#soapbox — Public Fediverse posts

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”*…

Today we have Substack and social media and blogs. In the old days, we “spoke” in person…

Speaker’s Corner, in Hyde Park in London, is a fabled site of on-going, open public speeches and debate. As Amelia Soth reminds us, that tradition also has a long history in the U.S…

There is nothing in American civic life today like Chicago’s old “Bughouse Square.” From the 1890s to the mid-1960s, it was a hotspot for soapbox speakers: radicals, evangelists, cranks, poets, philosophers, and eccentrics. Anyone with a perspective outside the mainstream gathered there nightly to declaim from their improvised podiums. The ethos, as one newspaper put it, was “free speech and the louder the better.” People actually came to listen, too, in crowds.

Bughouse Square (properly named Washington Square Park) might be the most famous free-speech center, but the practice of soapboxing stretched from sea to shining sea. New York City had its own crew of “peripatetic philosophers.” Hubert Harrison, known as the “Black Socrates,” delivered his critiques of capital right in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Then there was Portia Willis, the “suffrage beauty,” who drew in crowds with her looks and kept them with her wits.

As Mary Anne Trasciatti writes in “Athens or Anarchy? Soapbox Oratory and the Early Twentieth-Century American City,” the soapbox was a particularly democratic mode of public address. Even if you couldn’t get your cause into a meeting hall or a newspaper column, you could still hop on a box, lift your head a few inches above the crowd, and start talking. But that doesn’t mean just anyone could be a successful soapboxer. You had to be a good speaker to keep the crowds listening.

People tried all kinds of tricks to get attention. One soapboxer (wonderfully named Lowlife McCormick) would perform a Houdini-like escape from a straitjacket, which he would then declare to be a metaphor for the bonds of wage labor. Another would catch the crowd’s attention by shouting “I’ve been robbed! I’ve been robbed!” Once he had their ears, he’d finish up with “…by the capitalist system!” A really good soapboxer could draw in so many listeners as to render the streets impassable. One photo shows anarchist Alexander Berkman completely surrounded by a sea of hats.

But the attention soapboxing attracted wasn’t always positive. The 1910s saw a series of vicious “free speech fights” kick off in cities like Spokane, San Diego, and Fresno. Grace L. Miller lays out the history of perhaps the most violent of these struggles in “The I.W.W. Free Speech Fight: San Diego, 1912.” Things started to heat up when a deputy sheriff drove his car into a crowd of people listening to a socialist speaker. One listener reacted by slashing the sheriff’s tire. Within two days, the city passed an ordinance banning street speaking.

In response, the I.W.W. (the Industrial Workers of the World, or the “Wobblies”) urged supporters to ride the rails to San Diego and fight for their right to soapbox:

Come on the cushions; ride up on top;
stick to the brake beams; let nothing stop.
Come in great numbers; this we beseech;
Help San Diego to win free speech.

Soapboxers descended on the town en masse. Each would step up on the box, say a word or two, and then get yanked off by the police and carried to jail. There’s even an old Wobbly joke about a speaker who starts his speech with the traditional salutation—“Fellow friends and workers”—and then, when he realizes no one’s coming to arrest him, panics and shouts “Where are the cops?!”

The Wobblies’ goal was to overwhelm the court system with free-speech cases until the city was forced to give up prosecuting soapboxers. Soon the jail was overflowing. But instead of following the legal process, the city discharged the arrestees right into the waiting arms of a vigilante gang, who drove the Wobblies to the county line and viciously beat them with axe handles.

It’s not exactly clear who the vigilantes were, but the gang may have been composed of some of the city’s most prominent citizens. A newspaper editor who was run out of town for his sympathy to the free-speechers wrote of them (as quoted by Miller): “The chamber of commerce and the real estate board are well represented. The press and public utility corporations, as well as members of the Grand Jury are known to belong.”

Yet the vigilantes went too far, and labor organizations called on the state government to intervene. The commissioner sent to investigate declared that the abuses he saw weren’t taking place in Tsarist Russia. At great personal cost, the Wobblies had put the concept of free speech to the test, and won…

When public oratory was a defining feature of civic life: “The Golden Age of the American Soapbox,” from @amelia-soth.bsky.social in @jstordaily.bsky.social.

