#statusnet — Public Fediverse posts

@「 Jürgen 」:fedi_mastodon:

Irgendwie ist das doch nicht die „übliche“ Verwendung von Hashtags in Beiträgen. Was ist der Hintergrund bei Hubzilla, dass das so gehandhabt wird?

Das hat Hubzilla geerbt von Friendica, weil es umgebaut wurde aus einem Fork eines Forks von Friendica. Und Friendica hat es übernommen von StatusNet, weil es von vornherein mit StatusNet föderieren sollte. Und StatusNet hat es geerbt von Identi.ca.

Sie alle handhab(t)en Hashtags intern als Schlüsselwörter, die keine Raute enthalten. Und sie stellen die Raute außerhalb des Link vor den Link, um zu signalisieren: Das hier ist ein Hashtag. Wenn man einen Post, einen Kommentar oder eine DM verschickt, wird aus dem Hashtag automatisch ein entsprechendes Konstrukt aus ungelinkter Raute plus Link aufs Schlüsselwort generiert.

Das ist wie bei Namen: Auf allen war bzw. ist das @ kein Teil irgendeines Namen, nicht des Kurznamen, nicht des Langnamen. Der Kurzname, der Teil des Profil-Link ist, hat auch kein @. Guck dir mal deine Erwähnung an: Das @ ist nicht Teil des Link, sondern steht vorm Link, und dein Langname ist erwähnt.

Warum "die" das anders gemacht haben als auf Twitter und Mastodon? Ganz einfach: Weil "die" das vor Mastodon gemacht haben. Eigentlich sogar noch vor Twitter.

Identi.ca und StatusNet waren von 2008. Etwa acht Jahre vor Mastodon. Das war der eigentliche Urknall des Fediverse. Und StatusNet hatte meines Wissens damals schon offizielle Unterstützung für Hashtags.

Warum hat es das nun anders gemacht als Twitter? Weil es das vor Twitter gemacht hat.

Es war nämlich erst 2009, daß Chris Messina offiziell Unterstützung für Hashtags bei Twitter eingeführt hat. Evan Prodromou, der Erfinder von Identi.ca, StatusNet und dem Fediverse, konnte unmöglich etwa ein Jahr im voraus ahnen, wie Twitter mal Hashtags implementieren wird. Und die Twitter-Entwickler dürften damals überhaupt nicht gewußt haben, daß auch nur Identi.ca existiert, geschweige denn, wie es Hashtags handhabt.

Friendica ging im Mai 2010 an den Start, etwa fünf Jahre und acht Monate vor Mastodon. Friendica basierte zwar auf einem eigenen Protokoll, war aber von vornherein in der Lage, sich mit StatusNet über dessen eigenes OStatus-Protokoll zu verbinden. Praktischerweise hat der Friendica-Erfinder Mike Macgirvin gleich Identi.cas und StatusNets Handhabung von Hashtags übernommen. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt hatte Twitter Hashtags erst seit gut zehn Monaten.

Ende 2011 hat Mike Macgirvin Friendica geforkt, dann den Fork geforkt und diesen Fork namens Red (später Red Matrix) dann ab 2012 komplett umgeschrieben. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt handhabte alles im Fediverse Hashtags noch auf dieselbe Art.

Um diese Zeit wurde StatusNet nach GNU social hardgeforkt, das wohl versuchte, mehr wie Twitter zu sein. Daher wurden auch die Hashtags wie auf Twitter ausgeführt: mit der Raute als Teil des Schlüsselworts und als Teil des Link. StatusNet verlor dann nach der 2012er Umstellung von Identi.ca auf pump.io seine Entwicklungsgrundlage und wurde 2013 kurzerhand nach GNU social gemerget, ohne aber die Hashtags wieder auf die alte Form umzustellen.

Im März 2015 wurde erstmals Hubzilla veröffentlicht, das entstanden war, indem die Red Matrix umbenannt und massiv erweitert worden war.

Erst im Januar 2016 kam dann Mastodon, Pleroma kurze Zeit später. Weil beide ursprünglich alternative Frontends für GNU social sein sollten, übernahmen sie von GNU social die Twitter-Hashtags.

Zu diesem Zeitpunkt sahen weder die neuen Entwickler, die Friendica seit Ende 2011 hatte, noch Mike Macgirvin es ein, warum sie ihre Software unbedingt an Mastodon anpassen sollten. Mike, der inzwischen zwei Nachfahren von Hubzilla betreut, sieht es bis heute nicht ein. Eher baut er serverseitige Gegenmittel gegen Mastodon in seine Software ein.

