ca must have had hashtags as early as 2008, and there was no way that Identi.ca creator Evan Prodromou could possibly predict what Twitter would do the following year. So he did what he thought was right and what actually made sense to him.
But nowadays, everybody "knows" that Twitter had the world's very first hashtag implementation ever because nobody, even in the Fediverse, has ever heard of Identi.ca. I mean, the majority of Fediverse users "know" that the Fediverse started with Mastodon.
You know, just like Officer James Barrett "knew" that there is no intelligent life outside Earth only a few minutes before he became Agent J of the Men In Black.
This is also why just about all Fediverse software that does hashtags the Twitter way expects everything to do hashtags the Twitter way. It does not expect hashtags to be done differently. And when a message comes in from Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte with hashtags in it, it fails at varying degrees of ungracefully.
Hashtags with the hashtag character outside the link are older than hashtags with the hashtag character inside that they're not only completely unexpected, that they cause software to malfunction, but the same software often can't even handle that malfunction. It's a miracle that the Friendica/Hubzilla family doesn't cause Fediverse servers to crash or even server databases to go corrupt by simply sending hashtags.
Mastodon used to be an exception of sorts, but only because, before version 4.0 from October, 2022, its HTML "sanitiser" actually ripped out any and all rich text code from incoming messages and left nothing but plain text behind. And then it didn't recognise hashtags in messages from outside Mastodon as hashtags at all.
When Mastodon 4.0 came and supported some rich text, including embedded links, it went haywire, of course. But then someone from Friendica and Hubzilla went in and complained about this malfunction and explained what happened, why it happened and why it was not Friendica and Hubzilla that did things wrong. Besides, if something utterly defaces "toots", then Mastodon developers do step in to stop it. After all, Mastodon has a few more of them at hand, paid, full-time professionals even. You have to give it that.
Which takes us back to Sharkey. Sharkey is developed by a small handful of individuals in their spare time. Granted, it's a soft fork of Misskey, so a lot of development work is done by the Misskey devs and taken over by the Sharkey devs, but they still have to weave the code changes coming from Misskey in and make them work with what's different on Sharkey.
So it turned out that (Link content warning: eye contact) this bug has already been filed to the Sharkey devs in October, 2024. All that has happened since then until today was that Hazelnoot added two labels. But the bug report came with no explanations. In fact, it misattributed one of my Hubzilla posts as a Friendica post.
And in fact, it turned out that this is actually (Link content warning: Microsoft GitHub link, eye contact) a Misskey bug which has been filed in January, 2024, two years ago. The bug report is a bit more elaborate, but the reporter still knew precious little about what's going on. So I wrote a comment in which I explained the bug from a Friendica/Hubzilla POV as well as what's going on on the technical side, and why the error has to be on Misskey's side.
I hope this will finally help get the bug fixed. Unfortunately, this fix would come too late for Iceshrimp. Iceshrimp-JS is a true Forkey, but in maintenance mode, so I guess only security patches and critical bugfixes will be merged from Misskey, if anything. And Iceshrimp.NET is a complete rewrite of a pre-this-fix Misskey fork, so the Iceshrimp devs probably don't know about this issue either. If it fails ungracefully upon receiving hashtags with the hashtag character outside, it will require its own bug report.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Twitter #𝕏 #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #Iceshrimp.NET #Identi.ca #Laconi.ca #StatusNet #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte -
CW: Why Sharkey fails to render hashtags from Friendica, Hubzilla & Co. properly, and how long this bug has been known already; CW: long (over 6,600 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta
So there's that nasty bug on Sharkey that mangles hashtags in messages from Hubzilla and probably also Friendica, (streams) and Forte. They always look like this:
#[Hashtag](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Hashtag)
Basically, Sharkey receives fully standard Rich Text from Hubzilla. It manages to convert this Rich Text into its own Misskey-Flavored Markdown. But then its Markdown parser does not parse it and leaves the Markdown code visible to everyone. It simply doesn't expect there to be a hashtag character in front of an embedded link because, seriously, who'd ever do that and why?!
Friendica would. In fact, Friendica does. It puts the hashtag character in front of the tag, as in outside the tag, as opposed to at the beginning of the tag. It has been doing that since its beginnings in 2010 because it was designed from the get-go to also federate with StatusNet from 2008. And StatusNet does hashtags the same way on its few remaining servers. In fact, so did Identi.ca from 2008, from which StatusNet emerged.
Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do it, too, because they have inherited it from Friendica.
On StatusNet, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, a hashtag in a message looks like this:
#Hashtag
Notice how the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the post text. And not the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is not part of the link. (To Mastodon users who don't know this: If something in a "toot" has a different colour from the rest of the "toot", it's a link. Even if it doesn't show a URL in plain sight.)
On 𝕏, Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, the various Forkeys and a whole lot of other Fediverse software, a hashtag in a message looks like this:
#Hashtag
Notice how now the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is part of the link.
But why did Identi.ca do hashtags differently from Twitter? Because Identi.ca did hashtags before Twitter. AFAIK, when Identi.ca was launched, it had support for hashtags right away. About one year before Twitter.
The hashtag itself had already been invented by the Twitter community. Chris Messina had already codified it in 2007. But it wasn't until 2009 that Twitter actually introduced a technological implementation to support it.
Again, Identi.ca must have had hashtags as early as 2008, and there was no way that Identi.ca creator Evan Prodromou could possibly predict what Twitter would do the following year. So he did what he thought was right and what actually made sense to him.
But nowadays, everybody "knows" that Twitter had the world's very first hashtag implementation ever because nobody, even in the Fediverse, has ever heard of Identi.ca. I mean, the majority of Fediverse users "know" that the Fediverse started with Mastodon.
