#quotetootdebate — Public Fediverse posts

@Mark Andrew 🇨🇭 I guess that, more often than not, the only new developments that are widely welcome are those that happen on Mastodon, that still don't make Mastodon feel different, and that don't introduce features to Mastodon that are (considered) bad on 𝕏.

This alone is the reason why many Mastodon admins hold on to older Mastodon versions for their dear lives: They want to boycott new Mastodon features which they don't like, but they don't have what it takes to soft-fork or even only hard-fork Mastodon and remove the new features.

Now, when it comes to developments in the Fediverse outside of Mastodon, they tend to be even more nerve-grating for Mastodon users because they often aren't in line with Mastodon and its culture at all. That is, many Mastodon users don't even notice that these features exist unless these features directly hit their timeline. But once they do, they're considered bad new developments even though they've actually been around for much longer than Mastodon itself.

For example, quote-posts and full-text search. Mastodon users tend to be staunchly against both because they're used to harass and dogpile minorities on 𝕏. If at all, they're only okay with these if they come with an opt-in, and/or if server admins can turn them off entirely.

If only they knew that Friendica has had both since May, 2010, five years and eight months longer than Mastodon has even existed. That Friendica has been search-indexing and able to quote-post any public Mastodon toot since Mastodon's very launch. I guess they'd demand the immediate destruction of Friendica or at least its complete and permanent defederation.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #FullTextSearch #Mastodon #Friendica

@Chao-c'

Also, ALT text translates with the rest of the post, which can be helpful for images which contain only foreign language text.

Hubzilla is the most incompatible ActivityPub software in Fediverse. You do just lot of things wrong, to put it mildly.

You still seem to think that Gargron invented ActivityPub and the Fediverse, that Mastodon is the one and only reference implementation of ActivityPub, and that everything that doesn't work exactly like Mastodon is broken.

Here are the facts:

Mastodon was launched in January, 2016.

Hubzilla was launched in March, 2015. Counting an earlier incarnation named Red, it was created in May, 2012, when Friendica's creator re-wrote his own fork of a Friendica fork of his own.

Mastodon implemented ActivityPub in September, 2017, when the spec wasn't finalised yet.

Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub in July, 2017. Two months before Mastodon. Hubzilla was the first software to ever implement ActivityPub.

Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub strictly by the book. It has always tried to stick as close to the official W3C ActivityPub spec as possible.

Mastodon, in stark contrast, has always been stretching the ActivityPub spec until it broke. Not only that, but it has always been adding stuff outside the spec. First it did so to take over certain features from StatusNet which was its original protocol. More recently, it did so with the very intention to break compatibility with the rest of the Fediverse and make everything that isn't Mastodon look broken. And people like you keep falling for it because they think they know for a fact that Mastodon is the ActivityPub reference implementation.

The whole Fediverse has to break the ActivityPub spec just to be able to federate with Mastodon.

yes, the Hubzilla author is writing Streams, with nomadic identity, but it also means, that he understands, that Hubzilla approach is kind of dead-end.

You know nothing. Whereas I can rattle down the whole history from Mistpark in 2010 to today.

Mike Macgirvin, creator of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte created his post-Hubzilla server applications because he kept advancing the Zot protocol. And he couldn't implement these advancements into Hubzilla because they bore the chance of breaking compatibility with what already existed.

(streams) is not a completely new development, nor is it a straight Hubzilla fork.

(streams) is a 2022 fork of Roadhouse.
Which was a 2022 fork of either the third Osada or Mistpark 2020 or Redmatrix 2020.
Which were 2020 forks of Zap (or each other, but at least one of them was forked from Zap).
Which was a 2018 fork of either Hubzilla itself or the first Osada, which was a 2018 fork of Hubzilla.

Osada and Zap were created to develop Zot6. In its early stages of concept, Mike expected Zot6 to be incompatible with everything else. Mind you, he didn't see that as something bad. Advancing Zot was necessary because the then-current version of Zot was less than optimal. And Mike's vision was a decentralised, nomadic network named the "Grid", entirely based on Zot. The Grid would have been vastly superior to the existing Fediverse in every way possible.

So the issue with his early draft of Zot6 was that it was quite incompatible with non-nomadic protocols. Nomadic Zot6 content could not be translated into non-nomadic protocols like the diaspora* protocol or ActivityPub.

Thus, developing Zot6 on Hubzilla was out of question. Zot6 would have broken too much on Hubzilla. Besides, Hubzilla was bad as a platform to experiment on due to its wealth of supported protocols and other features, all of which would have had to be made compatible with Zot6.

And this is the real reason why Mike created Osada and Zap. From how I see it, and how I remember what he talked about back in the day (I was there, yes), he first forked Osada from Hubzilla. Then he ripped everything out that he didn't need, including support for all protocols except for Zot itself, ActivityPub, RSS and Atom, including the CMS stuff like articles, planning cards, notes, wikis and webpages, etc. Then he modified what was left against his early version of Zot6.

Then he discovered that a cloned Osada channel couldn't properly send content via ActivityPub.

Then, shortly afterwards, he forked Osada into Zap. He removed nomadic identity from Osada which kept ActivityPub and ActivityPub support from Zap which stayed nomadic.

The idea was to have a nomadic, cloned channel on Zap as your main channel that would only connect to Hubzilla, Osada and Zap, and to have an additional, non-nomadic channel on Osada that would serve as a "gateway" between nomadic Zap and the non-nomadic ActivityPub Fediverse.

Of course, this was highly impractical. But by 2019, Mike found a way to make Zot6 compatible with non-nomadic protocols. So, in early 2019, Mike discontinued Osada and forked a new Osada from Zap which only differred from Zap by having ActivityPub support while still being nomadic. This enabled Mike to have one development platform for Zot6 in conjunction with non-nomadic protocols and another one on which ActivityPub did not stand in the way.

Later in 2019, both Osada and Zap got stable releases. At that point, Osada and Zap were identical in code. Both had ActivityPub support. It was included into their cores now and no longer an add-on like on Hubzilla. They only had two differences. One was the branding. The other one was that Osada servers had ActivityPub activated by default, and Zap servers had ActivityPub disabled by default. Keeping Osada around was unnecessary now, so ActivityPub was activated by default on Zap, and Osada was discontinued. Zot6 was so stable that it was soon backported to Hubzilla.

Mike wasn't done yet, though. He now wanted to develop Zot8. Again, he did not want to develop protocol changes on stable production software that people potentially daily-drove.

Thus, three new forks emerged in 2020: another Osada, Mistpark 2020 (a.k.a. Misty) and Redmatrix 2020 (named after the Red Matrix, the name that Hubzilla bore from late 2012 to early 2015 between being created as Red and being re-branded into Hubzilla). Mike used them to develop Zot8. They were identical in all but brand identity.

This was fully intentional on Mike's part to confuse the hell out of the brand fetishists that were growing more and more numerous in the Fediverse. His goal was for people to declare Osada or Misty or Redmatrix the best Fediverse software and superior to everything else, just for him to tell them that Osada, Misty and Redmatrix are absolutely identical. In fact, the three remained identical to Zap in features.

Zot8 never got stable because Mike kept advancing it further and further. In early 2022, he was at Zot11. But Zot11 was so incompatible with everything else, including previous Zot versions, that Mike declared it a new protocol of its own and renamed it Nomad. In order to test-drive it, he forked Osada or Misty or Redmatrix into Roadhouse. After all, there were people who were daring enough to daily-drive production channels on Osada, Misty and Redmatrix, albeit only few. Roadhouse was still identical in features to Zap, Osada, Misty and Redmatrix.

It was now possible to crossgrade between Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse by simply rebasing the server code.

Later in 2022, he created a new fork of Roadhouse itself. The reason for this was not further protocol advancement. No, this time, it mostly had branding and licensing reasons.

First of all, he wanted to make that fork as easy for others to fork and adopt as possible. Everything he had developed so far was under the MIT license (he himself had relicensed Friendica under the AGPLv3 in 2011, but he didn't actually develop on Friendica; he developed on a fork named Free-Friendika that was still MIT-licensed and then backported the changes to the Friendica repository, and Red was a Free-Friendika fork). This new repository was released into the public domain. At first, the whole thing was never primarily intended to be installed on servers as it was, but rather to be forked as the base of something new.

At least the core and Mike's own add-ons were. What third-party add-ons from Hubzilla times were still there got to keep their maze of licenses. This was intentional on Mike's part, too. It would make it impossible for commercial players to scoop up the whole thing and relicense it into something non-free and commercial without breaking any licenses, or without pumping tons of money into their legal department to work around that maze of licenses.

Also, Mike removed any and all naming and branding from the software. He absolutely intentionally made it nameless. You've read that right. He did this for two reasons. One, whoever wanted to fork it would have to give the fork an individual name and an individual branding. Two, this was to mess with brand fanbois and brand fetishists even more: This thing had no brand to gush over to begin with.

Furthermore, Mike removed all nodeinfo code that he could possibly get away with removing. Again, this was intentional. One intention was to stop this software from automatically joining the "my Fediverse project is bigger than yours" and "my server is bigger than yours" rat races. He intentionally did everything he could to keep this software away from The Federation, Fediverse Observer, FediDB and the like.