Misskey landete meines Wissens erst 2018 im Fediverse, nachdem es ActivityPub adoptiert hatte. Das hatte übrigens Hubzilla als erstes, seit Juli 2017, und Mastodon als zweites, seit September.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Identi.ca #Laconi.ca #StatusNet #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Mastodon #Pleroma #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta

@Maxi 11x 💉

Das Fediverse wird immer mehr zu Facebook und ich hab da wenig Lust drauf.

Das Fediverse war Facebook, bevor es von Millionen von ahnungslosen Mastodon-Newbies zu Twitter gemacht wurde.

Mehr als die Hälfte der Mastodon-Nutzer glaubt, das Fediverse sei nur Mastodon. Der weit überwiegende Teil derer, die eines Besseren belehrt wurden, glauben immer noch, das Fediverse sei

• (frühestens) 2016
• von Eugen Rochko
• als reine Microblogging-Plattform und Twitter-Klon
• mit einem Zeichenlimit von 500 Zeichen

erfunden worden. Und alles, was davon abweicht und nicht "offensichtlich (wie PeerTube & Co.) als Extra an Mastodon drangeklebt" worden ist, wird aufgefaßt als lästige Eindringlinge im Mastodon-Fediverse, die sich nicht an die Regeln des Mastodon-Fediverse halten und sich auch nicht an die Kultur des Mastodon-Fediverse anpassen.

Um das mal zurechtzurücken:

Im Januar 2016 ging Mastodon an den Start.

Im Juli 2010, fünfeinhalb Jahre vor Mastodon, startete Friendica (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica, https://friendi.ca) als Facebook-Alternative.

• Ohne Zeichenbegrenzung (tatsächlich 16.777.215 Zeichen).
• Mit allem, was eine gute Bloggingplattform an Textformatierung hergibt.
• Mit Inhaltswarnungen, die jeder für sich selbst automatisch generieren lassen kann mittels einer Liste von Schlüsselwörtern.
• Mit Titeln und Zusammenfassungen, und die Zusammenfassungen waren schon immer in dem Datenfeld, das Mastodon seit 2017 für CWs verwendet.
• Mit der Fähigkeit, andere Posts als Komplettzitate zu teilen. Und nicht ein einziges Mal ist das mißbräuchlich verwendet worden.

Jetzt regen sich Mastodon-Nutzer darüber auf, daß Friendica auf so infame und rücksichtslose Art und Weise ins Mastodon-Fediverse eingedrungen ist und seine Nutzer

• sich nicht ans 500-Zeichen-Limit halten
• alle mit ihren Textformatierungen nerven
• keine CWs schreiben
• dafür das CW-Feld mißbrauchen mit "Titeln oder was weiß ich, was das ist"

Daß Friendica schon seit über 15 Jahren quote-posten kann, weiß zum Glück beinahe niemand auf Mastodon.

Fakt ist aber: Friendica gab es nicht nur schon fünfeinhalb Jahre, als Mastodon startete, sondern es war auch schon fünfeinhalb Jahre im Fediverse, als Mastodon startete. Und es hatte auch schon gut fünf Jahre lang seine eigene Kultur, als Mastodon startete.

In dem Augenblick, wo Mastodon startete, verband es sich sofort mit StatusNet (von 2008, wofür Mastodon ursprünglich nur eine Alternativoberfläche war; heute GNU social, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Social, https://gnusocial.rocks/), Friendica und Hubzilla (von 2015, basiert auf einem Fork eines Forks von Friendica von 2012; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla, https://hubzilla.org). Und nicht umgekehrt.

Wir waren zuerst hier. Findet euch damit ab.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #NichtNurMastodon #MastodonZentrizität #MastodonNormativität #StatusNet #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Zeichenlimit #Zeichenlimits #ZeichenlimitMeta #CWZeichenlimitMeta #500Zeichen #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteTröt #QuoteTröts #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebatte #QuoteTrötDebatte

@cy

The people who wrote the Fediverse

There were no "people who wrote the Fediverse". These was no committee who laid down the standards.

The Fediverse was invented by @Evan Prodromou. In 2008. By first creating a centralised Twitter alternative silo named Identi.ca.

And then open-sourcing the underlying technology as Laconi.ca, later StatusNet (merged into GNU social in 2013).

And then laying the protocol open as OpenMicroBlogging, later superseded by OStatus.