You know, just like Officer James Barrett "knew" that there is no intelligent life outside Earth only a few minutes before he became Agent J of the Men In Black.
This is also why just about all Fediverse software that does hashtags the Twitter way expects everything to do hashtags the Twitter way. It does not expect hashtags to be done differently. And when a message comes in from Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte with hashtags in it, it fails at varying degrees of ungracefully.
Hashtags with the hashtag character outside the link are older than hashtags with the hashtag character inside that they're not only completely unexpected, that they cause software to malfunction, but the same software often can't even handle that malfunction. It's a miracle that the Friendica/Hubzilla family doesn't cause Fediverse servers to crash or even server databases to go corrupt by simply sending hashtags.
Mastodon used to be an exception of sorts, but only because, before version 4.0 from October, 2022, its HTML "sanitiser" actually ripped out any and all rich text code from incoming messages and left nothing but plain text behind. And then it didn't recognise hashtags in messages from outside Mastodon as hashtags at all.
When Mastodon 4.0 came and supported some rich text, including embedded links, it went haywire, of course. But then someone from Friendica and Hubzilla went in and complained about this malfunction and explained what happened, why it happened and why it was not Friendica and Hubzilla that did things wrong. Besides, if something utterly defaces "toots", then Mastodon developers do step in to stop it. After all, Mastodon has a few more of them at hand, paid, full-time professionals even. You have to give it that.
Which takes us back to Sharkey. Sharkey is developed by a small handful of individuals in their spare time. Granted, it's a soft fork of Misskey, so a lot of development work is done by the Misskey devs and taken over by the Sharkey devs, but they still have to weave the code changes coming from Misskey in and make them work with what's different on Sharkey.
So it turned out that (Link content warning: eye contact) this bug has already been filed to the Sharkey devs in October, 2024. All that has happened since then until today was that Hazelnoot added two labels. But the bug report came with no explanations. In fact, it misattributed one of my Hubzilla posts as a Friendica post.
And in fact, it turned out that this is actually (Link content warning: Microsoft GitHub link, eye contact) a Misskey bug which has been filed in January, 2024, two years ago. The bug report is a bit more elaborate, but the reporter still knew precious little about what's going on. So I wrote a comment in which I explained the bug from a Friendica/Hubzilla POV as well as what's going on on the technical side, and why the error has to be on Misskey's side.
I hope this will finally help get the bug fixed. Unfortunately, this fix would come too late for Iceshrimp. Iceshrimp-JS is a true Forkey, but in maintenance mode, so I guess only security patches and critical bugfixes will be merged from Misskey, if anything. And Iceshrimp.NET is a complete rewrite of a pre-this-fix Misskey fork, so the Iceshrimp devs probably don't know about this issue either. If it fails ungracefully upon receiving hashtags with the hashtag character outside, it will require its own bug report.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Twitter #𝕏 #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #Iceshrimp.NET #Identi.ca #Laconi.ca #StatusNet #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte -
CW: Why Sharkey fails to render hashtags from Friendica, Hubzilla & Co. properly, and how long this bug has been known already; CW: long (over 6,600 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta
So there's that nasty bug on Sharkey that mangles hashtags in messages from Hubzilla and probably also Friendica, (streams) and Forte. They always look like this:
#[Hashtag](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Hashtag)
Basically, Sharkey receives fully standard Rich Text from Hubzilla. It manages to convert this Rich Text into its own Misskey-Flavored Markdown. But then its Markdown parser does not parse it and leaves the Markdown code visible to everyone. It simply doesn't expect there to be a hashtag character in front of an embedded link because, seriously, who'd ever do that and why?!
Friendica would. In fact, Friendica does. It puts the hashtag character in front of the tag, as in outside the tag, as opposed to at the beginning of the tag. It has been doing that since its beginnings in 2010 because it was designed from the get-go to also federate with StatusNet from 2008. And StatusNet does hashtags the same way on its few remaining servers. In fact, so did Identi.ca from 2008, from which StatusNet emerged.
Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do it, too, because they have inherited it from Friendica.
On StatusNet, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, a hashtag in a message looks like this:
#Hashtag
Notice how the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the post text. And not the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is not part of the link. (To Mastodon users who don't know this: If something in a "toot" has a different colour from the rest of the "toot", it's a link. Even if it doesn't show a URL in plain sight.)
On 𝕏, Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, the various Forkeys and a whole lot of other Fediverse software, a hashtag in a message looks like this:
#Hashtag
Notice how now the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is part of the link.
But why did Identi.ca do hashtags differently from Twitter? Because Identi.ca did hashtags before Twitter. AFAIK, when Identi.ca was launched, it had support for hashtags right away. About one year before Twitter.
The hashtag itself had already been invented by the Twitter community. Chris Messina had already codified it in 2007. But it wasn't until 2009 that Twitter actually introduced a technological implementation to support it.
Again, Identi.ca must have had hashtags as early as 2008, and there was no way that Identi.ca creator Evan Prodromou could possibly predict what Twitter would do the following year. So he did what he thought was right and what actually made sense to him.
But nowadays, everybody "knows" that Twitter had the world's very first hashtag implementation ever because nobody, even in the Fediverse, has ever heard of Identi.ca. I mean, the majority of Fediverse users "know" that the Fediverse started with Mastodon.
You know, just like Officer James Barrett "knew" that there is no intelligent life outside Earth only a few minutes before he became Agent J of the Men In Black.
This is also why just about all Fediverse software that does hashtags the Twitter way expects everything to do hashtags the Twitter way. It does not expect hashtags to be done differently. And when a message comes in from Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte with hashtags in it, it fails at varying degrees of ungracefully.
