Enchanting Chinese Beauty with Long Hair
Scott M. Stolz
Good luck getting Mastodon to implement any standard they haven't invented themselves.
This will end in
This won't change much about many public, open-registration Friendica/Hubzilla instances not providing a link to the account/channel of the admin. Or any admin contact at all. All because the admin didn't bother to edit that page/hasn't gotten to it yet.
And it changes nothing about Mastodon users/admins trying to reach Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) admins the exact same way as they always try to reach other Mastodon admins. And failing because it doesn't work like on Mastodon. Even less in a mobile app that's geared towards Mastodon and Mastodon only.
Don't forget: On Hubzilla, everyone's on a Linux PC using a standard browser. On Mastodon, everyone's on a phone using a Mastodon app.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta If done the Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) way, that'd be disturbing to Mastodon users again.
I think nobody on Mastodon knows this, but these three projects have a Facebook-like/Tumblr-like/blog-like one-post-many-comments thread structure as opposed to Mastodon's Twitter-like many-single-posts-tied-together thread structure.
This means the thread starter owns the whole thread. This also means the thread starter can moderate their own thread and even delete comments from their own thread. Even if they weren't appointed moderators by the admin. AFAIK, the deletion is actually forwarded to the source.
So a Mastodon user may e.g. troll around in a thread started on Hubzilla or attack the thread starter. A bit later, that Mastodon user will discover that their toots in reply to that Hubzilla posts are gone. Maybe the thread starter even mentions they've moderated their own thread and deleted comments.
The short form: Regular users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can delete Mastodon toots. In fact, posts from anywhere. Only toots/posts in reply to their own posts, but yes, they can. And they could before Mastodon even existed.
If this started happening often enough, and word started spreading around especially Mastodon, it'd be perceived as invasive and disruptive by many. It might cause such a big uproar that even more Mastodon users would call for defederating Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) completely.
As for actual, traditional moderation, I'm not saying it's bad per se.
I'm saying that many Mastodon admins really don't know anything about the Fediverse outside Mastodon.
They think everything else that does *blogging is basically Mastodon with a different UI. Like an alternative mobile app for Mastodon itself. Or it's Mastodon + feature x on top. But otherwise like Mastodon.
And then they act accordingly. They try to interact with Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) admins the same way as they interact with other Mastodon admins. And they neither know nor realise that these three projects are too different from Mastodon for these methods to even work!
Again:
You can't report a Hubzilla user to a Hubzilla admin using the report system because Hubzilla does not have Mastodon's report system!
You can't expect Hubzilla admins to follow hashtags for Mastodon instance admins either. Not only because they aren't Mastodon admins, and they probably don't even know that hashtag. But because you can't follow hashtags on Hubzilla!
And so forth.
So what appears to be a Hubzilla admin's laziness or carelessness or ignorance are actually technical differences between Mastodon and Hubzilla that Mastodon admins are unaware of.
This has nothing to with moderation by admins/mods only being bad. This has everything to do with Hubzilla being vastly different from Mastodon. And with Mastodon admins/mods not knowing jack shit about Hubzilla.
(Good thing this is so long that nobody will read it. Otherwise it'll empower those who say that Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) must be redesigned to be exactly like Mastodon or face full defederation otherwise for being too different.)
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta gave me to think.
Could it be that countless Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users are blocked on countless mostly Mastodon instances by the admins because reporting users the Mastodon doesn't work on these projects
So there's a user who doesn't fully act according to the Mastodon community standards. That user's posts appear on some Mastodon instance.
The wrongdoing: For example, what's perceived as hashtag abuse see the linked thread. Or no Mastodon-style content warning where Mastodon culture would demand one*. Or something like that.
What does the admin do Use the report system to report that user to the admins and moderators of their own home instance.
Problem: That particular user isn't on Mastodon. Not on anything that was modelled after Mastodon either. That user is on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams). Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK, neither has Mastodon's report system implemented.
The report never reaches the admin of that instance. And the instance doesn't have any more staff.
Well, then they could write directly to the admin of that instance. If only the Fediverse contact of the instance admin was available on the instance frontpage. Or anywhere on the instance Web interface.
Even if they could, they might get the idea that they could catch the admin's attention by mentioning them in a public post. Spoiler: Doesn't work with Friendica accounts, Hubzilla channels and (streams) channels.
Oh, and at least Hubzilla and (streams) allow you to restrict from whom you receive direct messages. Regardless of whether or not that's a good idea, it's possible to make it so that DMs from random Mastodon users no longer end up in your stream. Worse yet: These Mastodon users don't even know that their DMs don't reach the recipient.
Okay, last resort, complaints about that user can be posted publicly under the hashtag #MastoAdmin. Should reach lots of admins, right
Yes, but almost exclusively Mastodon admins. It's MastoAdmin, after all. Why should an admin of, say, a Friendica node or a Hubzilla hub follow that hashtag Neither of them is Mastodon, and neither of them has anything to do with Mastodon. They didn't even federate with Mastodon, Mastodon federated with them.
Oh, and besides, to my best knowledge, they can't even follow hashtags in the first place. Or is Hubzilla the only one out of the three that doesn't have that feature yet
Anyways, the warning with the #MastoAdmin hashtag doesn't reach them either.
So whatever you try to let some Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) admin know that a user on their instance "misbehaves", the admin doesn't react and "moderate" that user.
Conclusion for your typical Mastodon admin: That instance is unmoderated. From the point of view of people who only know Mastodon beyond the name, the admin must ignore all reports.
We can be glad if this leads only to blocking the "misbehaving" user on lots of Mastodon instances and not to what's standard for unmoderated or undermoderated instances on Mastodon: blocking the whole instance.
*Footnote: Neither of the three projects mentioned here has a "Content Warning" field. Hubzilla and (streams) have a "Summary" field which is the same thing, but especially newbies and those who are hardly in touch with the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse don't know it's the same. Also, that field is only available for posts (= first posts) and not for comments (= replies which are something entirely different on these projects). Friendica doesn't even have that a pair of BBcode tags is needed for a Mastodon-style content warning, and AFAIK, this isn't documented anywhere.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #BlockingMeta #BlocklistMeta #CWBlocklistMeta Add your location to a Google Map
But what if the offending user is on an instance
a) of something that is not Mastodon, that wasn't even inspired by Mastodon because it's older than Mastodon, and that doesn't have Mastodon's report system implemented
b) whose admin doesn't follow MastoAdmin because they aren't Mastodon admins
c) whose admin doesn't follow MastoAdmin because that project doesn't have following hashtags implemented
So whatever you do the Mastodon way never reaches the admin in the first place
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Defederation #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Just out of curiosity:
Let's suppose you come across someone whom you find misbehaving. You try reporting them to their instance moderation.