Then, in 2010, @Mike Macgirvin ?️ decided that the world needs a free, open-source, decentralised, secure alternative to Facebook that's better than Facebook. And so he made Mistpark, today Friendica.

But the features he wanted Friendica to have were impossible to achieve with any existing protocol. OStatus wasn't even that good for microblogging, much less Mike's ambitious plans. Besides, he's an experienced protocol designer. So he created a whole new protocol, DFRN, and built Friendica on top of it. Friendica did adopt OStatus as an extra protocol, though, because Friendica's goal was and still is to federate with everything and then some.

In 2011, Mike had seen many public Friendica nodes shut down with or without warning and people always losing everything and having to start over from scratch. So he decided to do something against it.

He invented nomadic identity. And built a new protocol around it, Zot, because there was no way DFRN could take care of this, let alone OStatus.

In 2012, he forked Friendica into Red and rewrote the whole backend against Zot, which, however, required the creation of yet another identity scheme.

For one, one login could now have multiple fully separate and independent identities on it. For example, my Hubzilla channel URL is https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/channel/jupiter_rowland.

Besides, one identity could now reside on multiple server instances which is what nomadic identity means.

Red was later renamed Red Matrix and, in 2015, refactored, redesigned and renamed into Hubzilla.

Mastodon and Pleroma started in 2016 as OStatus-based alternative UIs for GNU social. Mastodon was the first to be turned into a stand-alone project with not much interest in connecting to anything outside, all in spite of already being federated with Pleroma, GNU social, Friendica and Hubzilla via OStatus.

ActivityPub came out in 2017. No, not 2018. It was standardised in 2018. But it came out in 2017.

In July, 2017, Hubzilla was the first Fediverse project to integrate ActivityPub. Next to its own Zot, next to diaspora*, next to OStatus etc. On the one hand, Hubzilla tried to stay as close to the ActivityPub spec as possible and feasible. On the other hand, Hubzilla had to make its ActivityPub integration, which has always been an optional add-on, compatible to its own technology, to its own Zot protocol, to the way it works.

In September, Mastodon was the second Fediverse project to adopt ActivityPub. But Mastodon was more interested in doing its own thing and being as close to Twitter as it could than in sticking to a protocol spec, much less connecting to non-Mastodon stuff such as Hubzilla with which it already shared two protocols now.

Mastodon was the one that added Webfinger. ActivityPub doesn't even require Webfinger. The ActivityPub spec doesn't contain Webfinger. But Mastodon requires Webfinger. It can't live without Webfinger. So everything that wants to properly federate with Mastodon needs to implement Webfinger.

After ActivityPub had become a standard, more projects adopted it. But as lax a specification as ActivityPub is, it allowed for a lot of liberties.

Some devs looked at how Mastodon had integrated ActivityPub, decided it was rubbish and did it their own way.

Some devs looked at how Mastodon had integrated ActivityPub, decided they couldn't do it the same way because what they did was too different from Mastodon and did it their own way.

Some devs didn't look at what anyone else did and did it their own way.

Probably none of them looked at how Hubzilla had integrated ActivityPub because none of them even knew that Hubzilla existed. Except for those who were maintaining Friendica now. And Friendica had to make it compatible with DFRN and with the way it had been working since 2010.

Fast-forward to 2023. Mike's current piece of work was the streams repository which contains an intentionally nameless fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork) of Hubzilla, slimmed down from Hubzilla, but modernised and technologically even more advanced.

It was then that @silverpill, creator and maintainer of Mitra, got into contact with him because he wanted to add nomadic identity to Mitra. Something that's built on ActivityPub and only supports ActivityPub. A first. No-one had ever done nomadic identity with nothing but ActivityPub before.

So the two started working on how to implement nomadic identity using only ActivityPub. Mike had a vision of a Fediverse with nomadic identity all over and Fediverse identities cloned beyond server application borders. Like, a (streams) channel cloned to Mitra, Mastodon, PeerTube and Mobilizon, all with the same identity.

This, however, required another, brand-new way of identifying Fediverse actors. And so FEP-ef61 "Portable Objects" was created.

We're probably in the middle of xkcd 927 now.

Mike set up an experimental branch of (streams) to develop and test nomadic identity via ActivityPub, also since (streams) already had nomadic identity anyway.

Around summer, the "nomadic" branch (for nomadic identity via ActivityPub) seemed reliable enough to merge it into "dev". And in July, "dev" was merged into "release", complete with nomadic-identity-via-ActivityPub code.