Hashtags with the hashtag character outside the link are older than hashtags with the hashtag character inside that they're not only completely unexpected, that they cause software to malfunction, but the same software often can't even handle that malfunction. It's a miracle that the Friendica/Hubzilla family doesn't cause Fediverse servers to crash or even server databases to go corrupt by simply sending hashtags.
Mastodon used to be an exception of sorts, but only because, before version 4.0 from October, 2022, its HTML "sanitiser" actually ripped out any and all rich text code from incoming messages and left nothing but plain text behind. And then it didn't recognise hashtags in messages from outside Mastodon as hashtags at all.
When Mastodon 4.0 came and supported some rich text, including embedded links, it went haywire, of course. But then someone from Friendica and Hubzilla went in and complained about this malfunction and explained what happened, why it happened and why it was not Friendica and Hubzilla that did things wrong. Besides, if something utterly defaces "toots", then Mastodon developers do step in to stop it. After all, Mastodon has a few more of them at hand, paid, full-time professionals even. You have to give it that.
Which takes us back to Sharkey. Sharkey is developed by a small handful of individuals in their spare time. Granted, it's a soft fork of Misskey, so a lot of development work is done by the Misskey devs and taken over by the Sharkey devs, but they still have to weave the code changes coming from Misskey in and make them work with what's different on Sharkey.
So it turned out that (Link content warning: eye contact) this bug has already been filed to the Sharkey devs in October, 2024. All that has happened since then until today was that Hazelnoot added two labels. But the bug report came with no explanations. In fact, it misattributed one of my Hubzilla posts as a Friendica post.
And in fact, it turned out that this is actually (Link content warning: Microsoft GitHub link, eye contact) a Misskey bug which has been filed in January, 2024, two years ago. The bug report is a bit more elaborate, but the reporter still knew precious little about what's going on. So I wrote a comment in which I explained the bug from a Friendica/Hubzilla POV as well as what's going on on the technical side, and why the error has to be on Misskey's side.
I hope this will finally help get the bug fixed. Unfortunately, this fix would come too late for Iceshrimp. Iceshrimp-JS is a true Forkey, but in maintenance mode, so I guess only security patches and critical bugfixes will be merged from Misskey, if anything. And Iceshrimp.NET is a complete rewrite of a pre-this-fix Misskey fork, so the Iceshrimp devs probably don't know about this issue either. If it fails ungracefully upon receiving hashtags with the hashtag character outside, it will require its own bug report.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Twitter #𝕏 #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #Iceshrimp.NET #Identi.ca #Laconi.ca #StatusNet #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte -
CW: Why Sharkey fails to render hashtags from Friendica, Hubzilla & Co. properly, and how long this bug has been known already; CW: long (over 6,600 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta
So there's that nasty bug on Sharkey that mangles hashtags in messages from Hubzilla and probably also Friendica, (streams) and Forte. They always look like this:
#[Hashtag](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Hashtag)
Basically, Sharkey receives fully standard Rich Text from Hubzilla. It manages to convert this Rich Text into its own Misskey-Flavored Markdown. But then its Markdown parser does not parse it and leaves the Markdown code visible to everyone. It simply doesn't expect there to be a hashtag character in front of an embedded link because, seriously, who'd ever do that and why?!
Friendica would. In fact, Friendica does. It puts the hashtag character in front of the tag, as in outside the tag, as opposed to at the beginning of the tag. It has been doing that since its beginnings in 2010 because it was designed from the get-go to also federate with StatusNet from 2008. And StatusNet does hashtags the same way on its few remaining servers. In fact, so did Identi.ca from 2008, from which StatusNet emerged.
Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do it, too, because they have inherited it from Friendica.
On StatusNet, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, a hashtag in a message looks like this:
#Hashtag
Notice how the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the post text. And not the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is not part of the link. (To Mastodon users who don't know this: If something in a "toot" has a different colour from the rest of the "toot", it's a link. Even if it doesn't show a URL in plain sight.)
On 𝕏, Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, the various Forkeys and a whole lot of other Fediverse software, a hashtag in a message looks like this:
#Hashtag
Notice how now the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is part of the link.
But why did Identi.ca do hashtags differently from Twitter? Because Identi.ca did hashtags before Twitter. AFAIK, when Identi.ca was launched, it had support for hashtags right away. About one year before Twitter.
The hashtag itself had already been invented by the Twitter community. Chris Messina had already codified it in 2007. But it wasn't until 2009 that Twitter actually introduced a technological implementation to support it.
Again, Identi.ca must have had hashtags as early as 2008, and there was no way that Identi.ca creator Evan Prodromou could possibly predict what Twitter would do the following year. So he did what he thought was right and what actually made sense to him.
But nowadays, everybody "knows" that Twitter had the world's very first hashtag implementation ever because nobody, even in the Fediverse, has ever heard of Identi.ca. I mean, the majority of Fediverse users "know" that the Fediverse started with Mastodon.
You know, just like Officer James Barrett "knew" that there is no intelligent life outside Earth only a few minutes before he became Agent J of the Men In Black.
This is also why just about all Fediverse software that does hashtags the Twitter way expects everything to do hashtags the Twitter way. It does not expect hashtags to be done differently. And when a message comes in from Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte with hashtags in it, it fails at varying degrees of ungracefully.
Hashtags with the hashtag character outside the link are older than hashtags with the hashtag character inside that they're not only completely unexpected, that they cause software to malfunction, but the same software often can't even handle that malfunction. It's a miracle that the Friendica/Hubzilla family doesn't cause Fediverse servers to crash or even server databases to go corrupt by simply sending hashtags.
Mastodon used to be an exception of sorts, but only because, before version 4.0 from October, 2022, its HTML "sanitiser" actually ripped out any and all rich text code from incoming messages and left nothing but plain text behind. And then it didn't recognise hashtags in messages from outside Mastodon as hashtags at all.