* John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicens’d Printing, to the Parliament of England

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As we speak up, we might ponder another Chicago-related phenomenon, recalling that it was on this date in 1986 that Geraldo Rivera made a “shocking discovery”:

Notorious and “most wanted” gangster, Al Capone, began his life of crime in Chicago in 1919 and had his headquarters set up at the Lexington Hotel until his arrest in 1931.

Years later, renovations were being made at the hotel when a team of workers discovered a shooting-range and series of connected tunnels that led to taverns and brothels making for an easy escape should there be a police raid. Rumors were spread that Capone had a secret vault hidden under the hotel as well.

In 1985, news reporter Geraldo Rivera had been fired from ABC after he criticized the network for canceling his report made about an alleged relationship between John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. It seemed like a good time for Rivera to scoop a new story to repair his reputation.

It was on this day [that] a live, two-hour, syndicated TV special, The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault aired. After lots of backstory, the time finally came to reveal what was in that vault. It turned out to be empty. After the show, Rivera was quoted as saying “Seems like we struck out.”

– source

source

Click on the Soapbox website see a badge for “the human rights foundation” click on Ditto. I click the US hashtag , first post I see: “Super Jews: Why we need to be afraid.” Followed by a shit ton of less hateful bots (still kind of hateful)

Yep Nostr is and forever will be a cesspool. Avoiding …
#nostr #irony #ditto #fediverse #soapbox

What's next, #Socrates and #oratory on a #soapbox since #writing is dominated by #AI?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202603/when-writing-becomes-detached-from-thought
No more detaching #humans from writing my take here
https://nkozphoto.com/index.php/2026/03/09/writing-critical-thinking-and-ai-where-are-we-headed/ #philosophy #education #thought #individualism #publishing #books #literacy #humanities

David Duchovny & Laverne Cox Set To Lead ‘Soapbox’ Satire From Andrew Jay Cohen; West Duchovny, Randall Park, Jimmi Simpson And Jennifer Grey Also Set
#Casting #AndrewJayCohen #DavidDuchovny #JenniferGrey #JimmiSimpson #LaverneCox #MaxBarbakow #RandallPark #Soapbox #WestDuchovny

https://deadline.com/2026/03/david-duchovny-laverne-cox-to-star-soapbox-1236749129/

David Duchovny & Laverne Cox Set To Lead ‘Soapbox’ Satire From Andrew Jay Cohen; West Duchovny, Randall Park, Jimmi Simpson And Jennifer Grey Also Set
#Casting #AndrewJayCohen #DavidDuchovny #JenniferGrey #JimmiSimpson #LaverneCox #MaxBarbakow #RandallPark #Soapbox #WestDuchovny

https://deadline.com/2026/03/david-duchovny-laverne-cox-to-star-soapbox-1236749129/

David Duchovny & Laverne Cox Set To Lead ‘Soapbox’ Satire From Andrew Jay Cohen; West Duchovny, Randall Park, Jimmi Simpson And Jennifer Grey Also Set
#Casting #AndrewJayCohen #DavidDuchovny #JenniferGrey #JimmiSimpson #LaverneCox #MaxBarbakow #RandallPark #Soapbox #WestDuchovny

https://deadline.com/2026/03/david-duchovny-laverne-cox-to-star-soapbox-1236749129/

David Duchovny & Laverne Cox Set To Lead ‘Soapbox’ Satire From Andrew Jay Cohen; West Duchovny, Randall Park, Jimmi Simpson And Jennifer Grey Also Set
#Casting #AndrewJayCohen #DavidDuchovny #JenniferGrey #JimmiSimpson #LaverneCox #MaxBarbakow #RandallPark #Soapbox #WestDuchovny

https://deadline.com/2026/03/david-duchovny-laverne-cox-to-star-soapbox-1236749129/

“Announcing Ditto”

> Ditto is a Nostr community server. It has a built-in Nostr relay, a web UI, and it implements Mastodon's REST API.

> Since Ditto implements the Mastodon API, it can work with any Mastodon app!