It was shortly after that merge that I created my two (streams) channels. The channel URL of my channel for Fediverse memes is https://streams.elsmussols.net/channel/fedimemes_on_streams. But its DID, which all channels created on accounts registered after that merge got, is https://streams.elsmussols.net/.well-known/apgateway/did:⁠key:z6Mkf2dhUa65zBYCNVqs3AHyt8uPixauZ7bPzEJn15LJANsd/actor. And that's only two IDs of the same channel. There are also others for (streams)' native Nomad protocol, Hubzilla's Zot6 protocol, ActivityPub, OAuth, OAuth2 and probably also OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on, another one of Mike's creations. Not to mention that (streams) channels, like Hubzilla channels and Friendica accounts, can also optionally be group actors.

In fact, this blew up into (streams) users' faces because (streams) confused the various IDs to such degrees that it wouldn't federate at all anymore. It took Mike a whole lot of work to iron this out again, so much that he officially retired from Fediverse development on August 31st.

And in the middle of this, he even created yet another fork, Forte, which is (streams) minus Nomad, minus Zot6, based on and supporting only ActivityPub. My guess is still that one of the reasons to create Forte at that point was to get rid of the Nomad and Zot6 IDs to sort the ID mess out.

Even if nomadic identity via ActivityPub should ever become stable and start spreading, I don't expect DIDs to become the one norm in the Fediverse. Not with all those barely or unmaintained projects and those devs who refuse to acknowledge that devs of other projects do great stuff, too.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #OStatus #DFRN #Zot #ActivityPub #Nomad #Laconi.ca #Identi.ca #StatusNet #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Mastodon #Pleroma #Streams #(streams) #Forte #FEP_ef61

@We Distribute First of all: I wouldn't make it only about #Mastodon. I wouldn't make it mainly about Mastodon either. #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse.

I wouldn't even make it look like it's only or mainly about Mastodon. I wouldn't give the impression that the #Fediverse is "Mastodon and some other stuff that was bolted onto Mastodon that nobody really gives a damn about, but someone told me I'd better mention that but, like, idfc..."

Also, I'd split it up, at least into various sub-topics.

First of alll, I'd present Fediverse projects, one by one, in chronological order instead of in order of size, importance or popularity. I'd with #StatusNet (2008). Or if I were to only include projects that at least understand #ActivityPub, I'd start with #Friendica (2010). I might skip projects that have been discontinued (Red Matrix, Osada, Zap...) or abandoned (Anfora, reel2bits...).

Also, I'd ask devs, creators who aren't necessarily the devs (#Diaspora*, Friendica and Hubzilla aren't maintained by their respective creators, for example) and experienced users. That's better than trying to only do my own research.

That is, I might include a mini-series with important dead projects, for example to show how #Hubzilla and #Streams came to exist. Okay, this example could be covered with one or two episodes.

Depending on the target audience, there could be a tech sub-topic which could cover protocols or other technology.

Another sub-topic would cover culture. Again, not with a focus solely on one specific project. For example, #ContentWarnings and the necessity therefor aren't only a Mastodon thing, especially since other projects cover them in different ways, unbeknownst to almost everyone on ActivityPub-based projects.

#FullTextSearch is a hot topic only on Mastodon which didn't even have it until a few days ago. On most other projects, it's absolutely normal to have it. #Quotes are similar: On Mastodon, they're still being debated. Almost everywhere else, they've been available forever, and even quoting Mastodon toots has been possible forever.

I'd also look at #AltText and #ImageDescriptions from a not-only-Mastodon point of view to break with the general perception that an #ImageDescription always goes into alt-text, full stop, because there's no room anywhere else.

A few episodes would be Mastodon-centric. One would be about the various stages of #TwitterMigration which pretty much exclusively led to Mastodon. Also, I might do an episode on how Mastodon newbies discover the Fediverse around #MastodonSocial by and by. And I'd certainly do one about how Mastodon users perceive and react upon the Fediverse outside of Mastodon and what comes in from there. Particularly those who either want the Fediverse to be Mastodon and only Mastodon or want everyone else out there to only do what can be done on Mastodon, i.e. forgo #TextFormatting and limit their posts to #500Characters, regardless of how many they could actually post.

The #Threadiverse in general and the #RedditMigration definitely deserve their own episode.