But they aren't on Mastodon. They're on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams). And you can't for the life of you figure out how to get into contact with the admin of that specific instance via Mastodon. And yes, it's a public instance.
What do you do Defederate the whole instance because its management doesn't appear to be up to Mastodon's community standards Demand it be fediblocked altogether for that reason
Or what if there's only an e-mail address, but no link to a Fediverse account If that's a problem for Mastodon instance admins, I might single-handedly be responsible for hub.netzgemeinde.eu being defederated by dozens or hundreds of Mastodon and *key instances for "non-Mastodon-standard" behaviour.
(Hashtags below mostly for filter-triggering purposes. Text filters are the CW standard where I come from and have been since at least 2012.)
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Defederation #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Ich mache das anders. Ich warne im Summary (Mastodon: Content Warning) vor allem, was jemandem auf Mastodon unangenehm sein kann, und die eigentlichen Content Warnings dopple ich noch einmal mit jeweils einem und mehreren Hashtags fr die, die Filter verwenden.
Das ist auch ein bichen eine Demonstration dessen, was dabei rauskommen kann.
Zeichen habe ich selbst mehr als reichlich zu verbrennen, will sagen, praktisch unbegrenzt viele. Daran soll's nicht scheitern. Und wenn der Post lnger als 500 Zeichen wird, gibt's dafr eine Content Warning und die Hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong und #CWLongPost und bei deutschsprachigen Posts - wobei ich die Postsprache nicht einstellen kann - zustzlich #LangerPost und #CWLangerPost.
Bei Kommentaren gibt's dann nur die Hashtags, weil Mastodon-CWs nicht gehen.
CC: He may have a point, yes. There may be more people in the Fediverse who think like him, yes. He even sounds like he has come across one of my posts.
But if I did what he asked for, all my regular posts would grow to thousands upon thousands of characters and take hours to write because I'd have to break everything down to the very basics. Both the primary and the secondary topic of this channel are niche within a niche, maybe within yet another niche for a non-technical audience.
Essentially, I couldn't post anything anymore without long-post content warnings for Mastodon users who are disturbed by everything longer than 500 characters.
And my image descriptions for moderately complex in-world images, now sitting at 35,000 to 40,000 characters for the first image in a post and not counting the preamble, might easily grow beyond 50,000 or 60,000 characters. The preamble would grow well over 5,000 characters. Even longer if I took people's attention spans into consideration and explained certain things again and again.
This wouldn't even really help people outside my niche with understanding my posts. Even fewer of them would read them in the first place, and even more of them would mute or block me to get rid of those monstrous posts in their timelines.
And no, I can't explain the implications of the current scheduled OSgrid downtime in one simple sentence and in plain, everyday language to someone who doesn't even understand what a server is and knows exactly nothing about 3-D virtual worlds. Not in a way they'd fully understand.
Some of ya'll need to step back from the hyper-specific niche topics you post about and take a second to think about explaining your topics to normies, like ELI5 once in a while. Sometimes I'm scrolling my feed and I'm like wtf is all this this about.
Maybe I just curated a bunch of people with hard to follow niche interests.
Am I the only one
It seems like people aren't posting to have a conversation, It's just monologuing. I prolly fall into this once in a while as well.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
The latter is mostly because the vast majority of Lemmy users didn't come from Mastodon but from Reddit. They weren't told much about the existence of a Fediverse, only that there's a thing called Lemmy which is many copies of Reddit before its enshittification, and these are connected with each other. That's all that many know. Just like many Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
It doesn't help that Lemmy barely gets any interaction from other projects. Mastodon is huge, and Mastodon users should be all over Lemmy. But many Mastodon users have never heard about Lemmy. Those who have may find it too inconvenient to follow a Lemmy community because that involves using the account search and copy-pasting. Don't forget that the huge majority of Mastodon users is on phones. And those who do manage to follow Lemmy communities say that the interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is too limiting.
For the record: I do have Lemmy followers.
/kbin made bidirectional *blogging-style following possible only by bolting microblogging onto a Reddit clone. Lemmy is a more purist Reddit clone, it doesn't support domestic *blogging, so users of *blogging projects can't follow Lemmy users in the traditional sense.
As for lemmy.ml, that instance doesn't matter that much anymore. Even lemmy.world has been surpassed as the biggest instance.
Pixelfed could become big if Instagram was enshittified so tremendously that everyone except the biggest attention whores ("But muh followers, but muh fame") will start looking for alternatives. The advantage of Pixelfed for Instagram users over Mastodon for Twitter users is that Pixelfed allows direct imports of Instagram accounts with all content.
I'm not so sure about PeerTube, not only because that'd require gigantic amounts of hard drive space, but also because many users are on YouTube for the money, and PeerTube won't pay them a penny. If they moved to PeerTube, they'd lose a source of income. Also, fewer YouTube users have ever heard of PeerTube than users have heard of Mastodon.
BookWyrm would be easier, but I can't see right now how Goodreads could be enshittified enough to cause a mass migration. Maybe, however, BookWyrm becomes interesting for people who don't even know Goodreads and its whole concept, and they find out about BookWyrm before they find out about Goodreads.
Friendica tried to take a chance long ago, back in the early 2010s. It even tried to facilitate the transition of whole social circles from Facebook by federating with Facebook by means of a cross-poster. It didn't work out. People didn't want to leave their "friends" behind, not to mention that the average Facebook user was even less technologically adept than the average Twitter user a good decade later. Even trying to mimic Facebook's UI didn't help.
Maybe it was for the better. Typical server hardware that Friendica ran on back in the day could barely handle over 130 accounts on one node. The notoriously power-hungry Facebook connector cut a dozen or two out of this number. Many public Friendica nodes with the Facebook connector on closed their registrations at a bit over 100 accounts. I think not even the biggest root servers would have given you a four-digit capacity.
It would simply have been impossible to accommodate a flood of Facebook refugees on Friendica. Even if Friendica users with Facebook contacts had started their own private nodes, most of them would have needed multiple nodes to even have space for a fraction of their Facebook "friends".
As for Hubzilla, it'll first need a lot of polish. And then I can't see from where people would come flooding to Hubzilla. Facebook refugees would rather pile onto Friendica, the traditional more-powerful-than-Diaspora* Facebook "clone", or maybe (streams), the Fediverse champion in permission control.
Hubzilla could be something for companies, for organisations, for political offices, for journalists, for scientists etc. I could even see modern and progressive left-wing parties use it Pirate Parties, anyone They wouldn't have to worry about hub capacities because they could either use specialised hubs, e.g. for journalists, or they'd run their own hubs anyway, just like they run their own Mastodon instances now. In fact, if that thicket of instances run by German public broadcasters was Hubzilla instead of Mastodon, everyone could go nomadic without having to use general-purpose hubs for their clones.