The other intention was for the case of commercial players looking for free code to steal. If this software had really taken off and left its stats proving its popularity everywhere, some big commercial player would have been likely to try and steal this software, make it commercial and non-free and release it as their own original creation. So his intention was for them to not even be able to find it in this case. (This, by the way, was the reason why he relicensed Friendica under the AGPLv3, and why he hardly ever spoke about Free-Friendika: Now that Friendica was growing popular, he didn't want big commercial players to scoop up code of his under a license that they could change to non-free.)

This server application became the first and only one in the Fediverse with no fixed server type identifier, in fact, with none at all by default. It has one text field for the server name, just like Mastodon and Friendica and Hubzilla and the like. But it has an additional field where the server type, i.e. the identifier for the software, can be entered. If none is entered, it's derived from the server name. Mike used to have a server that identified as "Y" because, as he said, "Y is not X."

While the application itself is nameless (for it still is), the code repository did require a name of sorts. Mike named the repository "streams".

Now, the community needed something to call that nameless software when they spoke about it. So they unofficially established "(streams)", complete with parentheses that make sure that this is not actually the name of this software. Those who say, "Streams," with a capital S and no parentheses, and who use that term as if it's an official name, usually sincerely believe that this is the official name.

Mike himself uses "streams" without the parentheses because even he needs something to call his own software by. Before Forte was made, he preferred talking about the streams repository without directly mentioning the software. And he himself denied that (streams) is even a project. It's just a bunch of code that runs.

As far as I know, it was now possible to freely crossgrade between six different server applications because they were still identical in features. Only that Mike also had six server applications to take care of now.

So on December 31st, 2022, Mike discontinued Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse. Admins who ran either of these on their servers were recommended to rebase their servers to the streams repository. In this case, by the way, the old branding was kept. I've seen a server that still had "zap" as its subdomain which indicated that it was set up as a Zap server, that had Misty branding, but that actually ran (streams).

From then on, Mike dedicated his time to maintaining and developing only the streams repository. He still occasionally helped Hubzilla out, though.

In 2023, the Mitra creator and developer silverpill approached Mike. The goal was to make Mitra nomadic. I guess earlier attempts using a blockchain and crypto technology didn't come to fruition, so it had to be Mike's way which had proven itself stable for more than a decade. However, Mitra was to remain based on ActivityPub.

It was in this exchange that Mike realised that ActivityPub could indeed be used for nomadic identity if a few things were added to it. One outcome was FEP-ef61 "Portable Objects" which introduced decentralised IDs (DIDs) that would not be bound to any one server domain.

Instead of creating a whole new server application to play with, Mike simply made a "nomadic" branch in the streams repository (even though the software was already nomadic) in which he implemented support for nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Support as in (streams) understanding it while internally still using Nomad for nomadicity.

In June, 2024, Mike considered the "nomadic" branch reliable enough and merged it into the "dev" branch.

In July, 2024, Mike merged the "dev" branch into the "release" branch which caused DIDs as per FEP-ef61 to be rolled out to existing production servers. On accounts created on this new version, channels would have a DID internally. On accounts greated on any previous version, even new channels would keep the old ID system for the time being. This way, existing accounts and channels weren't messed with.

However, what had worked under supervised and restricted lab conditions completely blew up under real-life conditions. Again, I was there on (streams) with a pre-DID account and two channels on it. I still have them. (streams) channels wouldn't federate with anything anymore. It had become impossible to send anything anywhere. What Mike was facing was nothing short of an enigma because not even he knew what was going in.

So he started tinkering. In mid-August, Mike forked the streams repository into something named and branded Forte. He did so so he could rip the Nomad protocol out while still keeping the entire functionality. He had to get rid of Nomad because he had discovered that (streams) got confused juggling all the many IDs it had to deal with, so he had to weed out the Nomad and Zot6 IDs to make things easier. But he couldn't possibly have done that on (streams) proper.

This way, Mike created the very first Fediverse server software that uses ActivityPub for full nomadicity, including cloning.

By the end of August, things got back to normal. But Mike, having spent every free minute in the last few weeks to get (streams) back into working condition, was burned out. He sent an open message around in which he declared that he would completely retire from Fediverse development, and both the streams repository and Forte were up for grabs.

But nobody was found who could take over either. (streams) and Forte probably had way fewer than 100 users combined. Those few who would have been able to maintain either didn't have time. One did have time and was willing to do so, but he didn't know how to code. He eventually did start teaching himself, and he occasionally contributes merge requests, but there was no way he could take over as the only dev for either, much less both. So Mike had to go on, whether he wanted or not, albeit at a somewhat slower pace.

This is why Mike is still developing (streams) and Forte to this day.

By the way: The reason why Mike "abandoned" his old software was because he needed to invest all his time into protocol development and advancement. Mike isn't the one to constantly maintain stable server software unless he absolutely has to.

In 2011, he handed Friendica over to two new developers so that he had time to create the Zot protocol.

In 2015 already, he handed Hubzilla over to two new developers so that he had time to explore the advancement of the Zot protocol. He still contributed to Hubzilla's development.

In 2019, he wanted to hand Osada and Zap over to the community, now that they were stable, so he had time to develop Zot8. But the Osada/Zap community was so tiny that he couldn't get a new dedicated developer team together.

In 2024, he wanted to hand (streams) and Forte over to the community because fixing (streams)' huge identity bug, which led to Forte's creation, had burnt him out. He wanted to quit. But, again, he couldn't because (streams) didn't have a single user who had both the time and the knowledge to take over as the new main dev.

Consider this: Gargron was a young man when he made Mastodon. I think he was still at university. Mike Macgirvin made Friendica, he had some three decades of professional work in IT and software under his belly. Gargron was at the beginning of his career. Mike had quit and moved from the USA to the western Australian outback where he has been living as a farmer ever since. He might actually be older than Gargron's parents.

while nomadic identitity would be cool thing, currently it does not exist

Take off your Mastodon glasses and look at the Fediverse and what it actually is like.

Nomadic identity does exist. Not as a vague idea, not as a concept on paper, but as a stable, production-grade feature that has been used to its full extent for well over a decade now. Just because Mastodon doesn't have it, doesn't mean the Fediverse doesn't have it. And just because Mastodon doesn't recognise it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The Fediverse has loads of features which Mastodon users want "the Fediverse" to have. It has features which many Mastodon users have never wanted "the Fediverse" to have such as quote-posts, introduced by Mike Macgirvin on Mistpark in 2010. It even has features that are completely and utterly unimaginable for Mastodon users, and it has had even these since as early as 2010, 2012 or 2015.

Nomadic identity was invented by Mike Macgirvin in 2011 with the Zot protocol.

It was first implemented by him in mid-2012 when he rewrote Red against Zot. This means that Hubzilla itself has been offering full-blown nomadic identity since 2012, almost four years longer than Mastodon has existed.

This very Hubzilla channel that I'm commenting from right here, right now, is actually nomadic. It is cloned across two servers: hub.netzgemeinde.eu and hub.hubzilla.de. And it has been since before Elon Musk announced to take over Twitter in early 2022. When I sent you this comment, it was automatically sync'd over to hub.hubzilla.de. When you sent the comment that I'm replying to, it was automatically sync'd over to hub.hubzilla.de. The clone has actually been of great help at least once.

Unfortunately, non-nomadic software identifies cloned channels as fully separate accounts with fully separate identities. But rest assured: @Jupiter Rowland on hub.hubzilla.de is my clone. It's the live, hot, real-time, bidirectional backup of the main instance of my channel, @Jupiter Rowland on hub.netzgemeinde.eu that you're following now. They're both one and the same channel with one and the same identity, [email protected], even though Mastodon is unable to see it as such. Go check both. You'll see they've got all the same content in them, including comments from others. Including your comment. How else can [email protected] possibly have one of your comments under a post if you've only sent that comment to [email protected] if it weren't for nomadic identity?

Even nomadic identity via ActivityPub is available as a stable, production-grade feature in stable, production-grade software right now as we speak. Forte was the first to be fully nomadic via nothing but ActivityPub, as of mid-August, 2024. Tootik, based on Gemini instead of the World Wide Web, is fully nomadic at server level, too. Mitra is fully nomadic by means of the Minimitra client.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #ActivityPub #Zot #Zot6 #Zot8 #Nomad #Friendica #Red #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Mistpark #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Redmatrix2020 #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Tootik #Mitra #Minimitra #NomadicIdentity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CC: @Jan Wildeboer

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

@Pawlicker About "reply gating": This, or something similar, has been a standard feature at least on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte from the get-go, i.e. from their respective creation on. Hubzilla has had it since 2012. All three rely heavily on permissions for anything and everything. They can make themselves and each other hide the reply button. When someone wants to comment from Mastodon or something else that doesn't understand these permissions, these three simply reject unpermitted comments before they even reach the inbox.

On Hubzilla, the channel-wide permission to comment also includes a permission to like or dislike something. I can generally allow

• only myself
• only certain contacts
• only my contacts
• only my contacts plus those with an unapproved contact request
• anyone on the same Hubzilla hub as me
• anyone on Hubzilla (strangely, this does exclude (streams) channels)
• anyone in the Fediverse
• anyone anywhere on the Web, even without a Fediverse account

to comment on my posts.