When Mastodon 4.0 came and supported some rich text, including embedded links, it went haywire, of course. But then someone from Friendica and Hubzilla went in and complained about this malfunction and explained what happened, why it happened and why it was not Friendica and Hubzilla that did things wrong. Besides, if something utterly defaces "toots", then Mastodon developers do step in to stop it. After all, Mastodon has a few more of them at hand, paid, full-time professionals even. You have to give it that.
Which takes us back to Sharkey. Sharkey is developed by a small handful of individuals in their spare time. Granted, it's a soft fork of Misskey, so a lot of development work is done by the Misskey devs and taken over by the Sharkey devs, but they still have to weave the code changes coming from Misskey in and make them work with what's different on Sharkey.
So it turned out that (Link content warning: eye contact) this bug has already been filed to the Sharkey devs in October, 2024. All that has happened since then until today was that Hazelnoot added two labels. But the bug report came with no explanations. In fact, it misattributed one of my Hubzilla posts as a Friendica post.
And in fact, it turned out that this is actually (Link content warning: Microsoft GitHub link, eye contact) a Misskey bug which has been filed in January, 2024, two years ago. The bug report is a bit more elaborate, but the reporter still knew precious little about what's going on. So I wrote a comment in which I explained the bug from a Friendica/Hubzilla POV as well as what's going on on the technical side, and why the error has to be on Misskey's side.
I hope this will finally help get the bug fixed. Unfortunately, this fix would come too late for Iceshrimp. Iceshrimp-JS is a true Forkey, but in maintenance mode, so I guess only security patches and critical bugfixes will be merged from Misskey, if anything. And Iceshrimp.NET is a complete rewrite of a pre-this-fix Misskey fork, so the Iceshrimp devs probably don't know about this issue either. If it fails ungracefully upon receiving hashtags with the hashtag character outside, it will require its own bug report.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Twitter #𝕏 #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #Iceshrimp.NET #Identi.ca #Laconi.ca #StatusNet #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte -
@「 Jürgen 」:fedi_mastodon:
Irgendwie ist das doch nicht die „übliche“ Verwendung von Hashtags in Beiträgen. Was ist der Hintergrund bei Hubzilla, dass das so gehandhabt wird?
Das hat Hubzilla geerbt von Friendica, weil es umgebaut wurde aus einem Fork eines Forks von Friendica. Und Friendica hat es übernommen von StatusNet, weil es von vornherein mit StatusNet föderieren sollte. Und StatusNet hat es geerbt von Identi.ca.
Sie alle handhab(t)en Hashtags intern als Schlüsselwörter, die keine Raute enthalten. Und sie stellen die Raute außerhalb des Link vor den Link, um zu signalisieren: Das hier ist ein Hashtag. Wenn man einen Post, einen Kommentar oder eine DM verschickt, wird aus dem Hashtag automatisch ein entsprechendes Konstrukt aus ungelinkter Raute plus Link aufs Schlüsselwort generiert.
Das ist wie bei Namen: Auf allen war bzw. ist das @ kein Teil irgendeines Namen, nicht des Kurznamen, nicht des Langnamen. Der Kurzname, der Teil des Profil-Link ist, hat auch kein @. Guck dir mal deine Erwähnung an: Das @ ist nicht Teil des Link, sondern steht vorm Link, und dein Langname ist erwähnt.
Warum "die" das anders gemacht haben als auf Twitter und Mastodon? Ganz einfach: Weil "die" das vor Mastodon gemacht haben. Eigentlich sogar noch vor Twitter.
Identi.ca und StatusNet waren von 2008. Etwa acht Jahre vor Mastodon. Das war der eigentliche Urknall des Fediverse. Und StatusNet hatte meines Wissens damals schon offizielle Unterstützung für Hashtags.
Warum hat es das nun anders gemacht als Twitter? Weil es das vor Twitter gemacht hat.
Es war nämlich erst 2009, daß Chris Messina offiziell Unterstützung für Hashtags bei Twitter eingeführt hat. Evan Prodromou, der Erfinder von Identi.ca, StatusNet und dem Fediverse, konnte unmöglich etwa ein Jahr im voraus ahnen, wie Twitter mal Hashtags implementieren wird. Und die Twitter-Entwickler dürften damals überhaupt nicht gewußt haben, daß auch nur Identi.ca existiert, geschweige denn, wie es Hashtags handhabt.
Friendica ging im Mai 2010 an den Start, etwa fünf Jahre und acht Monate vor Mastodon. Friendica basierte zwar auf einem eigenen Protokoll, war aber von vornherein in der Lage, sich mit StatusNet über dessen eigenes OStatus-Protokoll zu verbinden. Praktischerweise hat der Friendica-Erfinder Mike Macgirvin gleich Identi.cas und StatusNets Handhabung von Hashtags übernommen. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt hatte Twitter Hashtags erst seit gut zehn Monaten.
Ende 2011 hat Mike Macgirvin Friendica geforkt, dann den Fork geforkt und diesen Fork namens Red (später Red Matrix) dann ab 2012 komplett umgeschrieben. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt handhabte alles im Fediverse Hashtags noch auf dieselbe Art.
Um diese Zeit wurde StatusNet nach GNU social hardgeforkt, das wohl versuchte, mehr wie Twitter zu sein. Daher wurden auch die Hashtags wie auf Twitter ausgeführt: mit der Raute als Teil des Schlüsselworts und als Teil des Link. StatusNet verlor dann nach der 2012er Umstellung von Identi.ca auf pump.io seine Entwicklungsgrundlage und wurde 2013 kurzerhand nach GNU social gemerget, ohne aber die Hashtags wieder auf die alte Form umzustellen.