But getting them from something as dead-simple as to the Leatherman of Fediverse projects is difficult, to say the least. Even from Facebook.
And private persons will only really tackle Hubzilla and stick with it if they're geeks enough.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Lemmy #kbin #/kbin #Pixelfed #PeerTube #BookWyrm #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseMigration How about projects that use ActivityPub as a secondary protocol ((streams)) or as an optional add-on (Friendica, Hubzilla) while using something different with different features as the main protocol
I mean, I could write a lot about Hubzilla, and I occasionally contribute to the . But most of what could be written about Hubzilla would be about its inner workings (channels, permission control, no limits, theming etc.), stuff that doesn't federate in the traditional sense at all (articles, wikis, websites, the file space, CalDAV, CardDAV etc.) and stuff that only works on Hubzilla's main protocol Zot (nomadic identity).
While this is all part of what makes Hubzilla Hubzilla, none of it has got that much to do with ActivityPub, if anything.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla
One is that Mastodon users, of course, expect everyone to add alt-text to all their images. That's easy for Mastodon users: Images are attached to toots, and you get a nifty text field into which you put your alt-text.
This is different on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams). Not only do you embed images much like in blog or forum posts. No, you don't have an alt-text field either. You embed these images using automatically generated BBcode, again, much like in forum posts. If you want alt-text, you have to edit that embedding code and graft the alt-text into it. Manually.
There is no official documentation on this whatsoever for either of these projects. The knowledge about this spreads by word-of-mouth only.
So users of these projects risk being ostracised for something they don't know a) that they have to do, b) that they can do and c) how they could possibly do.
The other issue is "image description == alt-text, full stop, end of discussion". The assumption that "alt-text" and "image description" are always mutually fully synonymous with no exception.
This comes from Mastodon's post length limitation. 500 characters. These are for the actual post, for mentions, for hashtags and for the content warning which actually counts into the post length. Doesn't leave you much room to describe an image, does it
But in alt-text, you have 1,500 characters. Per image. Always. No matter how much you want to toot otherwise.
With such a "high" limit, Mastodon users often don't simply add an alt-text of a maximum of 150-200 characters as defined in those many "how do I write alt-text for my static webpage with thousands of characters for explaining stuff" guides. No, they go well into detail. They give in-depth descriptions. They explain stuff. After all, they've got 1,500 characters of room.
Other Mastodon users love that, and they may do it themselves. Yet other Mastodon users see that the aforementioned Mastodon users love it and thus do it themselves.
With image descriptions of 700, 800, 1,000 or more characters, Mastodon users don't even question putting the descriptions into the alt-text. It's simply technologically impossible to do otherwise. So it doesn't even come to their minds. Image description == alt-text.
Okay, now here comes the catch.
First of all, you must never describe or explain something in alt-text that can't be accessed from anywhere else in the image.
That's because some people can't access alt-text, e.g. if they have a physical disability that prevents them from using a computer mouse, so they have to do everything with the keyboard, so they can't hover a mouse cursor over an image which is necessary to see alt-text in a desktop browser.
If they can't access alt-text, they can't access the information in it. If that information is only available in the alt-text but neither in the post text nor in the image, it's lost to them. Such information always goes into the post text.
Mastodon users are likely to be highly irritated upon reading that. How are you supposed to put that in the post text in the Fediverse! Mastodon doesn't give you enough characters! You can only put a detailed image description into the alt-text!
On Mastodon maybe. But only on vanilla Mastodon. Okay, and on Threads if it supports alt-text.
But everything that is not vanilla Mastodon gives you either more characters in the post text than in alt-text or no limits for either.
Even Misskey gives you 1,500 characters in alt-text and 3,000 in the post which is 2,500 more than on Mastodon. That's a thread of at least six posts rolled into one.
The other Forkeys give you 3,000 by default. Pleroma, Akkoma and their other forks give you 5,000 by default.
Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) don't have any defined limits. Not for the post text and theoretically not for the alt-text either which, as I've explained above, is grafted into the post text and not put into a dedicated text field.
That's plenty of room for description and explanation, depending on how much you go into detail. In fact, you aren't even bound to a 1,500-character limit anymore!
I still expect Mastodon users to be highly irritated whenever I describe images. That's because my alt-text usually only contains a brief image description that doesn't actually describe anything. In addition, it says that the actual, fully detailed image description is in the post which is hidden behind a Hubzilla-style summary/Mastodon-style content warning combination.
I expect someone to try and educate me about all image descriptions always only belonging into alt-text because that's how it's done on Mastodon, yada yada yada. Regardless of the image description of even only one of the images being over 25 times longer than Mastodon's alt-text, so it wouldn't even fit in there.
Mastodon doesn't do it like this, so it's wrong everywhere else as well. Even though Mastodon doesn't do it like this because it can't, and everything else can, and Mastodon can happily display what everything else can.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta Late, but still:
It has been around since the 2000s. No, really. No, I'm not kidding.
The community has been using the term "Metaverse" in its common daily lingo since at least 2008. Want proof
, the first public OpenSim grid, the oldest, the largest by active users and still the second-largest by land area, has referred to itself as the "Open Source Metaverse" .
The Metropolis Metaversum, the first grid hosted in Germany, called itself just that , too.
The news site Hypergrid Business has used the name "" for its OpenSim category for quite a while already.
Oh, by the way, , active since as early as 2003, has jumped upon the bandwagon meanwhile and refers to itself as a "metaverse", too.
#Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #SecondLife #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost I can't help but wonder if there's any influence or inspiration or experience from Second Life, the pioneer of highly modular and highly customisable avatars, going into this. And I mean actually using it, not hearsay or reading about it. (Mentioning OpenSim is probably futile here.)
Especially female avatars are tricky. Linden Labs has learned that the hard way after only supporting male/unisex clothes. When people wanted their female avatars to optionally wear high heels, or when they wanted them to wear skirts that move with the legs, Second Life's avatar standard had to be changed. All that was stuff that nobody had thought of early on, even if the default starter avatar was technically female.
For good skirts, look at Sinespace and Overte, by the way.
#Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Avatar #Avatars #VirtualClothing #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostCan everyone please with a cherry on top stop referring to Meta's virtual worlds as "the Metaverse"
They're called "Horizons"!
Zuckerberg did not invent the Metaverse. Zuckerberg did not even invent the term Neal Stephenson did in 1991. A Second Life in-world expo in the year 2007 was called "Metaverse". And the OpenSim community has been using the word "Metaverse" on a daily base down to grid names before 2010, too.