In addition, I can turn comments on and off for specific posts. Mind you, if it's a reply, it isn't a post, it's a comment, and I've got no control over it.

On (streams) and Forte, the channel-wide permission to comment is uncoupled from the permission to like or dislike. The channel-wide options are

• only myself plus certain contacts
• only my contacts
• anyone in the Fediverse
• anyone anywhere on the Web, even without a Fediverse account

On top of that, I can generally allow comments only for a certain number of days.

Again, I can turn comments on and off for specific posts. But I can also only allow my contacts to comment on specific posts, and I can define until when comments are allowed on specific posts.

In all three cases, I can even choose to preview technically unpermitted comments and then decide whether I allow or reject them, one by one.

In other words, where I am (I'm commenting from Hubzilla), this not only has been available for longer than Mastodon has even existed, but it's deeply engrained into the culture.

About "quote gating": Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte have all always (in Friendica's case, since 2010) had both actual quotes like on bulletin-board forums (remember the 2000s when forums were all the rage?) and Twitter-quote-tweet-style quote-posts (which literally were the only way for them to share content before they adopted Twitter-retweet-style forwarding).

The former obviously only works in comments. Whether or not it's allowed is defined by whether or not comments are allowed.

The latter doesn't have any permission setting, not even on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte with the most advanced permissions systems in the whole Fediverse. That's because their inventor says that it's technologically impossible to keep people from forwarding or sharing your content in separate posts.

If you disallow actual quote-posts, people can still copy-paste the content of your post into a new post. Unlike when you're actually being quote-posted, you won't even notice unless they mention you. Mind you, while an estimated 60% of all Mastodon users are on iPhones, and another estimated 39% are on Android phones, 100% of all Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte users are on desktop or laptop computers where copy-paste is easy-peasy. It's pretty much impossible to disallow copy-paste, and even if it was, people would resort to screenshots.

You don't want people to quote-post your stuff? Then don't make it public. Once it's public, it's out there, and anyone can do with it whatever they please.

Nobody really misses an actual permission for quote-posts. That's also because Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte aren't primarily a home for Twitter refugees. In fact, neither of them can even understand the ruckus about quote-posts on Mastodon, and neither can Friendica users. Hardly any of them have been on Twitter at any point in the 2020s. There's no influence of Twitter culture anywhere to be found.

The typical path into Hubzilla is not Twitter > Musk buys Twitter > Mastodon > Hubzilla. Not even Twitter > Musk buys Twitter > Mastodon > Friendica > Hubzilla. It's Facebook > diaspora* > Friendica > Hubzilla. Or Facebook > Google+ > diaspora* > Friendica > Hubzilla. The typical path into (streams) is the same, but one step further beyond Hubzilla. The typical path into Forte is the same as into (streams), but another step further beyond (streams).

About the iPhone: Whether or not the iPhone is a status symbol depends on where you are.

In the USA, the iPhone is the Levi's jeans of phones. It's the Ford F-150 of phones. The allegedly all-American American phone. Most importantly, it's what everyone has.

Over here in Germany, the iPhone is the higher-class Mercedes-Benz of phones. The iPhone 15 Pro is the 2026 Mercedes-Benz-AMG E 53 of phones. The iPhone 15 Pro Max is the 2026 Mercedes-Benz-AMG S 63 E Performance of phones, slammed suspensions, standing on polished 22" Lexani wheels, muffler cut-outs always open. In American terms, it's the 2026 Cadillac Escalade-V of phones, gold-foiled, with air-ride, standing on gold-plated 26" Bellagio spinnaz. The phone made for peacocking in rap music video clips. It's the Rolex of phones. For women, it's the genuine Prada or Fendi or Louis Vuitton handbag of phones.

Well, and then there's the iPhone 4S with the cracked screen. It's the 1995 Mercedes-Benz E-Class of phones. Old, worn out, four-banger engine, often rusty as hell, may have been stolen at some point, but it's cheap. And most importantly, it's still a Benz, and it's a real Benz as opposed to "Baby Benz" C-Class and smaller. The Benz for those who need a Benz to show their folks how much of a winner they are, but who can't really afford one.

Over here, the Samsung Galaxy S is the VW Golf of phones. The Americans' Ford F-150 of phones. It's what everyone has. It's the no-brainer that you buy when you don't know what to buy, so you buy what everyone buys. Still, it's expensive for what it does. But all the other brands are akin to "cheap imports" from, what, France or Italy or Japan or Korea or Romania.

The choice of the hardcore nerds in the homeland of Chaos Computer Club and Chaos Communication Congress is never something that can only run stock Android. It's an iPhone even less. They rather buy a Google Pixel, and the first thing they do is root it immediately and install GrapheneOS. Or if they refuse to buy something from Google and/or run a Google OS (de-Googled or not), they acquire a Sony Experia, root it and install SailfishOS. Or they go straight for a Fairphone or even the new Jolla Phone or something like that. I'm pretty sure many want a true successor to the Nokia N900.

If Google locks Android down, these nerds won't flock to Apple. Some may switch to SailfishOS which, on officially supported phones, has the Aliendalvik compatibility layer for Android apps, but only with F-Droid and neither with the Google Play Store proper nor with Micro-G. Many more will go entirely elsewhere like PostmarketOS or PureOS, also seeing as SailfishOS is payware that's half proprietary and closed-source. Or they'll forgo mobile phones entirely or keep old phones alive for as long as they can.

About iOS apps: I guess the notion that the Fediverse equals Mastodon, something that the majorty of Mastodon users believe, is particularly wide-spread among iPhone users. And if it isn't only Mastodon, it doesn't extend beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube. Excluding Pixelfed and PeerTube, if Mastodon can't do it, the Fediverse as a whole can't. I mean, on top of the fact that apps made for Mastodon generally only support Mastodon features because the Mastodon Client API only supports Mastodon features, and the Mastodon Client API is all that these apps understand.

It's particularly bad for Friendica users. If they're on Android, they may opt for a Mastodon app. There are several Android apps for Mastodon that have been reported to work with Friendica. Or they may want to try one of the dedicated Friendica apps which are at various levels of unfinished. Or they may choose the middle-ground and use Fedilab.

But if they're on an iPhone, they'll discover that literally not even a single Mastodon iOS app works with Friendica. There is no Fedilab. And the iOS version of RaccoonForFriendica requires Test Flight, and it's probably even more incomplete than the Android version.

In general, iPhone apps are rarely developed for the same reasons as Android apps. Most Android Fediverse apps are open-source and under a free license, and they're also or exclusively available on F-Droid. They're developed by FLOSS enthusiasts/idealists. However, these people don't develop for iOS. That's because the Apple App Store is inherently hostile towards free software, and it's completely incompatible with all versions of the GNU General Public License.

Also, as you've already pointed out, you absolutely need a Mac to develop iOS apps. But if someone releases FLOSS apps on F-Droid, you can bet they're running GNU/Linux at home (more often Arch or a derivative than you may think), and they won't touch any corporate-made, closed-source OS with a 10-foot barge pole. They may even steer clear of anything where Novell, Red Hat or Canonical is involved.

With hobbyist FLOSS enthusiasts out of the way of developing iPhone apps, this is only ever done by those who do it for money. Or fame and social status (same reason why they always have a fairly new iPhone). Or both. But then they discovered that the Fediverse, to them at least, is a hive of radical leftist tech nerds whom you can't impress with expensive bling-bling from big American gigacorps. They failed to gather the umpteen thousand followers they wanted. So they left for greener pastures: Bluesky. Or they even went back to their hundreds of thousands of followers on 𝕏. Doing so, they also abandoned their iPhone app development.

By the way, none of this affects Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. For starters, just like Friendica, all four can be installed as Progressive Web Apps. However, at least in the case of these three, there is no alternative to the Web interface whatsoever. There's an old Android app for Hubzilla named Nomad, but it's only available on F-Droid, it hasn't been worked on since December, 2019, it only runs on older Android versions and Aliendalvik, and it's only a wrapper for the Web interface anyway. For (streams) and Forte, there's zilch.

There has been some talk about developing a native mobile Hubzilla app. It's kind of difficult, though. Generally, Hubzilla users use Hubzilla on desktop OS's. They can't imagine people daily-driving phones as their main or only end-user devices, so they think that a Hubzilla app only needs the features one would need when out and about because everyone will go back to their desktop or laptop computers anyway when they're back home.

In reality, many users of the Hubzilla app will only use that app. They won't use Hubzilla's Web interface in a browser. They won't use it on a desktop or laptop computer either, usually because they simply don't have one. They'll resort to that app for everything. In fact, they'll perceive Hubzilla as a phone app rather than a Fediverse server application. This means that a Hubzilla mobile app will inevitably have to cover all of Hubzilla's features except those that really don't make sense in a phone app (e.g. the PDL editor). But a fully-featured Hubzilla app would be so complex, it'd make infamous K-9 Mail pale in comparison.