> Users of Mastodon and Pleroma will be happy to see search functionality that actually works. 😂

> Ditto is built in Deno with TypeScript. It's basically a REST API with a built-in Nostr relay. This is the same design as Mastodon and Pleroma, replacing ActivityPub with Nostr.

https://soapbox.pub/blog/announcing-ditto/

Tags: #Nostr #Ditto #Deeno #Mastodon #Pleroma #ActivityPub #Fediverse #SocialWeb #MycelialWeb #MyceliumNetwork #Nostrich #SNS #SocialMedia #Soapbox

@gordoooo_z @PhenomX6 @futurebird @ink8 Whatever Eugen decides at this point it’s irrelevant. He’s pretty much lost his grip over holding the Fediverse brand as secondary to the notion of a fantasy “mastodon network” when he gave that Time Magazine interview two months ago in which the word “Fediverse” appeared not one single time - that caused enormous, untold damages including confusion that remains in the news media and disenfranchisement of large swaths of developers and users alike on not just other platforms, but mastodon instances themselves.

There’s really no such thing as toots anymore, Eugen himself refers to “Posts” and “Quote Posts”, and the submit button in mastodon now says “publish”. The reason #Misskey calls them “notes” is because that’s what they are actually called in #ActivityPub - there are also other types, that other platforms use as well, including “article”, although, instances like #qoto have set the character count for notes at 65535 🙂

It’s been covered in this thread already that Quote Posts are simply beyond the control of mastodon devs, Eugen’s edicts, or local mastodon users or admins, because most other platforms support it and there isn’t anything #mastopub can do about it. In Misskey, users can disallow it, but that only affects other local users, so it’s s moot point (except for silo instances).

There are very few Fediverse platforms that aren’t taking advantage of most things that are possible, for example, #Soapbox now has federated events, and introduced custom emoji reactions like Misskey has, and live chat - Misskey’s traditionally led the way with these federating features with #Calckey going even further.

Some platforms however, intentionally incorporate a leaner set of features; #Smithereen is one example, it doesn’t even sccomodate boosts, which harkens back to #Myspace, #VKontakte (aka, “VK” - not sure I spelled that right), and very early #Faceplant days. #Epicyon has anti-silo capabilities baked in.

#Mitra has #Substack style subscriptions at it’s core. Anyone can subscribe remotely from any Fediverse server instance where the user can receive DMs - and in congruence with privacy concerns that are typically expected for Fediverse implementations, it’s based on #Monero (XMR).

Most platforms also support #Markdown, with Cakckey being perhaps supporting the greatest superset IIRC, including #LaTEX, and #Friendica, being much older than msstodon, has continued to evolve over the past decade and still has support for #BBCode too, and direct links for uploading images for those who prefer to.

I didn’t see any mention of Markdown support when I bothered to look at the mastopub roadmap, yet even on that platform, Quote Posts are all throughout the stream and people boost and reply to them as the time - and, as mentioned earlier, anyone can create a post, simply pasting the link from someone else’s post, and then boost that… Voila! Local #Quote_Post.

mastodon was successful in its arrogance of leveraging some pretty graphics and welcoming verbiage into a brand that Eugen weaponized against virtually all other Fediverse platforms, and now, with all of the fine forks like #Hometown and several newcomers, we’ll soon be seeing hardforking as a result of that hostility.

But not just forks, funding and ambitious development as evidenced by existing and emerging platforms like #Cloudflare’s #Wildebeest, Tumbler, and the very unique, #Django based Takahē Fediverse server that I wrote about here:

https://tallship.writeas.com/takahe-a-new-fediverse-paradigm

Average people are already migrating in larger numbers everyday away from the archaic mastodonian resource hog to other, more capable and promising (and friendlier) platforms elsewhere in the Fediverse that have integrated and fully support #masto_migration, and even ones that don’t (yet) haver that feature.

Unlike other dinosaurs and the eponymous mammal for which Eugen chose the namesake of his #TootSuite product, we shouldn’t expect extinction for his platform, but the apathy and indifference levels are rising, as is the enmity in many sectors of the community for what others perceive as a betrayal (or sellout), and that kind of self-inflicted damage is often difficult to mitigate, with waves of disenchantment reverberating get into the future… Just look at what happened to #SourceForge - it still technically exists, but never recovered after the community betrayal it committed years ago.