Thanks from someone who has been in OpenSim and thus known and used the term "Metaverse" in 2020 already in behalf of everyone in Second Life, OpenSim and all other virtual worlds that already existed before 2022.
P.S.: Second Life did not shut down in 2008 nor in 2009 either.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Just because you can't get anyone who can still develop in truly cross-platform languages because everyone can only "code" Windows apps in C# or .NET or mobile apps in JavaScript anymore
Or is it worth it because more and more Fediverse instance servers run on Windows machines because aspiring instance admins can't be bothered to learn Linux
Strongly reminds me of OpenSim which, back in the mid-2000s, was built in .NET and originally Windows-only. A server application. It was eventually made compatible with Mono. It may still cause trouble on Linux or macOS, so even amongst the grids that aren't DreamGrids, about every other one is running on a Windows machine. It got worse when OpenSimulator 0.9.3 switched from .NET for Windows and Mono for everything else to dotnet6 for everything.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CSharp #DotNet #Iceshrimp #OpenSim #OpenSimulator
I rarely post pictures anymore, but when I do, I always describe them before posting them. In order to make my pictures understandable, I have to write very detailed descriptions and explanations which require special niche knowledge. If hardly anyone but me has that knowledge, how could an AI possibly have it
Also, I describe my own original images not by looking at the images, much less at the resolution at which I'll post them, but by looking directly at what the images show. I can see many more details that way, and I can transcribe text verbatim that's illegible or practically invisible in the image. AI can't do that.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
In addition, Mastodon and only Mastodon dictates all culture all across the Fediverse, no matter where.
This means doing everything the Mastodon way. Content warnings for sensitive content in the summary. Friendica doesn't even have a summary field. Alt-text for all media which neither Friendica nor Hubzilla nor (streams) has a text field for or even only documentation on how to graft it into BBcode.
At the same time, doing anything that can't be done on vanilla Mastodon is bad. Quotes. Shared posts (= "quote-posts" = "quote-boosts" = "quote-tweets" = "quote-toots"). Text formatting. Code blocks. Bullet-point lists. Embedded links. Even only over 500 characters. All stuff that Mistpark 1.0 (now Friendica) could do as early as 2010, almost six years before Mastodon.
The key reason why Mastodon is so dominant is not only because it has twice as many active users as everything else combined. It's because it's the one and only gateway into the Fediverse.
Everyone who comes here believes that the Fediverse is only Mastodon because telling them that the Fediverse is more than that only confuses them. Hell, they wouldn't even join if the official app didn't railroad them hard onto mastodon.social because decentrality would scare them away even before they were forced to pick an instance.
Then they spend multiple months with that belief that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. And the Mastodon-only Fediverse is what they get used to. Their new, nice, friendly, cosy, fluffy home. It's also in that phase that the first-wave and second-wave Twitter refugees were in when they shaped Mastodon's culture, completely ignoring the rest of the Fediverse which didn't even exist for them.
Then they eventually come across the very first "toot" in one of their timelines which is somewhat weird. Mostly that's because it's very long. Or maybe it does stuff of which they don't know how to do it on Mastodon because they can't do it on Mastodon at all like italics without Unicode trickery. And whoever wrote that "toot" tells them it isn't a "toot" because it's not from Mastodon, it's from XYZ, and no, XYZ is not Mastodon, it isn't a fork of Mastodon either, and yes, it's absolutely normal and intentional and legal that you can post from XYZ to Mastodon.
And then they freak out because they're disturbed by someone who has intruded into their nice and cosy and fluffy Mastodon Fediverse. And they don't want this to happen ever again.
Still, I think the majority of Mastodon users have never knowingly come across anything from anywhere that isn't Mastodon. Those who say they know the Fediverse is more than Mastodon mostly only know the Fediverse beyond Mastodon from hearsay and name-dropping, but they assume it's basically Mastodon with different names, different UIs and maaaaaybe longer posts because they've read somewhere that you can post thousands of characters on this-or-that project.
So nobody on Mastodon takes the non-Mastodon Fediverse and its perks into account when shaping the Fediverse culture.
Everyone uses "alt-text" and "image description" synonymously because Mastodon toots are too ridiculously limited in size for proper image descriptions, so there's no other way in "the Fediverse" to describe an image more thoroughly than in alt-text which offers 1,500 characters. They're completely unaware that the circumstances are vastly different everywhere outside vanilla Mastodon and Threads because everything except vanilla Mastodon and Threads offers you thousands of characters by default.
The debates on whether or not to allow quotes or "quote-toots" should be possible on Mastodon are out-right hilarious. Friendica and Hubzilla have been able to both quote and "quote-toot" any post on Mastodon with no resistance from the very second that the first Mastodon instance spun up in 2016. But nobody knows that. The *keys are capable of both, too, AFAIK, but the greater Mastodon community is unaware of that as well and keeps debating only about Mastodon.
So it isn't much of a surprise that all behaviour rules for the Fediverse are made by Mastodon users for everything that connects to Mastodon, but completely disregarding the existing culture of whatever connects to Mastodon. Sometimes they disregard the capabilities of whatever connects to Mastodon, sometimes they forbid them because these capabilities are disturbing to those who want the Fediverse to feel like only Mastodon.
You're only exempt from these rules if you're on Hubzilla or (streams), and you've got Pubcrawl off. If at all.
Using nomadic identity is actually fairly safe. Mastodon users usually don't notice it unless you often post to the same people from your main instance and then from a clone. And besides, except for those who try to create imaginary scenarios of using nomadic identity as a harassment tool, those Mastodon users who know Hubzilla and (streams) offer nomadic identity envy them for their ease of moving instance and their resilience against sudden instance shutdowns.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPosttroet.cafe, one of the biggest German-speaking Mastodon instances, was on the verge of closing.
firefish.social, Firefish's lighthouse instance, has stopped working due to half a year of neglect by its only admin who is also Firefish's only core maintainer.
It's time the people behind ActivityPub finally accept Mike Macgirvin 's proposals. Nomadic identity shouldn't stay exclusive to Hubzilla and (streams).
#Fediverse #ActivityPub #NomadicIdentity #TroetCafe #FirefishSocial #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostWell, it might be possible to keep Hubzilla or (streams) users from quote-posting/quote-boosting/quote-tweeting/quote-tooting Mastodon toots, i.e. sharing them the good old-fashioned Friendica way.
When fetching a Mastodon toot, Pubcrawl would have to dig deep into Mastodon and check for the no-quote-post flag. If it's set, Pubcrawl would have to notify Hubzilla's core which, in turn, would have to tell Redbasic or whichever theme is active to deactivate (grey out) the "Share" button. It wouldn't even be necessary to keep a post with a share from being sent because it'd be impossible to generate the share in the first place.