Licensing is the least problem here. Hubzilla and Forte are released under the MIT license, (streams) was released into the public domain. So I guess putting an app for either of them under the MIT license would be an option, one that's fairly compatible with the Apple App Store even. It's just that this app would be bound to be an absolute monster.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #ReplyControl #Permissions #MastodonApp #MastodonApps #FediverseApp #FediverseApps #iOS #iOSApp #iOSApps #iPhone #iPhoneApp #iPhoneApps #Android #AndroidApp #AndroidApps

@Justin Crozer @Stefan Bohacek @Lentävä Kalakukko @Roni Rolle Laukkarinen Whenever I see Mastodon users talk about "culture" in a Fediverse context, I have to wonder: What exactly do they refer to when they talk about "culture"?

Is it Fediverse culture? As in, overarching, software-independent Fediverse culture?

As in, taking into consideration that Fediverse server applications that aren't Mastodon, e.g. Misskey or Sharkey or Friendica or Hubzilla, have different cultures than Mastodon?

Recognising a post or a comment from one of these applications, acknowledging that it comes from a place with a different history, a different set of features and thus a different culture than Mastodon and refraining from enforcing Mastodon's unwritten rules against it?

Or does "culture" only refer to Mastodon's culture? Does it reject or completely disregard all cultures in the Fediverse that aren't Mastodon's and demand the whole Fediverse adopt Mastodon's culture and only Mastodon's culture?

Do these "bad eggs" include users who post more than 500 characters at once (which, by the way, is perfectly normal everywhere outside of Mastodon)?

Do these "bad eggs" include users who reply to people who haven't mentioned them first, and whom they aren't mutually following either (which, by the way, is perfectly normal in large parts of the non-Mastodon Fediverse, too)?

Do these "bad eggs" include users who quote-post Mastodon toots that must not be quote-posted (because they've had quote-posts for much longer than Mastodon, but without a no-quote flag so they can't see Mastodon's no-quote flag)?

Do these "bad eggs" incllude users who "misuse" Mastodon's CW field for summaries (because they have literally had the exact same text field as a summary field for seven years longer than Mastodon has had it as a CW field, and because having a summary field makes a whole lot of sense if your character limit is not 500, but over 16.7 million)?

Do these "bad eggs" include users who use more than four hashtags in one post (because, unlike Mastodon, the places where they are have filtering as well as automatically having messages hidden behind CW buttons deeply engrained into their cultures, but this requires the appropriate keywords to be present)?

If so, then this explains why only Mastodon users can enjoy significant reach on Mastodon: Everyone else is mass-blocked for misbehaving by Mastodon's standards.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #MastodonCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@Jasper Burns

Groups, part 2: Starting a thread

Okay, here comes the twist. Here is where the group magic happens.

If you want to start a new thread in that group, you have to be a member of the group account. Connected to the group account. In Mastospeak, mutually follow the group account.

Then, if you send a new post that mentions the group account, and it is not a reply to another post, then the group account will automatically quote your post and send the quote-post with your post in it to all its connections (followers).

You know quotes? Quote-posts? Like, quote-tweets? What half of Mastodon is so afraid of because it's used on Twitter only to harass and dogpile people? That's what I'm talking about. Friendica has had these quote-posts for almost 16 years, and never have they been used for harassment and dogpiling, for never has anyone used Friendica as a drop-in replacement for Twitter. Friendica calls them "shares". And Friendica has used these quote-posts in groups for almost 16 years.

That is, within Friendica (and its descendants), one thing is a wee bit different: If you're on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte, you have to send a DM with a special mention (!group instead of @group on Friendica, @!group on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte) to the group account for this to happen. This automatically activates what's "mentioned only" on Mastodon and makes your post a DM.

But from Mastodon accounts and the like, it accepts public posts with @group mentions. That's because Mastodon & Co. don't know !group and @!group mentions.

(2/9)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Fediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups

Are you referring to my mentions being @Erik :heart_agender: and @Roknrol rather than what you're used to, namely @⁠bright_helpings and @⁠roknrol? Using the long name rather than the short name and keeping the @ outside the link rather than making it part of the link? Likewise, the # being outside the hashtag link rather than being part of it?

This is because I'm not on Mastodon. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has never been. So this is not a toot.

No, really. This is what I post from: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/channel/jupiter_rowland, https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/profile/jupiter_rowland. I ask you: Does this look like Mastodon? Have you ever seen Mastodon look like this?

Where I am, this style of mentions and hashtags is hard-coded. And it has been since long before Mastodon was even an idea.

I'm on something named Hubzilla. Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance. Hubzilla is not a Mastodon fork either. Hubzilla has got absolutely nothing to do with Mastodon at all.

It is its very own project, fully independent from Mastodon (https://hubzilla.org, https://framagit.org/hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla).

Hubzilla has not intruded into "the Mastodon Fediverse" either. The Fediverse is older than Mastodon. And Hubzilla was there before Mastodon.

Hubzilla was launched by @Mike Macgirvin ?️ in March, 2015, eight months before Mastodon, by renaming and redesigning his own Red Matrix from 2012, almost four years before Mastodon. And the Red Matrix was a fork of a fork of his own Friendica, which was launched on July 2nd, 2010, 15 years ago, five and a half years before Mastodon. (https://en.wikipedia.org/Friendica, https://friendi.ca, https://github.com/friendica, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica)

Friendica was there before Mastodon, too.

Here's the official Friendica/Hubzilla timeline on Hubzilla's official website to show you that I'm not making anything up: https://hubzilla.org/page/info/timeline. Scroll all the way down and notice all the features that you may right now know for a fact that the Fediverse doesn't have, but that Friendica has introduced to the Fediverse 15 years ago, five and a half years before Mastodon was launched.

Again, Mastodon has never been its own network. The Fediverse has never been only Mastodon. When Mastodon was launched in January, 2016, it immediately federated with

• GNU social, the successor to @Evan Prodromou's StatusNet from 2008 (the actual start of the Fediverse, eight years older than Mastodon)
• @Mike Macgirvin ?️'s Friendica, now maintained by @Tobias and @Michael 🇺🇦
• @Mike Macgirvin ?️'s Hubzilla

Friendica has been formatting mentions and hashtags the way I just did for 15 years now. When Mastodon was launched, Friendica has been formatting them that way for five and a half years already, and Hubzilla has done so for ten months. It is hard-coded there. It is not a user option.

That's because not everything in the Fediverse is a Twitter clone or Twitter alternative. [b]Friendica was designed as a Facebook alternative with full-blown long-form blogging capability. And Hubzilla adds even more stuff to this. This is why Friendica and Hubzilla don't mimic Twitter.

Another shocking fact: As you can clearly see here, Friendica and Hubzilla don't have Mastodon's 500-character limit. Friendica's character limit is 200,000. Hubzilla's character limit is 16,777,215, the maximum length of the database field. And it's deeply engrained in their culture, which is many years older than Mastodon's culture, to not worry about the length of a post exceeding 500 characters.

One more shocking fact: Friendica has had quote-posts since its very beginning. So has Hubzilla. Both have always been able to quote-post any public Mastodon toot, and they will forever remain able to quote-post any public Mastodon toot. And Mastodon will never be able to do anything against it. (By the way: In 15 years of Friendica, nobody has ever used quote-posts for dogpiling or harassment purposes. Neither Friendica nor Hubzilla is Twitter.)

You find this disturbing? You think none of this should exist in the Fediverse, even though all this has been in the Fediverse for longer than Mastodon?

Then go ahead and block all instances of Friendica and Hubzilla as well as all instances of Mike's later creations, (streams) (https://codeberg.org/streams/streams) from 2021 and Forte (https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte) from 2024.

• https://friendica.fediverse.observer/list
• https://fedidb.com/software/friendica
• https://rumbly.net/communities?project=friendica
• https://nomad.fedi-verse.hu/communities?project=friendica
• https://streams.elsmussols.net/communities?project=friendica
• https://hubzilla.fediverse.observer/list
• https://fedidb.com/software/hubzilla
• https://rumbly.net/communities?project=hubzilla
• https://nomad.fedi-verse.hu/communities?project=hubzilla
• https://streams.elsmussols.net/communities?project=hubzilla
• https://rumbly.net/communities?type=streams_repository
• https://nomad.fedi-verse.hu/communities?type=streams_repository
• https://streams.elsmussols.net/communities?type=streams_repository
• https://rumbly.net/communities?project=forte
• https://nomad.fedi-verse.hu/communities?project=forte
• https://streams.elsmussols.net/communities?project=forte

Or you could go ask @Seirdy / DM me the word "bread" and @Garden Fence Blocklist as well as @Mad Villain of @The Bad Space to add every last instance on any of these lists to their blocklists for being "rampantly and unabashedly ableist and xenophobic by design" due to not being and acting and working like Mastodon and just as rampantly and unabashedly refusing to fully adopt and adapt to the Mastodon-centric "Fediverse culture" as defined by fresh Twitter refugees on Mastodon in mid-2022 as well as refusing to abandon their own culture which is disturbingly incompatible with Mastodon's. Essentially try and have four entire Fediverse server applications Fediblocked once and for all because they're so disturbing from a "Fediverse equals Mastodon" point of view.

Or you could go to Mastodon's GitHub repository (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon), submit a feature request for defederating Mastodon from everything that isn't Mastodon by design and then go lobbying for support for your feature request.