Another episode, later into the podcast, could cover cultural differences caused by how the various communities came into the Fediverse. There are the millions who have come over from #Twitter since late October 2022, and who have adapted parts of the old pre-Musk Twitter culture to Mastodon with little regard for anything else because they weren't even aware of there being anything else. There are the fresh arrivals who can't stop acting like they're still on #X, many of whom are pining for a #Bluesky invitation because it promises to be even closer to "literally Twitter without Musk". There is the "old guard" from Friendica and Hubzilla. There is the Threadiverse which basically continues to live the #Reddit culture in decentralised, non-corporate places now and tries to put up with hardly working moderation.

Last but not least, maybe a look at media coverage could be worth some episodes.

@Codex ☯️♈☮ @CynthesisToday I think the #Fediverse is the easiest to understand for those who halfway know their way around computer stuff if you start at the protocol level.

#ActivityPub is a digital communications protocol standard. Like e-mail or RSS or Atom or XMPP or Matrix, for example. Or like #StatusNet or the #Diaspora protocol or #DFRN or #Zot, now known as #Nomad in its latest incarnation.

The server application projects that are based on ActivityPub are different server-side software implementations of the same protocol. Some have more features, some have fewer, some specialise in particular tasks which is possible because ActivityPub is not specialised itself, not a one-trick pony.

Like, for XMPP, you have jabberd and ejabberd and Openfire and Prosody and Tigase. For e-mail, you've got various mail servers and MTAs.

The main difference here is that ActivityPub is so versatile in its capabilities that it can be used for a whole lot of different things. #Mastodon, #Pleroma, #Akkoma, #MissKey, #CalcKey etc. were made for microblogging. But ActivityPub can also be used for actual blogging platforms like #Plume or #WriteFreely, for video streaming like in the cases of #PeerTube and #Owncast, for audio streaming like in the cases of #Funkwhale and #Castopod and for link aggregators/discussion communities like in the cases of #Lemmy and #kbin. Only to name a few examples.

Still, there are enough parts of this protocol fixed so that all these projects, all these implementations of ActivityPub can connect to one another and ideally communicate with one another.

Now, why is all this made so that they can connect to one another?

That's because they all use the same protocol. The alternative would have been to do like Mike MacGirvin did with DFRN for #Mistpark, later #Friendika, today known as #Friendica, and create a whole new protocol from scratch, even though StatusNet was readily available. Well, only that Mike's intention was to federate Friendica with everything that moved, regardless of protocol.

Okay, better comparison: The alternative would have been to do like the four Diaspora* creators and create a whole new protocol from scratch with no intention whatsoever to connect to the outside world.

Well, instead, all those clones of YouTube and Instagram and Reddit and GoodReads and so forth chose ActivityPub. It was a win-win situation: They could use an existing protocol which actually worked for them instead of taking upon themselves designing a whole new protocol first and then their server application on top. And they could expect a wider audience, namely everything else that uses ActivityPub. Two birds, one stone.

Oh, and by the way: Neither the Fediverse nor ActivityPub was designed around Mastodon, nor was ActivityPub designed by Eugen Rochko (Mike Macgirvin did have some saying in it, though, AFAIK), and quite a few Fediverse projects already existed before Mastodon. Pleroma is three and a half weeks older. MissKey is two years older AFAIK. #Hubzilla was forked from Friendica four years before Mastodon came out. This means that Friendica has to be even older: six years older than Mastodon.

None of these projects will ever give in to Mastodon's limitations and reduce their own feature set for the convenience of Mastodon users. Oh, and neither will the projects that came after Mastodon. If something from another Fediverse project doesn't look good on Mastodon, it's Mastodon's problem.

@Brennan Stehling It isn't even the first. Not even for social networking.

Laconica = #StatusNet = #GNUsocial was the first. It was what drove Identi.ca. That was in 2008.

Then, in 2010, came #DFRN, the internal protocol created for and used by #Friendica. (Friendica can also use ActivityPub, that's how you can post on @Fediverse News.)

A bit later, also in 2010, came the internal protocol created for and used by #Diaspora.

In 2011 came #Zot, the first protocol that went beyond decentralisation and federation and introduced #NomadicIdentity. Starting the next year, it became the technical basis of what is known today as #Hubzilla. (Hubzilla can use ActivityPub as well, that's how you can read this post of mine. But its nomadic features don't translate fully to ActivityPub.)

All of this was before #ActivityPub.

The newest version of Zot, Zot/11, was renamed #Nomad and has been used by #Streams since last year. And (streams) being a "fork me and build something nice out of me" code repository rather than a run-as-is branded platform like Mastodon or Hubzilla indicates that Nomad, much like Zot, is quite versatile, as does the fact that Hubzilla's entire huge set of features is made nomadic by Zot.

