#sublinks — Public Fediverse posts

@AJ Sadauskas

I mean, the Fediverse already has Lemmy, KBin, and MBin.

So there's already an ecosystem of pre-built communities out there.

/kbin is dead. Has been since last year. The last instances that haven't moved to Mbin are withering away.

However, in the "Lemmy clone" category, there's also PieFed, and Sublinks is still in development.

Also, the Facebook alternative Friendica ("Facebook alternative" not as in "Facebook clone", but as in "better than Facebook") has had groups since its launch in, 2010, five and a half years before Mastodon. Hubzilla has had groups since 2012 when it still was a Friendica fork named Red. (streams) (2021) and Forte (2024) have groups, too. All four are part of the same software family, created by the same developer. And interacting with their groups from Mastodon is somewhat smoother than interacting with a Lemmy community.

On Friendica, a group is simply another user account, but with different settings: In "Mastodon speak", it automatically boosts any DM sent to it to all its followers. In reality, it's a little more complicated because, unlike Mastodon, Friendica has a concept of threaded conversations. (No, seriously, Mastodon doesn't have it. If you think Mastodon has it, use Friendica for a year or two as your only daily driver, and then think again.)

Likewise, on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, it's another channel with similar settings.

CC: @myrmepropagandist @Jasper Bienvenido @sebastian büttrich @Asbestos

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #FediverseGroups #Groups #PieFed #Sublinks #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte

@🇵🇸  single use plastique 🏴‍☠️ @lori Misskey did it right, the Forkeys even more so.

Unlike Mastodon, they didn't aim to be purist Twitter clones. Misskey wanted to do microblogging, but without Twitter's unnecessary limitations and with some cool extra features, partly appealing particularly to a Japanese target audience.

It certainly helped that Misskey was originally launched in 2014, some two years before Mastodon.

Friendica, created in 2010 as Mistpark, is a similar case. It aimed to be an alternative to Facebook, but not a 1:1 Facebook clone. The idea was to build something that does the same thing as Facebook in similar ways as Facebook, but without what limited Facebook and without what sucked about Facebook.

And of course, it got a big pile of cool extra features on top that could be useful.

For example, circles. You may perceive them as either Mastodon's lists done right or a clone of Google+'s circles. Actually, however, Google+ was a clone of Diaspora*, Google+'s circles were a clone of Diaspora*'s aspects, and what are Friendica's circles today used to be Mistpark's groups. And Mistpark pre-dated even Diaspora*, so Mistpark had them first.

Also, next to being an alternative to Facebook, Mistpark was equipped as a full-blown blogging engine. No character limit. Full set of text formatting, up to and including headlines, lists and tables. In-line embedding of images and other media which can be uploaded to the built-in file storage before embedding them. StatusNet's summary field (which Mastodon repurposed into a content warning field seven years after Mistpark's launch in spite of being federated with both StatusNet's successor GNU social and Friendica) and a separate title field. A tag cloud. And so forth.

But we can also see it in the Threadiverse. First there were Lemmy, an attempt at a faithful clone of Reddit that also aimed at replacing Hacker News, and Lotide which fell to the wayside. Shortly before the Reddit enshittification, /kbin appeared. It added some interesting extra features, but it could never really mature due to being overrun at an early alpha stage.

Now we also have Mbin, a /kbin fork that improves on it, PieFed and Sublinks, all of which are more than mere Reddit or Hacker News clones.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Mistpark #Friendica #Threadiverse #Lemmy #/kbin #Mbin #PieFed #Sublinks