Im März 2015 wurde erstmals Hubzilla veröffentlicht, das entstanden war, indem die Red Matrix umbenannt und massiv erweitert worden war.
Erst im Januar 2016 kam dann Mastodon, Pleroma kurze Zeit später. Weil beide ursprünglich alternative Frontends für GNU social sein sollten, übernahmen sie von GNU social die Twitter-Hashtags.
Zu diesem Zeitpunkt sahen weder die neuen Entwickler, die Friendica seit Ende 2011 hatte, noch Mike Macgirvin es ein, warum sie ihre Software unbedingt an Mastodon anpassen sollten. Mike, der inzwischen zwei Nachfahren von Hubzilla betreut, sieht es bis heute nicht ein. Eher baut er serverseitige Gegenmittel gegen Mastodon in seine Software ein.
Misskey landete meines Wissens erst 2018 im Fediverse, nachdem es ActivityPub adoptiert hatte. Das hatte übrigens Hubzilla als erstes, seit Juli 2017, und Mastodon als zweites, seit September.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Identi.ca #Laconi.ca #StatusNet #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Mastodon #Pleroma #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta -
-
-
-
-
-
What happened to "Lady Jane" and "Johnny Null" ?
Didn't they meet via #statusnet / #identica and have a baby ?
-
What happened to "Lady Jane" and "Johnny Null" ?
Didn't they meet via #statusnet / #identica and have a baby ?
-
What happened to "Lady Jane" and "Johnny Null" ?
Didn't they meet via #statusnet / #identica and have a baby ?
-
What happened to "Lady Jane" and "Johnny Null" ?
Didn't they meet via #statusnet / #identica and have a baby ?
-
What happened to "Lady Jane" and "Johnny Null" ?
Didn't they meet via #statusnet / #identica and have a baby ?
-
Das #Fediverse ist (zumindest an ein paar Stellen) in der Mitte der Gesellschaft angekommen. Das ist stark und sicher mehr als mensch hoffen konnte als @evan damals 2008 #identica und #StatusNet gegründet und geschrieben hat.
Andererseits: Es ist auch eine Entwicklung von jetzt 17 Jahren, die zeigt, wie lange solche Projekte auch "im digitalen Zeitalter" brauchen. #ostatus #activitypub -
Das #Fediverse ist (zumindest an ein paar Stellen) in der Mitte der Gesellschaft angekommen. Das ist stark und sicher mehr als mensch hoffen konnte als @evan damals 2008 #identica und #StatusNet gegründet und geschrieben hat.
Andererseits: Es ist auch eine Entwicklung von jetzt 17 Jahren, die zeigt, wie lange solche Projekte auch "im digitalen Zeitalter" brauchen. #ostatus #activitypub -
Das #Fediverse ist (zumindest an ein paar Stellen) in der Mitte der Gesellschaft angekommen. Das ist stark und sicher mehr als mensch hoffen konnte als @evan damals 2008 #identica und #StatusNet gegründet und geschrieben hat.
Andererseits: Es ist auch eine Entwicklung von jetzt 17 Jahren, die zeigt, wie lange solche Projekte auch "im digitalen Zeitalter" brauchen. #ostatus #activitypub -
Das #Fediverse ist (zumindest an ein paar Stellen) in der Mitte der Gesellschaft angekommen. Das ist stark und sicher mehr als mensch hoffen konnte als @evan damals 2008 #identica und #StatusNet gegründet und geschrieben hat.
Andererseits: Es ist auch eine Entwicklung von jetzt 17 Jahren, die zeigt, wie lange solche Projekte auch "im digitalen Zeitalter" brauchen. #ostatus #activitypub -
Das #Fediverse ist (zumindest an ein paar Stellen) in der Mitte der Gesellschaft angekommen. Das ist stark und sicher mehr als mensch hoffen konnte als @evan damals 2008 #identica und #StatusNet gegründet und geschrieben hat.
Andererseits: Es ist auch eine Entwicklung von jetzt 17 Jahren, die zeigt, wie lange solche Projekte auch "im digitalen Zeitalter" brauchen. #ostatus #activitypub -
I chatted with @evan about the good old days of the #fediverse ☺️
#ostatus #activitypub #statusnet #identica #openmicroblogging #wordpress
-
I chatted with @evan about the good old days of the #fediverse ☺️
#ostatus #activitypub #statusnet #identica #openmicroblogging #wordpress
-
I chatted with @evan about the good old days of the #fediverse ☺️
#ostatus #activitypub #statusnet #identica #openmicroblogging #wordpress
-
I chatted with @evan about the good old days of the #fediverse ☺️
#ostatus #activitypub #statusnet #identica #openmicroblogging #wordpress
-
I chatted with @evan about the good old days of the #fediverse ☺️
#ostatus #activitypub #statusnet #identica #openmicroblogging #wordpress
-
Diese Frage stellt sich mir so nicht.
Ich bin seit 2008, oft mit eigenen Instanzen, im #Fediverse.
Zuerst auf #Identica, #Pumpio, #StatusNet und #GnuSocial, bis heute mit #Mastodon und #Diaspora.
Auch bei #Misskey, #Pleroma, #GoToSocial, #Friendica, #Hubzilla. #WriteFreely und #Pixelfed hatte ich Abstecher gemacht und diese Systeme getestet. Schlussendlich bin ich eben bei Mastodon und Diaspora hängengeblieben.
Da beutetet aber nicht, dass ich nicht weiterhin die Augen aufhalten und andere Projekte ausprobieren werde, und wer weiß, vielleicht ist irgendwann ja doch ein Wechsel für mich fällig. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
-
I did the whole frontend (some backend) for #StatusNet #identica. HTML, CSS - no JavaScript.