Oh, and by the way, e-mail and #XMPP predate them all. And there's also #Matrix, for example.

@John Socks @Chris Trottier @{[email protected]}

@mike

Streams is basically an acknowledgement that my work has no value to anybody but me.

The lack of popularity for #Friendica, #Hubzilla, #Zap & Co. never came from nobody caring.

It always came from nobody even knowing that they exist in the first place.

In 2010, people were ready and willing to pump a few hundred thousand US dollars into the development of #Diaspora. They hoped that Diaspora* would be a free, decentralised Social Web revolution. But the development of Diaspora* took an eternity, and out came something lack-lustre and underwhelming that spent several years in public alpha.

Why didn't people save their money and use #Friendika instead which was everything they had dreamed of and then some? Which was vastly more powerful in spring 2010 before Diaspora* was developed than Diaspora* itself would ever become? Why was Diaspora* developed in the first place? Why was the wheel re-invented, but worse?

Because nobody knew that Friendika existed. That's why. Diaspora* made it into all big news because its developers a) announced to mass media that they want to compete with #Facebook and b) asked people for crowdfunding, hence the big publicity campaign. If Friendika had been as well-known as, for example, #Firefox, Diaspora* wouldn't exist.

I myself only found Friendika back in the day by actively searching the Web for decentralised social network platforms. It was a thorough, intense search. And I eventually stumbled upon it.

As for Hubzilla, I happened upon it on Friendica when someone mentioned it.

As for #Osada and #Zap, I think it was you who mentioned them within the Hubzilla dev bubble which I occasionally got a glance into. Someone from that bubble also led me to #Misty a.k.a. #Mistpark2020.

As for #Roadhouse and #Streams, I discovered them on Zotlabs by chance. And their Zotlabs pages were never filled with any information on what they are and what they do.

I didn't find out about any of these projects through any form of advertising or publicity campaign, nor did I learn about any of them through tech media.

Only once do I recall that any of these projects has ever been presented at a FLOSS or hacker event. That was years ago at the #ChaosCommunicationCongress where a panel about Friendica was held. But even that panel was like Friendica devs talking to other devs about developing Friendica and Friendica node admins talking to other LAMP stack admins about installing and running Friendica nodes. What Friendica can do was only mentioned briefly. The first step, namely getting people interested in using Friendica as end users to see what it's good for, was skipped entirely. And there was no info booth, there was no promotional material, there were no flyers, no nothing. Even #OpenStreetMap had flyers.

#Mastodon was just lucky. For starters, it was the first free and decentralised microblogging service that was launched in years. The whole #StatusNet and #GNUsocial things had been so long ago that even those few who had come across it barely remembered, so Mastodon didn't seem like it was aping them. And it must have attracted enough disgruntled #birdsite users already then to gain a critical mass.

Before 2022, we already had a situation in which the vast majority of Mastodon users believed that the #Fediverse was Mastodon, and Mastodon was the Fediverse, and there was nothing else out there. Pleroma was already vastly superior to Mastodon technologically, but Mastodon had the critical mass. Still, Mastodon itself was so obscure that #TimBernersLee had never heard of it, much less of any of your projects or Diaspora*, and therefore decided to re-invent the free, open-source, non-commercial, decentralised social wheel all from scratch once more.

When the #TwitterTakeover started looming on the horizon, people started recommending Mastodon on #Twitter. And pretty much only Mastodon because that was all they knew. Again, critical mass. This critical mass enlarged itself in several waves.

I guess not a single birdsite refugee had ever heard of any Fediverse project beyond Mastodon when they joined it, and I guess over 80% still never have. And they keep wondering how people can toot more than 500 characters, whether their Mastodon instance has different settings and such. I know from personal experience that it often takes several attempts to explain to people that, no, I am not on Mastodon, and Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance.

Mass media don't make it any better. Both general news media and tech media have meanwhile picked up the Mastodon phenomenon, and many have accepted that Mastodon is here to stay. Still, all general news media and nearly all tech media "know" that Mastodon is the Fediverse and vice versa, and that there isn't anything else out there. Some media outlets have joined the Fediverse themselves. They could be way better off with #Akkoma or #Pixelfed or Hubzilla or their own take on Streams. But they're on Mastodon. Why? Because that's all they knew when they got there. Because they've settled with Mastodon before even knowing that there are projects that'd suit them better. And they'll probably never know.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming you personally. I'm not even sure if it's good style for the main dev of a project to go peddling their own work. Making your projects known should have been a task for the whole community. Not only the devs, not only the hub admins, but the users. Because if someone can talk to aspiring users, it's actual users. "If you build it, they will come" has failed, and we should have seen this coming.

