#mastodoncentricism — Public Fediverse posts

@Rob Ricci @caterpillar @Stefan Bohacek @Ericka Simone This is exactly the problem.

I'm on both Hubzilla and (streams) with multiple channels, and I've been on Hubzilla under various guises for longer than the vast majority of Mastodon users have been on Mastodon. I guess you can say that I know both very well.

I can tell you that the possibilities of Hubzilla's permissions system are staggering. It works on up to three levels: for the entire channel (that's "account" in Mastospeak), for individual connections (that's "followers and followed" in Mastospeak), for individual content (posts and and entire conversations, but also images and other uploaded files and documents).

For example, you can grant or deny permission to

• see your public profile (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
• see your connections (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
• see your public posts in your stream (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
• send you their posts (this means public posts that aren't replies because replies are not posts on Hubzilla)
• like (that's "fave" in Mastospeak; you know, the star), dislike and comment on your posts
• send you DMs
• see your uploaded files (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected, but this also extends to images and other media embedded into posts, comments and DMs)

All in all, Hubzilla has 18 such permissions, but these are the ones that matter from a Mastodon point of view. They can be granted or denied for your entire channel at seven or eight levels, and if they're denied at channel level, they can be granted for individual connections. Imagine that, on Mastodon, you could allow only certain followers to see your profile and your toots. Or you could only allow certain followed accounts to send you their toots. All of this is reality on Hubzilla right now.

Better yet: You know that you can send toots only to mentioned accounts on Mastodon. Hubzilla exceeds and improves upon this in three ways. First of all, you can send posts to individual connections. Or to a certain privacy group (from a Mastodon POV, that's a list on steroids). Or to a custom selection of individual connections and privacy groups while even being able to exclude certain other connections or privacy groups. This goes way beyond Mastodon's "mentioned = allowed to see".

But this doesn't only define who will receive your post. It also defines who is permitted to see your post.

And: The permissions of a post are inherited by the entire conversation. Comments always have the same permissions as the top post. There's no restricting the permissions in a comment, and there's no relaxing the limitations of a comment. It's impossible to pull other Fediverse users into a private conversation by mentioning them if the top post wasn't targetted at them.

Even better yet: You can allow or disallow comments on individual posts (remember that a post on Hubzilla is only a post if it starts a conversation, not if it's a reply).

On top of all this, Hubzilla's filters are both vastly more powerful than Mastodon's filters and easier to use. Mastodon requires you to set up one new filter for each word that you want filtered. It's always blocklisting. And it's always account-wide.

Hubzilla covers Mastodon's entire filter functionality with one or two text fields. You have one blocklist for the whole channel. And you have an optional extra feature named "NSFW" with its own filter list that generated individual, reader-side content warnings for you. The equivalent of defining a new filter on Mastodon is to add a new line to one of these filter lists. Want to back them up? Just copy-paste them into a text file.

But wait, there's more: Hubzilla also has a channel-wide allowlist. If you only want to see certain content in your stream, you can allowlist certain keywords.

Hubzilla even optionally has one blocklist and one allowlist per connection. Imagine you could filter individual followed accounts on Mastodon.

Hubzilla's filter lists support regular expressions. There is also a "filter syntax" that lets you filter by whether a message is a top post or not, whether a message is public or private, whether it's a repeat (that's "boost" in Mastospeak or "retoot" for those of you who still have Twitter on the brain). The filter syntax even lets you use Boolean operators.

(streams) and Forte are similar. Their permissions are somewhat different (you don't need permissions for wikis and websites if you don't have wikis and websites). The permissions system is vastly easier to use because it's no longer template-based. You can simply switch permissions on and off for your channel as well as for connections. And you can choose to have even more options for reply control.

Again, all this exists in the Fediverse right now. And most of it has existed for longer than Mastodon. Some of this dates back to the earliest days of Friendica in May, 2010.

Unfortunately, next to nobody knows.

For most Mastodon features, the features that Mastodon has are the features that the Fediverse has. If Mastodon doesn't have it, the Fediverse doesn't. Not only is Mastodon the default, but there's nothing that strays from this default. That's why Mastodon users keep wishing for "the Fediverse" to introduce features which Friendica has had for almost 16 years already. Or which Hubzilla has had for over a decade.

In addition, probably not even 10% of all Mastodon users have ever heard of Hubzilla. Probably not even 1% of all Mastodon users know what Hubzilla can do. And even only the existence of (streams) and Forte is almost entirely unknown outside of (streams) and Forte themselves and Hubzilla.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Permission #Permissions #ReplyControl #ReplyControls #Filter #Filters #MastodonCentricism #MastodonNormativity

@cmdr ░ nova ⸸ :~$ 🏳️‍⚧️ @Claire, The Ultimate Worrier @Null Pointer Exception However, alt-texts and the content warning field aren't a Fediverse thing. They're a Mastodon thing.