As for why I have so many hashtags below my comments, here is what they mean. Many of them are meant to trigger filters, including such that automatically hide posts behind content warning buttons, a feature that Mastodon has had since October, 2022, that Friendica has had since July, 2010, and that Hubzilla has had since March, 2015.

• #Long, #LongPost = This post is over 500 characters long. Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see my or anyone else's long posts.
• #CWLong, #CWLongPost = CW: long post (over 500 characters long). Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see my or anyone else's long posts.
• #FediMeta, #FediverseMeta = This post talks about the Fediverse. Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone talk about the Fediverse.
• #CWFediMeta, #CWFediverseMeta = CW: Fediverse meta. Or: CW: Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta. Or: CW: Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta. Create a filter for either or both of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone talk about the Fediverse.
• #NotOnlyMastodon, #FediverseIsNotMastodon, #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse: This post talks about the Fediverse not only being Mastodon. Create a filter for either or multiple or all of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about the Fediverse being more than Mastodon. Otherwise, click or tap any of these hashtags to read more about it in your Fediverse app.
• #Friendica: This post talks about the Facebook alternative in the Fediverse named Friendica. Create a filter for it if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Friendica. Otherwise, click or tap it to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
• #Hubzilla: This post talks about the Swiss army knif of the Fediverse named Hubzilla. Create a filter for it if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Hubzilla. Otherwise, click or tap it to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
• #Streams, #(streams): This post talks about the Facebook alternative in the Fediverse commonly referred to as (streams). Create a filter for either or both of them if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Friendica. Otherwise, click or tap either of them to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
• #Forte: This post talks about the Facebook alternative in the Fediverse named Forte. Create a filter for it if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about Forte. Otherwise, click or tap it to read more about it in your Fediverse app. It is also meant for post discovery.
• #AltText = This post talks about alt-text and/or contains an image with alt-text. It is primarily meant for post discovery.
• #AltTextMeta = This post talks about alt-text. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about alt-text.
• #CWAltTextMeta = CW: alt-text meta. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about alt-text.
• #ImageDescription = This post talks about image descriptions and/or contains an image with an image description. It is primarily meant for post discovery.
• #ImageDescriptions, #ImageDescriptionMeta = This post talks about image descriptions. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about image descriptions.
• #CWImageDescriptionMeta = CW: image description meta. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about image descriptions.
• #Hashtag, #Hashtags, #HashtagMeta = This post talks about hashtags. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about hashtags.
• #CWHashtagMeta = CW: hashtag meta. Create a filter for this hashtag if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about hashtags.
• #CharacterLimit, #CharacterLimits = This post is talking about character limits. It is primarily meant for post discovery. But if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about character limits, create a filter for any of these hashtags.
• #QuotePost, #QuoteTweet, #QuoteToot, #QuoteBoost = This post talks about quote-posts and/or contains a quote-post. If this disturbs you, create a filter for any of these hashtags.
• #QuotePosts, #QuoteTweets, #QuoteToots, #QuoteBoosts, #QuotedShares = This post talks about quote-posts. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about quote-posts.
• #QuotePostDebate, #QuoteTootDebate = This post talks about quote-posts. Create a filter for either of these hashtags if you don't want to see me or anyone else talk about quote-posts.
• #FediblockMeta = This post is talking about fediblocks. It is primarily meant for post discovery.

Lastly: Having all hashtags in one line at the very end of a post that only contains hashtags is the preferred way in the Fediverse. For one, hashtags in their own line at the end of the post irritate screen reader users much less than hashtags in the middle of the text. It's actually hashtags in the middle of the text that are ableist. Besides, Mastodon is explicitly designed to have a separate hashtag line at the end of the post.

@Scott M. Stolz Don't mix up quotes and quote-posts. They're something very different, not only in technology, but also in use-case and especially in cultural implications.

Whereas on platforms with threaded conversations, quotes are usually used in comments within a thread, and on many platforms, such comments could be removed by the thread owner.

This is a quote. Like in a bulletin-board forum. This is actually only used in comments. For Mastodon users, it's basically unimaginable that this ever happens in social media. Twitter has never had this, so most Mastodon users don't even know the very concept of this. Thus, it is not what they're upset about.

What Mastodon users are so upset about are quote-posts. What they refer to as "quote-posts" or "quote-toots" is what we call "shares" or "shared posts", what Twitter/X calls "quote-tweets", and what is used on Twitter/X for harassment and dogpiling purposes, namely this:

Scott M. Stolz wrote the following post Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:54:18 +0200 It should be noted that Twitter-style platforms use quote posts in an entirely different way than platforms with threaded conversations.

With Mastodon, someone can quote you, criticize you, and then people dogpile on. Since it is not part of a thread, and is its own top level post, nothing can be done about it.

Whereas on platforms with threaded conversations, quotes are usually used in comments within a thread, and on many platforms, such comments could be removed by the thread owner. Yes, they can create new top level post quoting someone, but that seems to be used less on threaded conversation platforms than on Twitter style platforms.

This creates a different culture surrounding quoting people, since one has potential consequences and one does not.

Plus, I think there is also a cultural difference between people who want to broadcast their thoughts versus people who want to join conversations. People who want to participate in conversations are typically less hostile since they get banned or blocked pretty quickly. People who broadcast their posts just want as many followers to see it as possible and tend to block anyone that disagrees with them. It is a different mindset.

That is why Mastodon has to implement quote controls, but thread conversation platforms do not.

You should see that it's something completely different. This never happens within the same thread. It wouldn't make sense to quote-post/quote-tweet/share a post in a comment on that same post.

This is what Mastodon users what to have control over. This is what they want to prevent. Entirely. They would want a switch that makes Hubzilla hide the Share button under a post of theirs if they knew that a) Hubzilla exists, and b) Hubzilla can share posts/quote-post.

This is what @Mike Macgirvin ?️ keeps preaching over and over and over that literally the only possible way to keep this from happening is by not posting in public. For this is what neither Hubzilla nor Mike's own (streams) and Forte have a permission setting for because even their highly advanced and fine-grained permissions systems have no way of implementing actually water-tight quote-post control. So what chance does Mastodon have with its total lack of a permission system and no understanding of Hubzilla's, (streams)', Forte's or even only Friendica's permission system?

Mastodon doesn't have either implemented, neither quotes nor shares/quote-posts, at least not beyond displaying quotes properly formatted (it is working on displaying quote-posts properly formatted now). Hubzilla has inherited both from Friendica which has had both for 15 years.

CC: @Matteo (Mastodon)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Quote #Quotes #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate

@Matteo (Mastodon)

Anyone can copy text from anywhere, start a new thread in the Fediverse, copy it in there, mark it as a quote or not, and make fun of the author.

And if that fails, they'll resort to what they've always been doing: screenshots. Not even (streams) and Forte with their advanced permissions systems can keep people from taking screenshots. (Then again, they don't have a quote-post permission setting either because such a thing wouldn't work across the Fediverse anyway.)

In the meantime, Friendica has had quote-posts for a decade and a half, and they've always been used sincerely, believe it or not. Same on Friendica's various descendants.

If the author is not fairly mentioned in the thread, he may never find out about it and be able to defend himselve.

If you're quote-posted from Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte, you're automatically notified as if you've been mentioned. I'm not sure about those server apps that have implemented Misskey's way of quote-posting, though.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate

@Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸 The Mastodon devs are talking as if either the Fediverse is only Mastodon, or the Fediverse as a whole doesn't have quote-posts.

Neither of this is true. The Fediverse has had quote-posts since July 2nd, 2010 when Mistpark (now known as Friendica) was launched. Mastodon toots have been quote-post-able since Mastodon itself was launched, for when Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated with at least two Fediverse server applications that have quote-posts, namely Friendica and Hubzilla, a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator.

Nowadays, at least Pleroma, Akkoma, all other Pleroma forks, Misskey, Calckey, Firefish, Iceshrimp-JS, Iceshrimp.NET, CherryPick, Sharkey, all other Misskey forks, Mitra, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte can quote-post Mastodon toots with no problem.

And Mastodon won't be able to stop them. No, seriously, it won't. Not with a non-standard, proprietary, home-brew opt-in or opt-out switch that doesn't tie into anything that the other Fediverse server apps have. And whatever switch Mastodon is working on will not tie into anything that already exists.

Let me put it this way: Hubzilla has the second-most advanced and fine-grained permissions system in the Fediverse. It goes well beyond most people's imagination. It works on three levels: for the whole channel (that's similar to a Mastodon account), for individual contacts (that's "followers" in Mastodon lingo, but Hubzilla doesn't distinguish between followers and followed), for individual content. (streams) and Forte are the only ones with an even more advanced and fine-grained permissions system.

But even they don't have a quote-post permission setting. And they have permission settings for just about everything. You want reply control in the Fediverse? Hubzilla has reply control, and (streams) and Forte have reply control on steroids. But what they don't have is a quote-posting permission because that's next to impossible to control across the Fediverse even with the most advanced permissions system.

As @Mike Macgirvin ?️ (professional software developer for almost half a century, designer of two Fediverse protocols, creator of Friendica and Hubzilla, inventor of nomadic identity, creator and maintainer of (streams) and Forte) says: The only way to make your posts un-quote-post-able is by not posting in public and not allowing everyone in the Fediverse full access to your posts. Set your "Who can quote" however you want, I'll always be able to quote-post all your public posts with no problem and with no resistance.