Large-scale migration away from proprietary, commercial projects and towards free, open-source, non-commercial alternatives only happens under pressure from outside and even then not always. Large-scale adoption of Firefox in Germany happened when the most widely-used browser was #InternetExplorer 6 which was not only hopelessly outdated but so insecure that the malware spread through it alone caused millions upon millions of Euros in damage. And it only happened because the reaction upon this was our Mother Of The Nation, Federal Chancellor #AngelaMerkel, herself telling the Germans to move from IE6 to Firefox.

And the mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon only happened for two reasons: One, Twitter was threatening to get more and more hard to take. Two, Twitter didn't and still doesn't really have a commercial, corporate-owned, centralised competitor. All possible Twitter alternatives are decentralised #FLOSS. There was nowhere else to go than down the Fediverse route.

Right now, however, I don't see a #Facebook takeover that'd turn it into yet another Nazi hive and cause people to flee to Friendica and/or Hubzilla. Nor does #OlafScholz tell people to quit Facebook and join Friendica/Hubzilla instead. He doesn't even tell people to join Mastodon.

No, growth for Friendica, Hubzilla and Streams still has to come from within. And again, this won't be a task for the core devs. All they'll have to do is tell the community what there is to advertise. But I don't expect anything really new to come anytime soon, seeing as Streams seems to be a be-all, end-all project that can be turned into anything without involvement by the core devs. So we already know what there basically is to advertise. And when it comes to cool new features, we learn about them quickly when new versions come around, and the devs do talk about these beforehand.

So the first step would be to get these projects known outside the #DFRN, #Zot and #Nomad bubble. This would lead us into two different, bigger bubbles. One is the Fediverse which, as I've already mentioned, the vast majority of its own users still sees as synonymous with Mastodon. Granted, we'd have tough competition there, for if someone desires more than 500 characters per post, maybe they're better off with Akkoma or a different Mastodon instance. And federation with Diaspora* is no longer a unique selling point because hardly anyone uses Diaspora* exclusively anymore, so I guess hardly anyone misses the Diaspora* connector on Streams. But maybe a "federated social Swiss army knife" like Friendica or even Hubzilla or a "federated social construction kit" like Streams is exactly what some people are looking for. Remember that the Fediverse alone covers millions of people. 1% of them is slowly but steadily closing in on being 100,000.

The other bubble is the FLOSS scene. This may be more difficult because, curiously, the FLOSS scene barely knows about the Fediverse, even about Mastodon, and thus has barely adopted it. This will be somewhat tougher. Some people in that scene reject social media altogether because they associate social media with corporate spyware, and they've convinced themselves that they don't need any social media (or their social media hub is either a git repository hoster, ironically often a #Microsoft property, or a mailing list). Others have a general dislike towards GUIs, only using ultra-minimalist #i3wm and no pointing devices themselves. Or they cling to the UNIX philosophy that each tool has to be able to only do one thing which gets to the point that they actually use different tools for receiving, composing and sending e-mails. Even Friendica can do too much for their tastes.

Still, I think that other people in the FLOSS bubble may be more welcoming, also because the Fediverse is yet another rather successful attempt at competing against corporate monopolies with FLOSS, with decentralised FLOSS à la #XMPP or #Matrix even. Also, while the #GAFAM bubble sees us as a bunch of idealistic but ultimately successless basement-dwelling nerds, the FLOSS bubble will see us as some of their own ilk doing more cool stuff in addition to all the cool stuff that has already been done. Not to mention that the FLOSS bubble has its own news outlets. We just must not repeat the mistake of only trying to talk to potential devs or potential instance admins. We have to reach out to aspiring end users first and foremost. Devs and admins will come in their wake. FLOSS people aren't keen on developing something they've never even tried using.

Media coverage outside the FLOSS bubble might give us an even wider audience. Sure, it may appear like even specialised tech media aren't interested in anything that isn't commercial. And some outlets do flat-out refuse to publish anything about anything FLOSS, or they only write about whoever pays them to write about them. But generally, they don't have an aversion against FLOSS alternatives to commercial products. Mass media helped Firefox spread. Mass media helped Diaspora* exceed their crowd-funding goal buy suggesting it'll be a Facebook killer. And mass media are right now accepting Mastodon and the Fediverse as the next big thing instead of some wacky nerd stuff. It may actually happen that media outlets which still reject the Fediverse in favour of Twitter will be seen as not only backwards-oriented, but outright right-wing.