I take pride in that work b/c it was technically "state of the art".
Progressively enhanced; valid markup, alternate stylesheets, and a tonne of structured data directly in the pages. Essentially enabling a read API.
Something for the #microformats fans:
https://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2009-February/012821.html
https://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2009-February/012822.html
>the best implementations of microformats in a social
media site -
I did the whole frontend (some backend) for #StatusNet #identica. HTML, CSS - no JavaScript.
I take pride in that work b/c it was technically "state of the art".
Progressively enhanced; valid markup, alternate stylesheets, and a tonne of structured data directly in the pages. Essentially enabling a read API.
Something for the #microformats fans:
https://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2009-February/012821.html
https://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2009-February/012822.html
>the best implementations of microformats in a social
media site -
I did the whole frontend (some backend) for #StatusNet #identica. HTML, CSS - no JavaScript.
I take pride in that work b/c it was technically "state of the art".
Progressively enhanced; valid markup, alternate stylesheets, and a tonne of structured data directly in the pages. Essentially enabling a read API.
Something for the #microformats fans:
https://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2009-February/012821.html
https://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2009-February/012822.html
>the best implementations of microformats in a social
media site -
I did the whole frontend (some backend) for #StatusNet #identica. HTML, CSS - no JavaScript.
I take pride in that work b/c it was technically "state of the art".
Progressively enhanced; valid markup, alternate stylesheets, and a tonne of structured data directly in the pages. Essentially enabling a read API.
Something for the #microformats fans:
https://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2009-February/012821.html
https://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2009-February/012822.html
>the best implementations of microformats in a social
media site -
I did the whole frontend (some backend) for #StatusNet #identica. HTML, CSS - no JavaScript.
I take pride in that work b/c it was technically "state of the art".
Progressively enhanced; valid markup, alternate stylesheets, and a tonne of structured data directly in the pages. Essentially enabling a read API.
Something for the #microformats fans:
https://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2009-February/012821.html
https://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2009-February/012822.html
>the best implementations of microformats in a social
media site -
Happy 17th Year Anniversary #Fediverse social network!
Always strong! 🎊🎉🎂🍻🎆🥳🤹🏽
( #FediverseDay #SNS #SocMed #SocialMedia #SocialWeb #OpenMicroBlogging #OStatus #ActivityPub #Laconica #Identica #Web3 )
-
Happy 17th Year Anniversary #Fediverse social network!
Always strong! 🎊🎉🎂🍻🎆🥳🤹🏽
( #FediverseDay #SNS #SocMed #SocialMedia #SocialWeb #OpenMicroBlogging #OStatus #ActivityPub #Laconica #Identica #Web3 ) -
Happy 17th Year Anniversary #Fediverse social network! Always strong! 🎊🎉🎂🍻🎆🥳🤹🏽 ( #FediverseDay #SNS #SocMed #SocialMedia #SocialWeb #OpenMicroBlogging #OStatus #ActivityPub #Laconica #Identica #Web3 )
-
Happy 17th Year Anniversary #Fediverse social network!
Always strong! 🎊🎉🎂🍻🎆🥳🤹🏽
( #FediverseDay #SNS #SocMed #SocialMedia #SocialWeb #OpenMicroBlogging #OStatus #ActivityPub #Laconica #Identica #Web3 )
-
Whoa!!!
Ok, that reminds me of a question I've been meaning to ask...
How exactly to we count the beginning of the #Fediverse?
I know it's older than #Mastodon, for sure.
Do we just go as far back as #GnuSocial?
What about #Identica? Does that count?
Also, what software did #Quitter run? Did it use #ActivityPub?
I have so many questions as a... somewhat newbie (2018) to the #Fediverse.
-
@@reiver ⊼ (Charles) :batman: Mastodon did start out as a full-stack Web application AFAIK. It used the OStatus protocol, the same protocol as what GNU social was based on and what StatusNet was using prior to its merger with its own fork, GNU social.
However, at first, it was not positioned as a fully independent project of its own, much less a federated walled garden that allegedly only connected to itself. It was initially conceived and advertised as an alternative to GNU social proper with a different, "easier-to-use", more Twitter-like GUI being its main selling-point.
I guess it's pretty obvious that what was working underneath was not GNU social proper either. Two examples to prove this:
Neither Identi.ca nor StatusNet nor GNU social had a rigid, hard-coded character limit of 500 characters. Mastodon had it from the get-go.
Also, Identi.ca, StatusNet and GNU social had a summary field. It was part of the OpenMicroBlogging and OStatus protocols. Both Friendica and Hubzilla made use of this summary field as such. Mastodon did not have the summary field implemented because summaries were pointless if all you had was 500 characters.
Fast-forward to 2017. Mastodon had meanwhile repositioned itself on the "market" as a stand-alone microblogging platform, implying to be a "decentralised, federated walled garden" with its own exclusive technology that nothing else used, and that nothing else connected to. Something that just about every last Mastodon newbie takes Mastodon for still today.
At some point in 2017, a Mastodon user from the demo scene with some development experience submitted a pull request to Mastodon's GitHub repository which would repurpose this very same summary field as a content warning field. The pull request was accepted and merged. Ever since shortly afterwards, Mastodon users started believing that Mastodon's content warning field was invented by Eugen Rochko from scratch. And they still do.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Identi.ca #StatusNet #OStatus #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseHistory -
@@reiver ⊼ (Charles) :batman: 2008. When @Evan Prodromou launched Identi.ca.
After all, Mastodon started out as an alternative frontend for GNU social. GNU social is a fork of StatusNet. StatusNet, in turn, was the software which Identi.ca used to run on until it was merged into GNU social in 2013. (Evan first launched Identi.ca, and then he open-sourced the technology under the name of Laconi.ca, later StatusNet.)