So what chance does Mastodon have then? Mastodon which doesn't even know what permissions are? Developed by Eugen Rochko who actually has a history of head-butting with Mike Macgirvin, and who would never take any step towards anything that Mike has ever developed?

I'm commenting from Hubzilla right now, and I'm also on (streams). And I can tell you: If you make any of your posts "un-quote-post-able", this still won't make my Share buttons on Hubzilla and (streams) disappear.

CC: @Stefan Bohacek @FinchHaven sfba

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@FinchHaven sfba

I've seen no mention (perhaps I missed it) of who exactly gets to --> create <-- these "remote quote posts"

"remote" implies no one on my local instance

A common misconception on Mastodon is that the Fediverse doesn't have quote-posts. Anywhere.

As a matter of fact, however:

• Pleroma users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Akkoma users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Misskey users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Calckey users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Firefish users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Iceshrimp-JS users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Iceshrimp.NET users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• CherryPick users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Sharkey users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Users on any other Forkey can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Mitra users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Friendica users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Hubzilla users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• (streams) users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Forte users can quote-post Mastodon toots.
• Many other non-Mastodon Fediverse users can quote-post Mastodon toots.

None of them have included quote-posts with the explicit intent to harass Mastodon users.

To give you an example: Friendica was launched 15 years ago, more than five years before Mastodon. It already had quote-posts back then. When Mastodon was launched, it was Mastodon that connected itself to Friendica and not the other way around. And ever since that very moment, Friendica was able to quote-post Mastodon toots.

If Mastodon adds its own, proprietary, home-brew, non-standard quote-post opt-in or opt-out, [b]all of the above will still be able to quote-post any public Mastodon toots with zero resistance[b]. In fact, they won't even know whether a Mastodon user has opted out of or not opted into being quote-post-able.

To make matters worse, the Fediverse has at least two different quote-post technologies.

Misskey and the various Forkeys put RE: <URL of the quote-posted message> into a message, and it's automatically rendered as a quote-post. It references the original, and when the original is edited, so is the quote-post. I don't know whether or not the quote-posted user is notified.

Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte generate a dumb copy of the original message from an eight-digit reference number. It comes with a "headline" containing the name of the original poster, profile picture included, and a link to the original message. Since it's a dumb copy, the quote-post will not change when the original is edited. The quote-posted user is notified similarly to being mentioned when being quote-posted.

Immediate, effective counter-measures are completely impossible against both.

CC: @Stefan Bohacek

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@PaulaToThePeople

Mastodon decided against quote posts so far, so Hubzilla and (streams) should not allow quoting Mastodon posts.

I mean, I could propose to Mike, Mario and Harald to automatically remove the Share button under any and all posts and comments from Mastodon, just to see their reactions.

But as a matter of fact, Pleroma and Akkoma can quote-post Mastodon toots just the same. The same goes for Misskey and its over 50 forks, including but not limited to JavaScript-based Iceshrimp which won't get any new features, Iceshrimp.NET which isn't officially released yet, Sharkey, CherryPick and Catodon. And Friendica can quote-post Mastodon toots, too.

Several dozen Fediverse server projects can quote-post Mastodon toots. They all would have to change. Or they all would have had to change the moment that it was decided that Mastodon lacks quote-posts to protect its users rather than to stay simple.

And where are you reading that Mastodon will reinvent the wheel? To me it reads like they are working on Fediverse-wide interoperability for these features.

That has been Mastodon's track record since its very inception. I won't believe that anything has changed about this until Mastodon actually implements technology introduced by another Fediverse server project.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate

@PaulaToThePeople It isn't just a matter of consent. Besides, for example, I do have quote-post control here on Hubzilla.

I can give permission to quote-post my posts to

• everyone in the Fediverse
• everyone on Hubzilla and (streams)
• everyone on this hub
• approved and unapproved connections
• only approved connections
• only those of my connections whom I explicitly give permission by contact role
• nobody but myself

Over on (streams), I can still give that permission to

• everyone in the Fediverse
• all my connections
• only myself + specific connections whom I grant that permission either by permission role or by individual connection settings

It's much more a matter of technology.

Mastodon is about to completely re-invent the wheel with a non-standard, Mastodon-only setting. This setting will only work within Mastodon simply because it probably won't even be documented anywhere, especially not before it's officially rolled out.

There simply is no way that every last instance of Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Calckey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, CherryPick, Catodon, Meisskey, Tanukey, Neko, dozens of other Misskey forks, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte etc. etc. will have that setting implemented before Mastodon rolls it out so that even the users on mastodon.social are perfectly safe from the first second on.

Besides, @Mike Macgirvin 🖥️, creator of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte and still the only maintainer of the latter two, will never introduce proprietary Mastodon features to them. He'd rather risk (streams) and Forte becoming incompatible with Mastodon. The same goes for @Mario Vavti and @Harald Eilertsen, Hubzilla's main maintainers.

If Mastodon wants to become a perfectly safe haven against unallowed quote-posting, it has only got one choice: It must introduce something like (streams)' and Forte's user agent filter and use it to block just everything that isn't Mastodon. Like, include a hard-coded allowlist that only includes Mastodon plus what little can't quote or quote-post anyway.

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@PaulaToThePeople @Stefan Bohacek Keep one thing in mind:

Mastodon may not have quote-posts yet. But the Fediverse has quote-posts right now. And it has had them since before Mastodon was made.

Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Calckey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, CherryPick, Catodon, Meisskey, Tanukey, Neko, dozens of other Misskey forks, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte etc. etc., they all have quote-posts. They're all fully capable of quote-posting any Mastodon toot.

None of them has introduced quote-posts to harass Twitter refugees on Mastodon. At least Friendica and Hubzilla have had quote-posts since long before Mastodon was even made.

You will be able to choose whether your posts can be quoted at all.

At least by Mastodon users.

But since this will be Mastodon re-inventing the wheel with brand-new, proprietary, Mastodon-only technology, everything I've listed above will still be able to quote-post anyone and anything on Mastodon with zero resistance.

To quote-post myself and the guy who invented Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte:

Jupiter Rowland schrieb den folgenden Beitrag Sat, 20 Jul 2024 01:29:11 +0200 I think I've just chased someone out of the Fediverse.

That someone was afraid of Mastodon being "screwed over" by becoming quote-post-able.

I've told him the truth: Mastodon has been quote-post-able for as long as it has been around. Mastodon became quote-post-able the very moment it was launched.

That's because when Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated with Friendica which is from 2010, which had been around for almost six years at that point, and which has had quote-posts from its own inception AFAIK. Mastodon also immediately federated with Hubzilla which has had quote-posts since its own inception, since it had been forked from Friendica, and that was in 2012.

Mastodon has never been un-quote-post-able.

Right now, there are dozens of Fediverse server apps whose users can quote-post Mastodon toots with no resistance.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate
Mike Macgirvin 🖥️ schrieb den folgenden Beitrag Sat, 20 Jul 2024 03:18:39 +0200 The closest you'll ever get to making Mastodon un-quote-postable is to post privately. Not unlisted. Private. Most fediverse software will honour this today; and it doesn't require yet another "pretend permission". Like unlisted.

And Mike should know. He brought things to the Fediverse like actually working permissions. Including permissions on two levels to quote-post any content on a channel. Readily available right now at least on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

Also, this is what people on Friendica and its descendants have been using quote-posts for since 2010.

You will be notified when someone quotes you.

You already are when someone on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte quote-posts one of your posts.

As for Pleroma, Misskey and their forks, you aren't notified right now, and I've got my doubts that you will be after this change.

Also, "quote" and "quote-post" are two different things. Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte can do both. "Quote" is what I'm doing right here. Whether or not you're notified depends on whether or not you're mentioned.

And blocking quotes is even less possible. A quote only consists of a pair of BBcode tags plus the quoted text in-between. And on Friendica and all its descendants, you don't work with a WYSIWYG editor by default, but you have to get your hands dirty on raw markup code.

You will be able to withdraw your post from the quoted context at any time.

Again, probably not if someone on Pleroma, Misskey or one of their forks quote-posts you.

And definitely not if someone on Friendica or one of its descendants quote-posts you.

The difference is that a quote-post on Pleroma, Misskey or one of their forks is actually a reference to the original. On Friendica and its descendants, a quote-post is an automatically generated dumb copy of the original.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Iceshrimp #CherryPick #Sharkey #Catodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate

@toolbear#🪧 From an outside-of-Mastodon point of view (I'm posting this from Hubzilla which is very, very much not like Mastodon), I can see schisms through the Fediverse happen quite easily.

For example:

• One side: Mastodon fundamentalists who want to enforce the Mastodon culture and the Mastodon "rules" (both as established by the first wave of Twitter refugees in the mid-2010s, based solely on Mastodon 3.x and completely ignoring the rest of the Fediverse) all over the whole Fediverse. And everything that doesn't comply must be defederated.
• The other side: Places that can do the same as Mastodon, but that aren't Mastodon, and that have their very own culture, not to mention features which are deeply engrained in their culture, but forbidden in Mastodon's culture. Pleroma and its forks. Misskey and its forks, fork-forks, fork-fork-rewrites etc. Friendica and its family tree. And so forth.