Preventing quotes would be more difficult and more prone to false positives or negatives.
If e.g. Mastodon accounts can set a flag for not being quoted ever, the post/comment editor would have to check if a) someone is mentioned who doesn't want to be quoted, and b) there is a substring of a post from that user in the draft between a pair of
However, this would be so easy to circumvent for Hubzilla's/(streams)' typical tech-savvy users that it would have to be extended. After all, almost all of us are on desktop/laptop computers instead of on phones, and we use standard browsers instead of dedicated apps. Copy-pasting anything from anywhere to anywhere is easy for us.
Posts or bits of posts can be copied and pasted into a whole new post draft, thus starting a whole new thread with a quote. This would make checking an existing thread for unquoteable posts impossible, so the whole database of the instance would have to be checked. Even then, our likes could go to Mastodon, copy something from a post there and paste it into a new Hubzilla or (streams) post without first fetching the Mastodon post to be quoted.
Also, there are many ways to quote a post. Apart from the standard
there are
>Quote
> Quote
"Quote"
Quote
Quote
Quote
Quote
Quote
>>Quote<<
etc.
Hubzilla and (streams) would have to be able to catch them all. And if bad came to worse, that'd be a game of whack-a-mole because those who absolutely want to quote unquoteable posts will keep inventing new ways of quoting.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Quote #Quotes #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuotedPostsScott M. Stolz
This will take a lot of time to happen.
Currently, Mastodon is just about the only gateway for new users into the Fediverse, also because everything written about the Fediverse outside the Fediverse is either mostly about Mastodon and just name-drops other projects in one half-sentence somewhere, or it's entirely about Mastodon and sweeps everything else under the rug. In addition, almost all Mastodon newbies land on one and the same instance owned and controlled by the devs.
So almost all Fediverse newbies spend their first one, two, three or more months thinking that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. My personal record was someone who learned from me that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon after five months.
Then they read about Threads being (increasingly) part of the Fediverse. Then they read about Pixelfed and PeerTube. Then they read about Pleroma, Misskey and maybe Friendica from people who don't know more about these than the names. Add a few more weeks or months until they learn about Akkoma and the still maintained Forkeys, all of which are Mastodon's actually serious competitors. It'll probably take them even longer to find out about Hubzilla, not to mention (streams).
And even then they will only know that these projects exist, and that they're federated with Mastodon. But they will still believe that all these projects were created after Mastodon and glued onto Mastodon because Eugen Rochko has invented Mastodon, ActivityPub and the Fediverse in 2022 in the wake of Musk's Twitter takeover announcement.
They will not, however, know what these projects can do. By and by, they will learn a little. The first thing they learn is that non-Mastodon projects may have a higher character count, and be it by finding a 1,200-character "toot" in their federated timeline, wondering or complaining about it and then learning it's not a Mastodon toot, it's from Iceshrimp which is totally not Mastodon. As slim as chances are, they might also find out about other projects' text formatting capabilities.
Everything else stays hidden from them unless it's slammed right into their faces in their Mastodon apps. Members of marginalised groups that have been harassed on Twitter can't for the lives of them imagine that every other *blogging project in the Fediverse is fully capable of those dreaded "quote-tweets" until others share (= "quote-tweet") their own posts to themselves repeatedly. And then they'll demand Mastodon introduce a feature that makes it absolutely impossible for users of e.g. Hubzilla to "quote-tweet" them. Or even only quote them.
Either way, Mastodon will stay the big kid on the block as long as Mastodon stays the only kid on the block for every Fediverse newbie and for everyone who hasn't joined the Fediverse yet, including most mainstream media. And as long as Mastodon has a monopoly on mobile app compatibility because just about all iPhone apps and almost all Android apps are built against Mastodon and its API rather than the ActivityPub standard.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #NotOnlyMastodonI've noticed a trend in avatar clothing.
Single pieces of clothing and fatpacks with the same piece of clothing in many colours/variants have been superseded by outfit boxes with tops and bottoms over the years, almost always including footwear and often offering everything in only one colour. We've reached a point at which the former two are basically dead, as seems to be mixing and matching your own outfits. Granted, it doesn't help that clothes-makers often try to make their own mesh clothes incompatible with those by their competitors to keep you from combining tops by maker A with bottoms by maker B.
But outfit boxes themselves are increasingly superseded by complete avatars which add a mesh body plus a mesh head plus necessary HUDs, one shape, one skin, one eye texture and one hairstyle which often doesn't come with a colour HUD. As if you didn't have these already. Yes, you'll look like on the box art, but you won't look any different without out-of-the-box stuff or editing the shape.
These have been around since long before mesh and mostly targeted at newbies who wanted or had to change their look away from default Ruth and didn't know how. But nowadays, complete avatars are increasingly replacing outfit boxes.
Admittedly, that's even more convenient because you don't have to make the outfit work with your avatar if you replace your whole avatar. And right-clicking a folder with a complete avatar in it and then clicking "Replace" is less work than taking your previous clothes off, putting new clothes on, adjusting alphas if necessary and then saving the result as an outfit, not to mention learning what "outfits" in the viewer are in the first place.
Also admittedly, this means that your whole avatar looks different whenever you put on something new if you only ever wear complete avatars as they come out of the box. But over the last years, fewer and fewer users have actually put work into customising their looks anyway because they can't make the shapes that come with mesh heads, starter avatars and complete avatars any sexier.
There used to be a time when most users put work into their avatars by selecting or even modifying a skin, eyes and a hairstyle and editing the shape. But then they had a unique, individual look. You could recognise your acquaintances or well-known avatars by looking at them without paying the name tags above their heads any attention. A killer feature that's pretty unique to Second Life and OpenSim.
This is increasingly sacrificed to convenience and maxed-out sexiness.
I hope that the arrival of Maxine and Maxwell will not only kick-start the increased creation of native OpenSim clothes for these bodies, but since they start out with no clothes at all, cover the basics first with fatpacks.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #Avatars #VirtualWorlds #VirtualClothing #OldAndBusted #NewHotness
I sincerely hope not.
The last thing the Fediverse needs is Mastodon assuming control over all other projects by officially assuming direct control over the official ActivityPub standard. For example, Mastodon could dictate other projects to remove features that Mastodon doesn't have and thus kill all incentives to use these alternatives by having the ActivityPub standard re-written in such a way that everything that Mastodon doesn't do becomes "non-standard".
On the other hand, Mastodon isn't even interested in being standard-compliant. Mastodon can use its deliberate, intentional incompatibilities to everything else to make everything else look bad in comparison. And it actually works. People flock back from places like Akkoma, Friendica and the Forkeys because they aren't enough "like Mastodon". Sabotaging connections between Mastodon and the non-Mastodon Fediverse adds to this.