Yes, that's actually a big difference. And I can say this because, for one, I've been in the Fediverse since before there was Mastodon, and besides, I'm on something that not only isn't Mastodon, it's very much not Mastodon.

Outside of Mastodon and the usual Mastodon satellites like Pixelfed, alt-texts are only catching up very slowly. Even then, most people don't do more than the required minimum while some Mastodon users go out of their way and write very detailed descriptions.

Especially on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, a software family that started as early as 2010, alt-texts are largely seen as just another Mastodon fad in the same vein as cutting long posts up into threads. And the communities on these four are quite opposed to Mastodon fads and, in fact, to everything Mastodon-related.

You will never see anyone on any of these ostracise or sanction or even block someone who doesn't add alt-texts to images.

The difference in behaviour when it comes to content warnings is even more extreme.

On Mastodon, it's part of the culture and an only partially written rule to add content warnings to the content warning field whenever you post sensitive content. It's "only partially written" because not all servers have made it a steadfast rule, and because it is not being enforced beyond the boundaries of servers. Still, the Mastodon community is trying hard to force that rule upon the whole Fediverse.

What next to nobody on Mastodon knows: The CW field was not invented by Gargron, and especially, it was not invented from scratch.

The CW field is actually a repurposed summary field from StatusNet from 2008. It was added to Mastodon by a user in 2017. And Mastodon started as an alternative frontend for the StatusNet successor GNU social on which that field still is a summary field.

On Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte (as well as all dedicated blogging server applications in the Fediverse like WriteFreely, Plume, Ghost and WordPress), the summary field still is a summary field. And that makes a whole lot of sense to have if you have an eight-digit "character limit" (Friendica, Hubzilla: over 16.7 million; (streams), Forte: over 24 million).

Both technologically and culturally, these four have a different way of handling content warnings, namely by having them automatically generated for you as a reader and only for you, i.e. without forcing the same CW upon everyone else.

Let's say you don't want to read about US politics. On Mastodon, you "shout into the ether", asking everyone to add "USpol" as a CW. And then you have to deal with those who want the CW field to be limited to what it's actually for, namely porn and gore.

On these four, you open your NSFW. You add "uspol" to the filter list. Done. From then on, all posts that have "uspol" (case-insensitive and even as a substring) anywhere in them will be hidden by a button that reads, "uspol". But they'll only be hidden for you individually.

Friendica has had this technology since its inception in 2010, five and a half years before Mastodon's launch. Hubzilla has inherited it from Friendica, and Hubzilla predates Mastodon by ten months (and at its core by almost four years). (streams) has inherited it from Hubzilla, Forte has inherited it from (streams).

On all four, it's part of their culture. And it's considered good manners to add something to your posts and comments that has these content warnings generated.

Ironically, Mastodon itself has introduced this very principle with version 4.0 in October, 2022, just before the first huge Twitter migration wave. But Mastodon's entire culture, which it tries so hard to force upon the whole Fediverse (also because Mastodon users cannot see whether a post is from Mastodon or Akkoma or Misskey or Friendica or Hubzilla, so they tend to assume it's all Mastodon), is based on version 3.x as of mid-2022.

CC: @love

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonCulture #MastodonCentricism #MastodonNormativity #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits

@dr-e 🛡️

The really interesting thing is that Hubzilla, for example, exists without the Fediverse and forms its own network. In complete contrast to Mastodon.

In a sense, there are multiple parallel networks, all of which Hubzilla is or can be part of.

There is the "grid" which started with Hubzilla, and which is also populated by (streams). It's based on Zot/Nomad.

The ActivityPub-based Fediverse is optional on both Hubzilla and (streams). I guess many Hubzilla users have chosen to not switch ActivityPub on, and quite a few (streams) users have intentionally turned ActivityPub off.

Lastly, there is the diaspora* network which was originally created only for diaspora*, but which was "invaded" by Friendica, Hubzilla (optional again) and Socialhome.

Mastodon is 100% dependent on infiltrating people from other projects and passing their contributions off as Mastodon contributions. Otherwise there would suddenly be a lot less content. It would become quiet if these > 40% were suddenly silent.

My impression is rather that 99% of all communication that happens on Mastodon originated on Mastodon itself.

Look through a typical Mastodon user's list of followed actors. It's usually way over 90% Mastodon accounts. You'll have to scroll through multiple pages before you even come across the first Pixelfed or Flipboard account. Some users follow thousands of Fediverse actors, and not a single one of them is in the Friendica/Hubzilla family.

Look through a typical discussion thread that started on Mastodon. Sometimes you have dozens upon dozens of replies, and every last one of them comes from Mastodon.

This is why a new Mastodon user can spend two months, five months, sometimes over two years thinking that the Fediverse is only Mastodon: You can spend that much time in a Mastodon-only bubble. This is why Mastodon users claim that the non-Mastodon Fediverse is so tiny it doesn't matter: On Mastodon itself, the non-Mastodon Fediverse barely even happens.

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