Or, although this may become obsolete:

• One side: Those on Mastodon who don't want to have quote-posts in the Fediverse.
• The other side: Again, just about everything that isn't Mastodon while capable of doing Mastodon things, because it all does have quote-posts right now.

A variant that's more likely to happen soon:

• One side: Mastodon, full stop. It has introduced quote-posts. It has also introduced a quote-post opt-in or opt-out switch. This switch, however, is proprietary, non-standard and completely incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse.
  On top of this, as demanded in that one quote-post feature request, there's a new rule for all Mastodon instances: Any and all Fediverse instances which "circumvent" Mastodon's quote-post opt-in or opt-out switch to quote-post Mastodon toots must be regarded "rogue" and Fediblocked.
• On the other side: Once again, just about everything that isn't Mastodon, but that can do what Mastodon can do. Once again, it can quote-post right now. It can also quote-post Mastodon toots right now. And it won't know that proprietary, non-standard, Mastodon-only opt-in or opt-out. So it can quote-post any and all Mastodon toots with zero resistance.

The logical result: All Mastodon instances must immediately block all instances of Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Calckey, Firefish, Iceshrimp-JS, Iceshrimp.NET, CherryPick, Sharkey, Catodon, Neko, Meisskey, Tanukey, Mitra, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte etc. etc. All instances of all of these have quote-posts. They can all quote-post Mastodon toots. And when Mastodon introduces the opt-in or opt-out switch, they won't know that switch. And what they don't know, they can't heed. So they'll still be able to quote-post any and all Mastodon toots, completely regardless (and oblivious) of opt-in or opt-out status.

This, however, is against the new rule that states that all instances that can quote-post toots that shall not be quote-posted must be blocked. Which applies to all of them. Thus, all of them, every last one of them, must be defederated.

If properly carried out, this would fully separate several dozen entire Fediverse server applications from Mastodon. The only reason why these server applications won't be fully separated is because it's a game of whack-a-mole. Mastodon can't defederate entire server applications by user agent (this is possible and actually implemented on both (streams) and Forte), so server applications have to be defederated instance by instance.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #MastodonCulture #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #FediSchism

@Lasse Gismo - 🇮🇱🇺🇦🇸🇩 If they notice.

Thing is: If someone on Pleroma, Akkoma, Mitra, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte quote-posts someone else, that someone else is notified as if they've been mentioned. If they're notified when they're mentioned by a non-contact out of the blue, that is. Mods might not notice.

If someone on Misskey or any of its various still active forks and fork-forks quote-posts someone else, that someone else is not notified, and neither are any mods unless they happen upon the quote-post.

Also, nobody and nothing on Mastodon can prevent anybody outside of Mastodon from quote-posting anyone on Mastodon. And there's a whole lot outside of Mastodon that can and will always be able to quote-post Mastodon toots with zero resistance. See my start post in this thread for 18 server apps that can do that.

However, this much should be said: Friendica has had quote-posts for over 14 years. Hubzilla has had quote-posts for, technically speaking, almost 13 years. And never in all these years have quote-posts been used on either to harass anyone on Friendica, on Hubzilla, on Mastodon or elsewhere.

Sounds hard to believe for people who only know Twitter and Mastodon, I know. But Friendica and Hubzilla aren't almost entirely populated by people who came from Twitter. They aren't Twitter alternatives anyway. Friendica is a Facebook alternative, and Hubzilla is a Facebook alternative on coke and steroids. Both have a totally, completely different culture from Twitter as well as from Mastodon, both early Mastodon and today's Mastodon. There is no influence from Twitter on them whatsoever.

In fact, until Hubzilla 9.0 which came out this year, Hubzilla did not even have repeats (= retweets = boosts). It had always used quote-posts (= shared posts in Hubzilla lingo) for this purpose.

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@Tejan Ausland Yes, but many on Mastodon don't understand this.

For them, the Mastodon devs are the creators and keepers of the Fediverse itself as well as "the good guys" who have made the single most awesome piece of server software in decades. If the Mastodon devs even only imply that an opt-out or opt-in switch for quote-posts will bring absolute safety from being quote-posted, they take it at face value.

So when they opt out of being quote-posted, and someone from outside of Mastodon quote-posts them anyway, they won't blame it on the Mastodon devs having promised them something impossible. Never would the Mastodon devs do that.

Rather, the devs behind whatever that someone is using are the bad guys. They're rogues, they're evil hackers who have introduced quote-posts just to be able to spite and harass Mastodon users. Why else would something introduce quote-posts after all?

The one thing that'll protect wherever that someone is from their wrath is that most of them won't be able to figure out what that someone is using. Just because Mastodon users can look up a post at its source, doesn't mean they know they can, much less they actually do.

So they may try to get allegedly rogue instances Fediblocked just because these instances are non-Mastodon instances doing what they regularly do. They may succeed because at least some blocklist maintainers don't have a clue about the Fediverse outside Mastodon, its capabilities and its culture either. But it's unlikely that they'll pinpoint this culprit having used Sharkey, have all of Sharkey Fediblocked for being able to "circumvent" Mastodon's quote-post opt-out/opt-in, then pinpoint that the next quote-poster is using Akkoma and have all of Akkoma Fediblocked and so forth.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Blocklist #Blocklists #BlocklistMeta #FediblockMeta

By the way, there's exactly one way of being safe from being quote-posted in the Fediverse:

Move to Hubzilla or (streams). Keep all optional communications protocols off, including ActivityPub. Disallow quoting and mirroring of your posts entirely in your channel role (on Hubzilla) or keep your channel type on Limited ((streams)). Make sure that none of your contact roles (Hubzilla) or permission roles ((streams)) allows it. Try to live with only contacts on Hubzilla and (streams); none of them would ever use quote-posts for nefarious reasons, but better safe than sorry. Always post to a restricted audience so that sharing your posts isn't possible anyway. And never comment on public posts so that sharing your comments isn't possible either.

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@Stefan Bohacek

Also worth mentioning that quote boosts, which have also recently received funding, will include work on privacy and safety features around them, possibly extending to other areas of the online experience.

These "privacy and safety features" are non-sense.

They're proprietary, they're non-standard, they're Mastodon-specific. And they are expected to work only by respecting a proprietary, non-standard, Mastodon-specific quote-post permission flag which probably won't even be documented anywhere except Mastodon's server code.

The opt-out feature will only work within a 100% Mastodon bubble and even that only if no non-Mastodon user finds content from within this bubble by searching mastodon.social for hashtags.

Mastodon is selling its whole quote-post feature as a total revolution, as the very introduction of quote-posts to the Fediverse. And it will work. I've once run a poll on whether the Fediverse has quote-posts. 71% of all voters thought the Fediverse does not have quote-posts right now. And that was in my bubble which, in comparison to Mastodon in general, is fairly Fediverse-savvy and full of non-Mastodon users.

But as a matter of fact, the Fediverse does have quote-posts right now! Almost everything that can do microblogging in a way has quote-posts.

Pleroma has quote-posts.

Akkoma has quote-posts.

Misskey has quote-posts.

Firefish has quote-posts.

Iceshrimp has quote-posts.

Iceshrimp.NET has quote-posts.

Sharkey has quote-posts.

Catodon has quote-posts.

Friendica has quote-posts.

Hubzilla has quote-posts.

(streams) has quote-posts.

And so forth.

They haven't introduced quote-posts to spite Mastodon. Some of them have had quote-posts since before Mastodon even existed. Friendica, for example, was created with quote-posts available, and that was five and a half years before Mastodon was created. For as long as Mastodon has existed, Friendica could quote-post Mastodon toots. And so could Hubzilla, created ten months before Mastodon.

In fact, all of the above can quote-post any Mastodon toot right now, with no problems, with zero resistance.

Guess what'll change when Mastodon introduces quote-posts plus the opt-in switch.

Well, Mastodon will be able to quote-post. Mastodon might be able to display quote-posts from outside properly, but probably not because it's ignoring that the rest of the Fediverse can quote-post.

But the rest of the Fediverse will still be able to quote-post just about all Mastodon toots. With no problems. With zero resistance. Even with the opt-in switched to off.

Because that switch is proprietary, non-standard and Mastodon-specific. Because only Mastodon even supports it.

This switch will cause many many more Mastodon users to learn the hard way that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Namely by encountering a post or comment from something that does not behave like Mastodon. And many many more Mastodon users will shit bricks in sheer terror upon this revelation.

If Mastodon really wanted this switch to be 100% waterproof, it would have to implement the feature request in its entirety. That includes defederation from all Fediverse instances that don't respect the opt-in switch.

Mind you, the defederation clause and the entire feature request came from someone in the firm belief that the Fediverse is Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. Just like about every other Mastodon user out there. So it was only targetted at rogue Mastodon instances with hacked source code.

In reality, however, it would require entire non-Mastodon Fediverse projects to be Fediblocked because they can quote-post without respecting Mastodon's quote-post opt-in switch.

All instances of Pleroma, of Akkoma, of Misskey, of Firefish, of Iceshrimp including Iceshrimp.NET, of Sharkey, of Catodon, of Friendica, of Hubzilla, of (streams) and so forth would have to be Fediblocked because they can quote-post without respecting Mastodon's quote-post opt-in switch. Every last one of them.