And finally, there’s a irony so obvious that’s it’s not even plausible to deny… Eugen subverted the very rudimentary principal that the Fediverse network is ideologically predicated upon - #DeSoc… There’s no question that his goals shifted to that if building a silo for himself, at least to some great degree. Very sad.

An interesting thing about condescending others, you find yourself alone and isolated in an otherwise vibrant, busy world.

#tallship #Takahe #ActivityPub #privacy #community_values #FOSS

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## Making Better Use of Space

### Moving that old white elephant in the room.

There's been a lot of talk lately, and speculation, about the #Fediverse. Yet for the most part, only with respect to a single brand of server platform.

What I find particularly odd about that, is it's a rather lackluster server platform (especially considering the hefty system requirements) with an extremely limited feature list. Mastodon servers have a hard coded default character count limit per post of only 500 characters - more than Twitter, but not often enough to get a complete thought out with a link to somewhere else, or engage in a conversational thread, and certainly nowhere near what you need to post a news article, holiday recipe, tutorial, HowTo, or movie review.

As if a paltry 500 character limit isn't bad enough for this resource hog, virtually every other Fediverse platform provides for sensible , and configurable message lengths with common defaults of 2000, 5000, or more; most support #Markdown, and other ubiquitous text formats like #LaTex or #HTML, and some even have built in #WYSIWYG editors - like #WordPress, #Hubzilla, and #Drupal, with big players like #Imgur and #Tumblr already looking forward to their official Fediverse launches soon.

When those latter two giants arrive on the scene, the world of social networking will truly be interconnected, having achieved critical mass. It will be a revolution, a juggernaut toppling the deprecated, legacy monolithic silos that have so insidiously subverted and subjugated the masses like chattel. But I digress.

Other Fediverse platforms have offered the ability for people to edit their own posts for a long time, some for years, yet mastodon enabled this capability less than a month ago. It lags behind most other Fediverse platforms in several other ways too - groups, marketplaces, federated chat, and several other often requested functions are all but ignored by that platforms' developer while other Fediverse servers enjoy active and ambitious development cycles with new feature releases.

So considering it is so lacking in basic functionality compared to the other more prominent contemporaries, I've assembled a curated list below where you can evaluate and testdrive others for yourself. I've included links to some of the most darling up and coming projects like #Foundkey and #Quanta, that scale to thousands of users, and if you truly want an even smaller, minimalist Fediverse platform I've included #MicroBlogPub too. There's a couple of web tools including databases so you can search for even more platforms, instances, and compare statistics.

Choosing from the list below, you can join existing instances, self-host your own, or even have a professional #hosting_provider do it for you - simply pick a #turnkey provider where in just a couple of clicks your new fully managed Fediverse server will be online in only a minute or two!

There are literally free and privacy respecting Fediverse platforms to replace everything from #Faceplant, #Twatter, #Reddit, #YouTube, #twitch, #InstaSPAM, #Spotify, #Quora and so very much more!

And most are so light on system resources that you can run then on an old laptop or #Raspberry_Pi in your home.

Without further adieu, here's a list of [some of] the most prominent Fediverse server platforms in operation.

https://JoinTheFedi.com

https://Soapbox.Pub

https://Btrf.ly

https://JoinPeerTube.org

https://Mitra.Social

https://Epicyon.net

https://join.misskey.page/en-US/instances

https://akkoma.dev/FoundKeyGang/FoundKey

https://Pixelfed.org

https://Friendi.ca

https://Quanta.Wiki

https://FediDB.org/software

https://WriteFreely.org

https://funkwhale.audio/en_US/apps

https://microblog.pub

https://socialhome.network

https://hubzilla.org

https://owncast.online

https://join-lemmy.org

#tallship #FOSS #Soapbox #Rebased #PeerTube #Mitra #Quanta #Pixelfed #Epicyon #Friendica #WriteFreely #Plume #FunkWhale #MicroBlogPub #Socialhome #GotoSocial #Owncast #LoTide #Lemmy #ActivityPub #Privacy #DeSoc #Federating #Decentralize

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

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@downey

Mastodon IS NOT the #Fediverse!

The #BDFL of that project saying it's is "vital" illustrates the branding philosophy and corporate, ego driven mindset behind so many PRs and requests that have repeatedly been rejected by an overwhelming amount of Fediverse users and developers - just look at how many 👎 "thumbs down" 👎 reactions his post received (that is rarely seen on GitHub).