This also means that the OStatus protocol is part of Mastodon's history as well. OStatus is the protocol that GNU social was based on back in the day and probably still is, that later versions of StatusNet were based on, and that Mastodon was originally based on. It's the successor to OpenMicroBlogging, the protocol that Identi.ca was launched on, and that early StatusNet was based on. But it was gone when Mastodon was launched.
It's also fair to mention Friendica, the Facebook alternative launched by @Mike Macgirvin ?️ in 2010, and Hubzilla, the "federated social content management system" which, in 2015, emerged from something that Mike himself had forked off Friendica in 2012.
Both speak a whole lot of protocols. Hubzilla used to speak OStatus, Friendica still does. And so, when the very first Mastodon test release came out in early 2016, and the very first Mastodon instance was started up, it was immediately able to connect to GNU social, Friendica and Hubzilla.
It's an important part of Mastodon's history that Mastodon has never in its history been an isolated walled garden, that Mastodon has never in its history been connected to only itself.
Speaking of Hubzilla, it should be mentioned once again, namely in 2017.
The very first Fediverse project to implement ActivityPub was Hubzilla in July. Mastodon followed in September. These two were the only Fediverse projects that adopted ActivityPub before it was declared a standard. And so, for quite a while, it was only these two that could use ActivityPub to connect to each other (while still also being able to do so via OStatus, by the way). But since both have vastly different philosophies, actual compatibility was and still is limited.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Identi.ca #StatusNet #OStatus #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #ActivityPub #FediverseHistory -
@cy
The people who wrote the Fediverse
There were no "people who wrote the Fediverse". These was no committee who laid down the standards.
The Fediverse was invented by @Evan Prodromou. In 2008. By first creating a centralised Twitter alternative silo named Identi.ca.
And then open-sourcing the underlying technology as Laconi.ca, later StatusNet (merged into GNU social in 2013).
And then laying the protocol open as OpenMicroBlogging, later superseded by OStatus.
Then, in 2010, @Mike Macgirvin ?️ decided that the world needs a free, open-source, decentralised, secure alternative to Facebook that's better than Facebook. And so he made Mistpark, today Friendica.
But the features he wanted Friendica to have were impossible to achieve with any existing protocol. OStatus wasn't even that good for microblogging, much less Mike's ambitious plans. Besides, he's an experienced protocol designer. So he created a whole new protocol, DFRN, and built Friendica on top of it. Friendica did adopt OStatus as an extra protocol, though, because Friendica's goal was and still is to federate with everything and then some.
In 2011, Mike had seen many public Friendica nodes shut down with or without warning and people always losing everything and having to start over from scratch. So he decided to do something against it.
He invented nomadic identity. And built a new protocol around it, Zot, because there was no way DFRN could take care of this, let alone OStatus.
In 2012, he forked Friendica into Red and rewrote the whole backend against Zot, which, however, required the creation of yet another identity scheme.
For one, one login could now have multiple fully separate and independent identities on it. For example, my Hubzilla channel URL is https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/channel/jupiter_rowland.
Besides, one identity could now reside on multiple server instances which is what nomadic identity means.
Red was later renamed Red Matrix and, in 2015, refactored, redesigned and renamed into Hubzilla.
Mastodon and Pleroma started in 2016 as OStatus-based alternative UIs for GNU social. Mastodon was the first to be turned into a stand-alone project with not much interest in connecting to anything outside, all in spite of already being federated with Pleroma, GNU social, Friendica and Hubzilla via OStatus.
ActivityPub came out in 2017. No, not 2018. It was standardised in 2018. But it came out in 2017.
In July, 2017, Hubzilla was the first Fediverse project to integrate ActivityPub. Next to its own Zot, next to diaspora*, next to OStatus etc. On the one hand, Hubzilla tried to stay as close to the ActivityPub spec as possible and feasible. On the other hand, Hubzilla had to make its ActivityPub integration, which has always been an optional add-on, compatible to its own technology, to its own Zot protocol, to the way it works.
In September, Mastodon was the second Fediverse project to adopt ActivityPub. But Mastodon was more interested in doing its own thing and being as close to Twitter as it could than in sticking to a protocol spec, much less connecting to non-Mastodon stuff such as Hubzilla with which it already shared two protocols now.
Mastodon was the one that added Webfinger. ActivityPub doesn't even require Webfinger. The ActivityPub spec doesn't contain Webfinger. But Mastodon requires Webfinger. It can't live without Webfinger. So everything that wants to properly federate with Mastodon needs to implement Webfinger.
After ActivityPub had become a standard, more projects adopted it. But as lax a specification as ActivityPub is, it allowed for a lot of liberties.
Some devs looked at how Mastodon had integrated ActivityPub, decided it was rubbish and did it their own way.
Some devs looked at how Mastodon had integrated ActivityPub, decided they couldn't do it the same way because what they did was too different from Mastodon and did it their own way.
Some devs didn't look at what anyone else did and did it their own way.
Probably none of them looked at how Hubzilla had integrated ActivityPub because none of them even knew that Hubzilla existed. Except for those who were maintaining Friendica now. And Friendica had to make it compatible with DFRN and with the way it had been working since 2010.
Fast-forward to 2023. Mike's current piece of work was the streams repository which contains an intentionally nameless fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork) of Hubzilla, slimmed down from Hubzilla, but modernised and technologically even more advanced.
It was then that @silverpill, creator and maintainer of Mitra, got into contact with him because he wanted to add nomadic identity to Mitra. Something that's built on ActivityPub and only supports ActivityPub. A first. No-one had ever done nomadic identity with nothing but ActivityPub before.