Mastodon's quote-post feature will either cause a rift through the Fediverse if this rule is put into action or even more people to shit bricks in terror and escape to Bluesky if it isn't.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Fedisplaining #CWFedisplaining #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Firefish #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp.NET #Sharkey #Catodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #FediblockMeta

@utopiArte I wasn't only posting this with raw technology in mind. I was also thinking about cultural differences that arose from the technological differences.

Friendica and Hubzilla are technologically very different from Mastodon. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users are rather used to that. They try to cope with it the best they can, although this alone brings its own bunch of issues with itself.

Mastodon users, on the other hand, are not used to it. Many of them have come to Mastodon from Twitter over the last two years, believing that Mastodon is only one Web site. And pretty much all of them, every last one of them, came to Mastodon, believing that the Fediverse that everyone talks about is Mastodon. And nothing else.

Those who have invited them to Mastodon have not told them that Mastodon is connected to things that aren't Mastodon, much less that Mastodon is connected to things that are very much not Mastodon.

Nearly all Twitter refugees on Mastodon have spent their first several months on Mastodon in this belief. They've settled into and gotten used to a Fediverse that's only Mastodon.

Many, not all of them, but many have since found out that there are things in the Fediverse that are very different from Mastodon. For not exactly few, it was a disturbing, if not outright traumatising experience to see that some Fediverse users can post over 500 characters at once. Or that some Fediverse users can easily "quote-toot" Mastodon toots, using something which is used on 𝕏 to harass members of marginalised minorities.

They didn't want that. They still don't want that. They want to make it go away again, so disturbing is it.

By and by, at least some Mastodon users face other differences between Mastodon on the one side and things like Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) on the other side. For example, what the way these three handle conversations means in practice for users of Mastodon which doesn't have a concept of conversations. Or that Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users do not react when someone on Mastodon mentions them out of the blue. Everyone on Mastodon would notice it, so it's beyond a Mastodon user's comprehension that Friendica and Hubzilla users don't notice it by default.

So on the one hand, Mastodon users are increasingly stressed out by Friendica being Friendica and Hubzilla being Hubzilla. They ask themselves: "Why did they make everything so different from Mastodon? Why couldn't they have made it all just like Mastodon in the first place?"

It's incomprehensible to them that Friendica and Hubzilla were both made before Mastodon. For how can something in the Fediverse possible pre-date Eugen Rochko's invention of the Fediverse? It's also incomprehensible to them that something in the Fediverse can be something else than a Twitter clone. Or they simply don't know how Facebook, which Friendica aims to be an alternative to, works differently from Twitter as well.

On the other hand, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users are increasingly stressed out by Mastodon users trying to force Mastodon's culture upon them, along with Mastodon's limitations. Not few Mastodon users try to make Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) behave more like Mastodon by putting pressure on their users to a) always do everything the Mastodon way and b) stop making use of features that Mastodon doesn't have.

If you've never come across a Mastodon user complaining about a post or comment of yours being too long because you've exceeded the holy limit of 500 characters, then I'm very certain that you will.

Food for thought: This entire conflict would disappear with a split. Mastodon users would be spared from utterly non-Mastodon things. And non-Mastodon uers would be spared from demands to stop making use of 90% of all features they have at hand just because Mastodon doesn't have them.

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I could post the entire context of this for better understanding.

But for one, this would require sharing (= Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) lingo of quote-posting) a whole number of very long (= way over 500 characters) comments on a not exactly short post. And besides, I guess quote-posting an anti-racist activist falls under harassment and therefore racism itself. Because quote-posts are always harassment.

In fact, I'm now waiting for hub.netzgemeinde.eu to be added to Fediverse blocklists. I can already see Mastodon users try to have the hub.netzgemeinde.eu moderation sanction me, only to fail because

• Mastodon-style reports to remote instances are probably not implemented on Hubzilla
• no Mastodon interface tells you who the admin of hub.netzgemeinde.eu is
• the hub website itself doesn't tell you either
• even if they figured out who the admin is, he won't notice being mentioned by a non-contact out of the blue because this behaviour is off by default on Hubzilla

So from a Mastodon point of view and by Mastodon standards, hub.netzgemeinde.eu is not sufficiently moderated to silence such an utterly, deeply racist pig as me. And being undermoderated has always been a valid reason for a Fediverse instance to be Fediblocked.

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@Phil This could happen more quickly than you imagine.

Hubzilla, which is where I post from, didn't have boosts until a few months ago, and Hubzilla will be 10 years old next year. Quote-posts were the only way at all to share messages on Hubzilla until then.

On Misskey as well as its many forks, quote-posts are just as much and as firmly part of the culture as content warnings in the summary field on Mastodon.

And nobody in either place checks where a post came from before quote-posting it.

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@Phil @Pepijn Keep two things in mind, though:

One, the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. And the Fediverse isn't entirely built against Mastodon either.

Two, just about everything else that can do microblogging in any shape or form already has quote-posts implemented. Only Mastodon doesn't. Some of these implementations are older than Mastodon itself.

This means: Even if you opt out of being quote-postable on Mastodon, this will only have an effect within Mastodon itself. But if I should receive one of your posts here on Hubzilla which has absolutely nothing to do with Mastodon, Mastodon will not make the "Share" button disappear from my menu, and I will still be able to quote-post you with exactly zero problems.

Maybe Mastodon will hide my quote-post from you. Maybe it won't, and I know from personal experience that Mastodon users are notified when I quote-post them. But it can't keep me here on Hubzilla from creating a quote-post of any of your posts or comments.

Nor can it keep anyone on Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon, Friendica etc. etc. from quote-posting you.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuoteTootDebate #QuotePostDebate #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

@Emelia 👸🏻 @Stefan Bohacek This right can only be enforced by Mastodon within Mastodon itself, but not in the rest of the Fediverse.

Practically everything outside of Mastodon that can do social networking has both quotes (like in forums) and quote-posts (= quote-tweets, but notifying the quoted) already now. Everyone on Pleroma or Akkoma or Misskey or Iceshrimp or Sharkey or Friendica or Hubzilla can both quote and quote-post everyone and everything on Mastodon right now with next to zero resistance.

Mastodon's home-brew, proprietary, non-standard opt-out/opt-in switch for Mastodon's home-brew, proprietary, non-standard quote-post feature will not be understood by anything that isn't Mastodon.

And since Mastodon will probably never know, acknowledge and support actual permissions, it will never have any way of stopping non-Mastodon users from quoting or quote-posting anyone on Mastodon.

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@Leo

But is it a QP or a link to the post? Does the author get a notification?

Depends because there are currently two ways of quote-posting.

The Friendica way from 2010, also used by Hubzilla and (streams), generates a dumb copy of the original post from a reference written in a pair of special BBcode tags which includes a link to both the poster, even with their profile picture on compatible instances, and the original post.

[share​=55993487][/share]

becomes

Leo wrote the following post Sat, 20 Apr 2024 20:41:18 +0200 @jupiter_rowland

But is it a QP or a link to the post? Does the author get a notification?

I think that's what is being discussed here. Anyone can link anything. I see it every day on my timeline, but those show up as links to a toot, and the embedded display generally doesn't even show the toot that is being "quoted". I doubt the author can get notified from that type of interaction.

And the author is notified. I've tested just that with a Mastodon user.

The Misskey way, I don't know from when that is, consists of "RE:" plus the URL of the quoted post from which compatible frontends are expected to generate the actual quote-post.

RE: https://mas.to/@thylacoleo/112305011343985452

I don't know whether the author is notified.

However, what Mastodon is working on right now is very likely to be something entirely new and completely incompatible with anything that has existed. So I can't say how it'll work.

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@Andreas Müller When I quote-post a Mastodon toot on Hubzilla, the tooter is notified. I know for certain, I've tested it.

Same goes for Friendica and (streams) which use the same quote-posting technique. Not sure about Misskey and the Forkeys, though, and about Pleroma and its forks.

And the only way for Mastodon to stop this would be for all Mastodon instances to Fediblock all non-Mastodon instances. Which is a game of whack-a-mole.

Mastodon can never be 100% safe from quote-posts. That's the way it is. Deal with it.

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@Andreas Müller What if I told you:

Pleroma has quote-posts already now.
Akkoma has quote-posts already now.
All the other Pleroma forks have quote-posts already now.
Misskey has quote-posts already now.
Firefish has quote-posts already now.
Iceshrimp has quote-posts already now.
Sharkey has quote-posts already now.
Catodon has quote-posts already now.
All other forks of Misskey, Firefish and Iceshrimp have quote-posts already now.
Friendica has quote-posts already now.
Hubzilla has quote-posts already now.
(streams) has quote-posts already now.
Only a few examples.

And all of them can quote-post everything and everyone on Mastodon already now.

And no, they haven't introduced quote-posts because Mastodon doesn't have them. Friendica has had quote-posts since it was made, and Friendica is 6 years older than Mastodon. Same for Hubzilla which is 4 years older than Mastodon. Both could quote-post Mastodon toots from the moment that Mastodon was launched.

The Fediverse is not only Mastodon.

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