His language and marketing have been largely successful, confusing newcomers during this Twitter egress (including media coverage) and conflating just what the Fediverse and mastodon are...

People are saying, "I just joined mastodon!" - NO, you did not. You just joined the "Fediverse", by creating an account on a mastodon server. Even newcomers creating accounts on #Friendica and #Pleroma servers are often seen saying this, and it needs to "STOP".

The Fediverse is the network they are joining, and mastodon is just one of a dozen or so viable platforms that people can use to do so.

Truth be told, mastodon is one of the least feature complete Fediverse server platforms, lacking in many of the most basic social networking tools and features that most other popular server platforms introduced ages ago.

It doesn't even render Markdown, have have quotable boosting, only introduced editing of posts a couple of weeks back, and has a hard coded limit of a paltry 500 characters for each post, forcing users to create those confusingly chronologically backward hellthreads that are interspersed and broken up in everyone's feeds, and there's many more deficiencies to list here.

This is why there are so many different forks.

When you create a #PeerTube account, you haven't joined the PeerTube network - you've joined the Fediverse!

When you create a #Pixelfed account, you haven't joined the Pixelfed network - you've joined the Fediverse!

If you create a mastodon account, you haven't joined "mastodon" - you've joined three Fediverse!

There is no such thing as a mastodon network!

It's just one type of Fediverse server platform, among many, like:

#Akkama, Pleroma, Friendica, #Lemmy, #Soapbox, #Misskey, PeerTube, #Mitra, Pixelfed, #MicroPub, #Epicyon, #Quanta, #GoToSicial, #Socialhome, #FunkWhale, and many many other platforms that open up the entire Fediverse to people, allowing them to share and seamlessly communicate with one another.

There are analogs for #Faceplant, #Twitter, #InstaSPAM, #Reddit, and pretty much any type of social networking experience you can find in the deprecated, centralized, legacy silo systems that cannot, and do not wish to interact with each other - which the Fediverse breaks the paradigm of, and empowers everyone engage with each other globally.

Mastodon's marketing has very deliberately been designed to subvert that narrative and replace this reality with its own, self serving commercial interests to the detriment of Fediverse itself.

A wake up call us coming very soon when the #non_FOSS based platforms like #Tumblr and #Imgur join their (millions) substantial user bases to the Fediverse at which time, mastodon itself may find itself drowned out and largely irrelevant due to its very lacking feature set, and ask if the other existing Fediverse platforms providing so much more if what is possible for us all.

This is typically what happens when your development is driven by egocentric, ulterior motives (whether he actually realizes this about himself or not) to benefit yourself personally - just look at how his donations have jumped, even though newcomers are creating accounts on other Fediverse and mastodon servers begging for donations that for the most part are going directly to him.

#tallship #FOSS #ActivityPub #introductions #newcomers

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Without further ado, here's a list of all the most prominent #Fediverse server platforms in operation.

Choosing from the list below, you can join existing instances, self-host your own, and when have a professional #hosting_provider do it for your - just pick a #turnkey provider where in just a couple of clicks your new fully managed Fediverse server will be online in only a minute or two!

There's literally free and privacy respecting Fediverse platforms to replace everything from #Faceplant, #Twatter, #Reddit, #YouTube, #twitch, #InstaSPAM, #Spotify, and so very much more!

https://JoinTheFedi.com

https://Soapbox.Pub

https://Btrf.ly

https://JoinPeerTube.org

https://Mitra.Social

https://Pixelfed.org

https://Friendi.ca

https://Quanta.Wiki

https://FediDB.org/software

https://WriteFreely.org

https://funkwhale.audio/en_US/apps/

https://microblog.pub/

https://socialhome.network/

https://owncast.online/

https://join-lemmy.org/

#tallship #FOSS #Soapbox #Rebased #PeerTube #Mitra #Quanta #Pixelfed #Friendica #WriteFreely #Plume #FunkWhale #MicroBlogPub #Socialhome #GotoSocial #Owncast #LoTide #Lemmy #ActivityPub #Privacy #DeSoc #Federating #Decentralize

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

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