Don't forget that the Fediverse didn't start with Mastodon, and Rochko invented neither the Fediverse nor ActivityPub. The term "Fediverse" itself is four years older than Mastodon.
If Eugen Rochko and Mastodon shall have a saying in the development of the W3C standard, then Mike Macgirvin, experienced protocol designer and creator of the DFRN, Zot and Nomad protocols as well as their respective projects, shall have just as much of a saying without his suggestions being constantly blocked out of principle.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ActivityPub #Fediverse #Mastodon #W3Ctldr: Must add lots of hashtags because some people use them for CW text filters, some people only do that for CW, others may want to find my stuff, and yet others want to hide my stuff with filters.
Guilty as charged. I regularly use a lot of hashtags. But I always put them all at the end of the post unless I'm talking about certain hashtags.
I actually have to. I know that not everyone in the Fediverse is using Mastodon 4.x like it's still Mastodon 3.x or older. Some Fediverse users use text filters to automatically generate content warnings. Some prefer it.
Here on , what Mastodon perceives as a content warning field is actually a summary field. Content warnings are optionally automatically generated by a text filter. All this has been part of Hubzilla and its culture since its first release in 2015, a year before Mastodon was launched. In fact, Mastodon's content warning field has actually been StatusNet's summary field since 2008.
When I write a post, I always give out content warnings two-fold: in the summary field so that those used to Mastodon 3.x and older have their content warnings and as hashtags so that those who use text filters have their content warnings automatically generated.
When I write a comment right now, I can't write a Mastodon-style content warning. Hubzilla doesn't have Mastodon's Twitter-like many-posts thread model. Hubzilla has a one-post-many-comments model like Facebook, Tumblr or blogs. And why would you want to put a summary on a blog comment! That's why Hubzilla doesn't have a "content warning field" for comments. That's why I can't write Mastodon-style content warnings for replies. Hashtags are my only way of flagging sensitive content in replies.
I take content warnings seriously. And I post a whole lot of potentially sensitive or triggering content.
This starts with long posts. Many Mastodon users don't want to see posts with more than 500 characters. Hubzilla doesn't have a character limit at all, and it's extremely hard for me to stay under 500 characters. At least some Mastodon users demand all posts with over 500 characters have a content warning. So whenever I exceed 500 characters, I add "(CW:) long (n characters)" to the Mastodon-style content warning and the four hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost to the end of the post because I can't know who uses what for their filters.
Then there are those who don't want to read about the Fediverse on Mastodon. It's too technical for them or I don't know what. So whenever I write about the Fediverse, I add "(CW:) Fediverse meta" and often also "non-Mastodon Fediverse meta" to warn those who don't want to read about the Fediverse not only being Mastodon. In addition, I add the hashtags #FediMeta, #FediverseMeta, #CWFediMeta and #CWFediverseMeta for those who use filters.
If I explain something Fediverse-related without having been asked to do so, not even indirectly, I add "(CW:) Fedisplaining" and the hashtags #Fedisplaining and #CWFedisplaining.
If I write about content warnings, I add "(CW:) content warning meta" and the hashtag #CWMeta.
If I could write a summary/Mastodon-style content warning for this, I'd write, "I need hashtags not only to cover the topics I write about, but also to trigger text filters which some people use for automated content warnings CW: long (almost 6,400 characters), Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta, Fedisplaining, content warning meta, hashtag meta, doing things differently from the standard Mastodon way in the Fediverse".
Similarly, all my other content warnings are always present as hashtags and in (start) posts as Mastodon-style content warnings as well.
Also, of course, I have to indicate what I write about so that my posts can be found by those who might be interested in the topic and filtered by those who aren't. And this regularly requires multiple hashtags.
The primary topic of this Hubzilla channel is 3-D virtual worlds, especially those based on OpenSimulator. In order to make such posts discoverable, I add the hashtag #OpenSimulator. But there's also the short-hand OpenSim which is used even more often, so I also have to add the hashtag #OpenSim. If my post is partly or entirely about Second Life, I add #SecondLife.
In addition, I need more general hashtags. One is #Metaverse. No, this term wasn't invented by Zuckerberg in 2022. The OpenSim community has used it a lot before 2010, maybe as early as 2008 or even 2007. And it was the name of a Second Life conference in 2007. The other one is #VirtualWorlds.
If I write about a special topic within this topic, e.g. if I mention a certain grid or an event, I add that as a hashtag. Larger events in OpenSim usually have their official hashtags for commercial social media, and I use them here. And so forth.
The secondary topic of this channel has become the Fediverse itself. As I've written above, this alone requires four hashtags by default even without going over 500 characters.
If it's somewhat about the Fediverse as a whole or in general, I add #Fediverse. If it touches one or multiple certain projects, I tag them all. And I know a lot of Fediverse projects.
If a post explains that the Fediverse extends beyond Mastodon to an actual or imaginary audience that thinks otherwise, my go-to hashtags, all of which have existed before, are #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse, #NotOnlyMastodon and most recently #FediverseIsNotMastodon.
Certain details such as protocols, OpenWebAuth or nomadic identity require their own hashtags.
I can never know who might be searching for what, especially if I'm about to provide exactly what they're looking for. And I can also never know who's tired of reading what, and who has set up a hashtag filter to get rid of that kind of content.
As far as alt-text is concerned: I never skip the image description when I post an image, not even when I link to one. And I write the longest and most detailed image descriptions in the whole Fediverse.
There are only two exceptions. One are my profile picture (Mastodon: "avatar") and my channel picture (Mastodon: "banner"). There are no adequate means for me to describe them in such a way that the descriptions can easily be associated with the images. And I'd need a whole lot of character space for that. The other one are link preview images automatically generated by Mastodon because I can never know beforehand which image Mastodon will place there, if any.
This.
"Quote postswhich have already been implemented in several other Fedi projects and even some Mastodon clientsare on the Mastodon roadmap for 2024."
What will I get that I don't have with CTRL-C and CTRL-V
Disclaimer: I'm on . I can both quote and share/quote-post/quote-tweet/quote-toot any post in the Fediverse that can show up in my streams or in my search. Hubzilla has had these capabilities since its inception in 2015, and it has inherited them from Friendica which has had them from its own beginnings in 2010.
I didn't create this share with copy-paste. It was automatically generated from a code which, in turn, was automatically generated by Hubzilla. And as you can see, it offers both a link to your profile and a link to your original post. The latter makes it possible to verify the share is genuine and neither falsified nor manipulated. Both are technically impossible to create by hand on Mastodon because Mastodon doesn't support embedding links under text.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedSharesMastodon might introduce a "proprietary", home-brew "No quote-toots allowed" flag outside the ActivityPub standard that probably won't be documented anywhere. Just like their "sensitive image" flag, but even more critical.