So the two started working on how to implement nomadic identity using only ActivityPub. Mike had a vision of a Fediverse with nomadic identity all over and Fediverse identities cloned beyond server application borders. Like, a (streams) channel cloned to Mitra, Mastodon, PeerTube and Mobilizon, all with the same identity.
This, however, required another, brand-new way of identifying Fediverse actors. And so FEP-ef61 "Portable Objects" was created.
We're probably in the middle of xkcd 927 now.
Mike set up an experimental branch of (streams) to develop and test nomadic identity via ActivityPub, also since (streams) already had nomadic identity anyway.
Around summer, the "nomadic" branch (for nomadic identity via ActivityPub) seemed reliable enough to merge it into "dev". And in July, "dev" was merged into "release", complete with nomadic-identity-via-ActivityPub code.
It was shortly after that merge that I created my two (streams) channels. The channel URL of my channel for Fediverse memes is https://streams.elsmussols.net/channel/fedimemes_on_streams. But its DID, which all channels created on accounts registered after that merge got, is https://streams.elsmussols.net/.well-known/apgateway/did:key:z6Mkf2dhUa65zBYCNVqs3AHyt8uPixauZ7bPzEJn15LJANsd/actor. And that's only two IDs of the same channel. There are also others for (streams)' native Nomad protocol, Hubzilla's Zot6 protocol, ActivityPub, OAuth, OAuth2 and probably also OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on, another one of Mike's creations. Not to mention that (streams) channels, like Hubzilla channels and Friendica accounts, can also optionally be group actors.
In fact, this blew up into (streams) users' faces because (streams) confused the various IDs to such degrees that it wouldn't federate at all anymore. It took Mike a whole lot of work to iron this out again, so much that he officially retired from Fediverse development on August 31st.
And in the middle of this, he even created yet another fork, Forte, which is (streams) minus Nomad, minus Zot6, based on and supporting only ActivityPub. My guess is still that one of the reasons to create Forte at that point was to get rid of the Nomad and Zot6 IDs to sort the ID mess out.
Even if nomadic identity via ActivityPub should ever become stable and start spreading, I don't expect DIDs to become the one norm in the Fediverse. Not with all those barely or unmaintained projects and those devs who refuse to acknowledge that devs of other projects do great stuff, too.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #OStatus #DFRN #Zot #ActivityPub #Nomad #Laconi.ca #Identi.ca #StatusNet #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Mastodon #Pleroma #Streams #(streams) #Forte #FEP_ef61 -
Something I miss about the old #Identica is how weirdly well it ranked on Google. Like I could dent something like "The factory service manual doesn't mention it, but when removing the passenger-side CV axle on a 2000 #Infiniti #i30 you need to unbolt the support bearing (part 22 in the diagram) from the support bracket (part 23)" and somehow that dent would suddenly be in the top 5 results for "2000 infiniti i30 cv axle". On #Mastodon sharing such information feels like shouting into the void.
-
Something I miss about the old #Identica is how weirdly well it ranked on Google. Like I could dent something like "The factory service manual doesn't mention it, but when removing the passenger-side CV axle on a 2000 #Infiniti #i30 you need to unbolt the support bearing (part 22 in the diagram) from the support bracket (part 23)" and somehow that dent would suddenly be in the top 5 results for "2000 infiniti i30 cv axle". On #Mastodon sharing such information feels like shouting into the void.
-
* #Friendster and #MySpace were my first.
* Then #Facebook.
* Later #Twitter.
* Followed by the #Fediverse through #Identica (software: #Laconica).
* Next was #Plurk, 15 years ago today, and I'm still using it.It's crazy to realise it has been that long already.
-
Happy Birthday Fediverse!
Gestern vor 15 Jahren hat Evan seinen ersten Post ins Fediverse gesendet:
Fifteen years ago tomorrow I published the first post on the fediverse.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080618164355/http://identi.ca/notice/1
It’s still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that.
https://identi.ca/evan/note/Y0QwGyc1QYilqqawkDrQlg
Thanks to everyone who made identi.ca a great place to be, and thanks to everyone who’s expanded the fediverse since then.
Someday soon-ish I’d like to have identi.ca working with ActivityPub. When I get the time for it!
Vor 15 Jahren!!!
Erst laconi.ca/identi.ca dann status.net und jetzt gnu.social.
Von OpenMicroBlogging über OStatus zu ActivityPub.
Es ist faszinierend wie lange sich die Idee gehalten hat und das unabhängig von der Platform und dem Protocol!
Laut dem Screenshot von meinem Profil, bin ich auch schon seit Juni 2008 dabei.
Happy Birthday und mal schauen wie das Fediverse in 15 Jahren aussieht 😉 !
#activitypub #fediverse #identica #openmicroblogging #ostatus #statusnet
-
* Been on #Mastodon since the beginning: 2017-04-05 (although Mastodon was first released in 2016). Oh, wow, just turned 6 years since I created my first Mastodon-software account and my first #Toot (as it was called then).
— Original protocol: #OStatus
— My first Mastodon-software account was with aleph.land
— I was still running my own #Hubzilla instance at this time.* But, I've been on the #Fediverse since the beginning: 2008 ^_^
— The first instance was: #Identica
— The first software was: #Laconica — which was later renamed to #StatusNet; and then merged with #GnuSocial and #FreeSocial. The surviving brand is GNU Social, but the code is, afaik, Laconica/StatusNet.
— The first protocol was #OpenMicroBlogging (not to be confused with the second fediverse software #OpenMicroBlogger)
— Other than the flagship, the largest instance (2008) was “The TWiT Army Canteen”. (Surviving photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/twitarmyflickr/3379859096/ [archived, just in case, only found it today])More on the history: https://codeberg.org/ddfon/federated-sns
^_^