It's hard to say how easy it'd be in 2023 to even only get tech media to write about Friendica, Hubzilla or even Streams. On the one hand, there may still be an attitude of, "Nobody wants to read about it if it wasn't launched with venture capital." On the other hand, the Fediverse itself has more than one foot in the door, what with journalists joining Mastodon and entire media outlets launching their own instances. All we have to do is get the knowledge into their heads that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Maybe they'll find this discovery so amazing that they'll write about it.

I think Friendica would be the easiest case. Okay, it'll be hard to treat something as cool new stuff if it has been around for 13 years or so. But it isn't so modular, it's more like an all-in-one "black box" of the kind that non-techy types prefer, and it concentrates on social networking and doesn't overwhelm its users with features, at least not that much. Also, it's the closes to being "to Facebook what Mastodon is to Twitter."

Hubzilla could mainly score with its sheer, all-encompassing power. It's certainly the most powerful, most versatile Fediverse project. This, however, may make it too powerful for casuals. It's also more modular than Friendica which means that many cool features, even including #ActivityPub support, have to be activated by the user. That said, Hubzilla's main issues, its user interface which capitulates before its vast amount of features, its documentation which reads more like a technical spec than a user manual and its outdated and less-than-welcoming representation on the Web, are being tackled as we speak (or rather type). Thanks to @Scott M. Stolz, Hubzilla may soon have one or multiple user interfaces that make it much easier to harness its vast power and flexibility.

Streams, or (streams) as some spell it, is still the odd one out. I must admit that even experienced Hubzilla veterans often have a hard time understanding what it actually is, much less Mastodon users, not to mention the GAFAM-only bubble. While bone-stock Streams itself is easier to use than Hubzilla, partly thanks to a reworked UI, partly thanks to lots of features having been cut and therefore no longer cluttering the UI, the whole concept may be confusing to many. It's not only even less of a "black box" than Hubzilla, it isn't a project or even a platform like Mastodon or Friendica at all; it's only a code repository which you can yoink and make something nice out of. Streams says, "Fork me!" It wasn't made to be run vanilla as a Zap successor which is a rather subversive idea. In fact, running Streams as-is is subverting the subversion again; it doesn't help that vanilla Streams makes for a decent Fediverse server already.

So Streams will be difficult to explain even to tinker-happy FLOSS people, its main target audience, and even more so to those who have only just left the commercial, corporate software bubble they had called their cosy home for many years and managed to wrap their minds around Mastodon. What Streams needs more than Hubzilla is reference implementations that show in practice rather than in theory what can be done with it. I mean, it's hard enough to grasp that Hubzilla can serve as a macroblog or a wiki until you've seen it happen with your own eyes.

A typical Hubzilla reference implementation would be a regular instance with all bells and whistles with open registration (until it's full, that is). People can join it, play around with it and make it their social homebase. Along with it, there could be Hubzilla instances that aren't social networking platforms but something different, yet still "powered by Hubzilla" as would be written on them. These could show Hubzilla's versatility. Something you were told is "something like Facebook" suddenly powers a blog. Or a community webpage, including a public event calendar. Or a wiki. Or a personal website with a personal DAV cloud server silently running in the background. Things that make Hubzilla get away with ActivityPub being optional, especially if these websites have nomadic clones. In this case, #Zot only serves to keep the clones in sync.

With Streams, the focus should be vice-versa. It'd be more important to show off what can be done on top of Streams or by forking Streams and making something nice and "unexpected" with it, preferably with multiple identical nomadic clones to show off what #Nomad can do, but still with a "powered by Streams" badge on it. A social networking platform or two could come later and mainly to demonstrate that Streams can do that, too. If this came first, Streams would be reduced to being "the next Friendica" or the next attempt at a Facebook competitor, and nobody would try to use it for anything else. Rather than that, Streams deserves a reputation as "nomadic WordPress" at the very least.

There's a lot that can be done to help these projects gain popularity. Some of it is already being done, especially for Hubzilla. And Streams can be given some time to take off, new as it is. Sitting around and waiting for people to come only gains us those who came from Twitter to Mastodon and then happened upon Friendica or Hubzilla through posts with over 500 characters.