And if that happens, all Fediverse projects that have a quote-post/quote-boost/quote-tweet/quote-toot/share feature will have to have that flag reverse-engineered from Mastodon's source code and implemented a functionality that greys out the corresponding button under "no quote-toot" posts. And all their instances will have to upgrade to a version that fully supports that flag before Mastodon rolls out that flag. Or else Mastodon will defederate all their instances for being non-compliant.
This will at least affect Friendica and everything that can be traced back to it, including Hubzilla and (streams), as well as Misskey and everything that can be traced back to it, including Firefish whose development is dead and dozens upon dozens of other Forkeys.
If this actually comes, and if it's enforced immediately after release with no grace period, Mastodon could just as well fully be defederated from the rest of the Fediverse due to being incompatible. It'd cause a rift between Mastodon and the non-Mastodon Fediverse anyway because the former would have a requirement for federation which the latter is incapable of fulfilling.
are coming to . It is on the of to implement.
Here is a to opt out of quote posts. Please vote:
Here is an interesting article about research on quote posts or
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuotedShares I'm wondering how the Fediverse-wide opt-in or opt-out is supposed to work. Like, you check a box that says you don't want to be quote-posted, and on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), the Share button is automatically greyed out under all your posts. And none of these three have ActivityPub as their main protocol.
This would require a whole lot of steps to be done:
Good luck getting Mario Vavti, main developer of that behemoth that is Hubzilla who said he'll never give in to Mastodon's incompatibility shenanigans, to add a whole new functionality the Redbasic UI which hasn't been changed in almost 14 years, adding support for a Mastodon-specific, non-standard flag to the Pubcrawl ActivityPub support add-on which AFAIK has been coded against vanilla ActivityPub until now and then wiring them together. All ASAP after Mastodon has rolled out that flag. And good luck catching the various current developers of new Hubzilla UIs like Scott M. Stolz to implement this even before the first stable releases, too.
Good luck getting Friendica which is almost six years older than Mastodon and which has introduced quote-posts six years before Mastodon to adopt a non-standard, Mastodon-exclusive flag. And several dozen Forkeys. Including Firefish whose development is pretty much dead, but which has still got lots of active instances and users.
And good luck pressurising all developers of all these projects into fully implementing this feature right now, otherwise all instances of their projects would be defederated by all Mastodon instances in no time.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fedisplaining #CWFedisplaining #QuotePost #QuotePosts #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Misskey #Forkeys #Firefish #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #Catodon #DefederationStill working on improving my meme posts.
I hope it was a good decision to link to the image rather than embedding it. Here on Hubzilla, I don't have the means to make it so that sensitive images are hidden from Mastodon users. Even though this means that all you mobile users will have to live with your Web browser opening.
I hope the headline above the image description isn't too disturbing for Mastodon users not used to seeing text formatting.
I hope the content warnings and hashtags for filtering are sufficient. And I hope putting both an eye contact content warning and a pair of eye contact filtering hashtags on a post which merely links to a page with an image with eye contact, another content warning placed next to the link, isn't overkill and not triggering too many people itself either.
I hope the image description is sufficiently descriptive and explanatory, too, although I relied on KnowYourMeme to explain the meme rather than doing it myself, I didn't go into details describing what the four pictures and the two characters in them look like, and I didn't describe what the captions look like.
And I hope I can get away with not actually adding alt-text to the image in the link because Hubzilla doesn't give me the means to do so either.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #CW #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #Accessibility #A11y
Given OSgrid's track record, I could impossibly not meme it. Content warning: eye contact, hence no embedding the image in the post itself. Sorry for having you open another webpage.
The linked image macro is based on the "" meme, also known as "Anakin and Padm".
It consists of four still captures from the film Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, cropped to squares around one character each and arranged in two rows of two images. The two images on the left show young Anakin Skywalker in a spring meadow inmidst high grass and various blooming flowers, the two images on the right show young Padm Amidala in the same meadow.
The caption at the bottom of the top left image has Anakin say, "OSgrid will have a scheduled three-day downtime, starting on Wednesday, January 10th."
The top right image shows Padm happy with a caption at the bottom that has her say, "Oh, no problem, it'll be back online on Saturday."
The bottom left image does not have a caption, implying that Anakin doesn't say anything.
In the bottom right image, Padm's expression has changed to sceptical, and the caption at the bottom has her say, "It will be back online on Saturday, right"
Padm's scepticism refers to OSgrid's track record of maintenance downtimes always taking a lot longer than scheduled or expected.
OSgrid is a 3-D virtual world, a so-called "grid", based on OpenSimulator, a free and open-source server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life.
is a commercial 3-D virtual world created by Philip Rosedale, also known as Philip Linden, of Linden Labs and launched in 2003. It is a so-called "pancake" virtual world which is accessed through desktop or laptop computers using standard 2-D screens rather than virtual reality headsets. Second Life had its heyday in 2007 and 2008. It is often believed to have shut down in late 2008 or early 2009 when the constant stream of news about it broke away, but in fact, it celebrated its 20th birthday in 2023, and it is still evolving.
, OpenSim in short, was first published in January, 2007. Unlike Second Life, it is not one monolithic, centralised world. It is rather a server application for worlds or "grids" like Second Life which anyone could run on either rented Web space or at home, given a sufficiently powerful computer and a sufficiently fast and reliable land-line Internet connection. This makes OpenSim as decentralised as the Fediverse. The introduction of the Hypergrid in 2008 made it possible for avatars registered on one OpenSim grid to travel to most other OpenSim grids.
Second Life and the OpenSim-based worlds are called "grids" because they are flat worlds divided into square areas of 256 by 256 metres each which is roughly 280 by 280 yards. These areas are called "regions".
is the oldest OpenSim grid. Launched in summer 2007, about half a year after the initial release of OpenSim, it was the first public OpenSim grid. It is also the largest OpenSim grid by registered users, active users including Hypergrid visitors and landmass. Since 2023, OpenSim has had a bigger landmass than Second Life.
At the same time, OSgrid has always been a testbed for new developments in OpenSim instead of running a stable release of OpenSim. This, together with its sheer size and its age, still carrying over lots of contents from over a decade and a half ago, made it hard to maintain. Especially the asset server which handles the contents both in-world and in the avatars' inventories tends to cause trouble and downtimes which, while expected to be a day or two, might last for over two weeks.
Thus, Padm's reaction symbolises the scepticism that when OSgrid announces to be offline for three days due to a server migration, it will actually be back online after these three days.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #OSgrid #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Meme #StarWars #StarWarsMeme #StarWarsMemes #PrequelMeme #PrequelMemes #AnakinAndPadme #EyeContact #CWEyeContact Thing is, Fediverse projects can't be whipped up from scratch short-term.
Mike Macgirvin put Friendica together from zero to 1.0 within four months, and that was out-right incredible, not only considering it took Diaspora* a whole bunch of devs, crowdfunding and a bit over seven years until it even went beta.
/kbin had been in development for several months when the Reddit crowd came piling in. It had like five or six instances, all operated by the devs, all but one of which were non-public and experimental. Not that the one sole public instance was anywhere near stable. It was a case of, "What do you all want here We're not ready yet!" In fact, /kbin still isn't really ready.
Most projects have exactly one spare-time maintainer. Maybe two. Few have additional developers, and even they can only do so much if the main maintainer doesn't get to merging their pull requests. And not everyone is as blazing fast as Mike. That's free, libre, open-source software to you.
Sure, it's more impressive to show off something that's really brand-spanking-new. Press and paying customers are the most likely to pay attention to something that basically didn't exist yesterday, and that had its 1.0 release today, along with shiny, fully-featured mobile apps in Apple App Store and Google Play Store. But you won't easily get that in the Fediverse. And in the Fediverse, 1.0 means "reasonably stable, but still missing a whole lot of features we still need to implement for this to shine." Also, nothing in the Fediverse ever starts with an iPhone app.
If you really want to show off what can be done in the Fediverse, I'd say Mike's projects could be prime examples. However, Mike has just turned (streams) into a construction site for the time being, not to mention you can't easily sell something that intentionally has no name, no brand and no documentation because what documentation it initially had was stuck in 2018, surviving about half a dozen subsequent forks in that state. Oh, and there's no app.
Hubzilla is so feature-rich that it makes Firefish users gasp. It was actually created with professional users in mind. But it also has a Web UI that's stuck in 2012 with a few extra elements glued on for new features, a documentation that's every bit as terrible as (streams)' was before it was deleted, no official app, no iOS app at all and more than enough rough edges and out-right bugs for something that started its life almost a dozen years ago, not to mention only one developer who has to maintain this monster almost on his own. Oh, and it's anything but new. Even though the Hubzilla Association was founded in late 2023, Hubzilla is older than Mastodon.
At the end of the day, there's nothing that could be used to show off the Fediverse with something new and sparkly to aspiring commercial customers during a one-hour keynote at next week's CES like Microsoft would show off the newest Windows version, or Apple would show off the newest iPhone. In fact, it'd even be hard to impress a crowd of nerds and hackers at the Chaos Communication Congress.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) Well, something is already happening, and more will happen this year. Much of it will stay unnoticed by most Mastodon users, though, because just none of it will happen on Mastodon. Here's an attempt at a prognosis:
If anything, Mastodon itself will develop further away from the rest of the Fediverse. But this rest of the Fediverse is growing stronger, and it doesn't necessarily have to go on aping what Mastodon does, especially not if it breaks the ActivityPub standard. We may reach a point at which lack of compatibility between Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse can finally be blamed on Mastodon. And we may reach it this year.
The most obvious change visible to Mastodon's eyes is probably happening around the Forkeys. Firefish, 2023's shooting star of the Fediverse, may join FoundKey in Fediverse Heaven unless Kainoa resurfaces. Whether or not this happens, the legacy is already being taken over by the Misskey forks Sharkey and Catodon and the former Firefish fork Iceshrimp which has been rebased to more up-to-date Misskey itself. None of the three aim to be minimalist projects.
Hubzilla has a hot year ahead of it, at least I hope so. The Hubzilla Association has been founded recently, taking care of organisation, publicity etc. Its very own President is working on his own third-party advancements, especially new UIs, both general-purpose and specialised AFAIK. A blog-style UI is in development elsewhere. I'd be surprised if none of them saw the light of day this year. Not to mention main dev Mario's own plans for Hubzilla 9 which may come more quickly if the Association manages to reel in a few more devs.
And then there's (streams), as unnoticed by the Mastodon crowd as Hubzilla. Mike not only wants to turn its backend inside-out and rework it entirely, but he has already begun. Knowing Mike and how fast he is, (streams) may be even more awesome than it is already now before summer.
So, what I'd really like to see is something that, while highly unlikely, might catch the attention of not few Mastodon users, namely Mike's proposals being officially accepted into the ActivityPub standard, including but not limited to nomadic identity. Mastodon wouldn't adopt any of them if this happened, at least not right away. But the Forkeys certainly would. If they managed a way to go nomadic without adopting the channel model from Hubzilla and (streams), they'd have another big advantage over Mastodon. Enough stories by Forkey users of how they survived the sudden death of their home instance because they had at least one clone, and more and more Mastodon users would be sold, especially those who had to "move" manually because their home had announced its shutdown or simply vanished.
But again, this is unlikely to happen.
More realistically, third-party add-ons for (streams) being developed, and be it Hubzilla apps being forked and ported.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forkeys #Firefish #Sharkey #Catodon #Iceshrimp I've yet to use (streams) myself, but I guess interoperability issues are down to those few causes now:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams) I was a member of the "proto-Fediverse" as early as 2011. I started out on Friendica.
Back in the day, that proto-Fediverse was Diaspora*, Friendica and whatever else Friendica reeled in, e.g. the occasional few and far between StatusNet users.
Diaspora*'s users were a) hipsters who were too cool to remain on Facebook, b) normies who were concerned about their privacy and wanted to give Diaspora* a chance and c) tech nerds on the FLOSS side of IT who, like a) and b), had never heard of Friendica.
Diaspora* has never wanted to federate externally. The federation with Friendica was all Friendica's doing, including reverse-engineering Diaspora*'s source code, cracking its encryption and then latching directly onto Diaspora*'s inner workings. It was akin to connecting a new piece of external hardware to a computer by drilling a hole into the computer case and soldering 237 individual wires to certain points on certain circuit boards using self-made diagrams.
Thus, since Diaspora* has also never wanted to become compatible to ActivityPub, it is not considered part of the Fediverse nowadays because the Fediverse is defined as everything that can federate with Mastodon.
Friendica can. In fact, Mastodon immediately federated with Friendica after it was created. So the only project that was part of the Federated Social Web back then, and that's still part of today's Fediverse is Friendica. We can therefore sweep Diaspora* and GNU social, formerly StatusNet, under the rug.
Well, Friendica had a bunch of alternative left-wing activists who probably used it because it was so obscure. They may have been afraid of being discovered by whatever authorities even on Diaspora*.
Everyone else was hardcore tech geeks who found Diaspora* outright ridiculously underwhelming in comparison to what Mike Macgirvin had launched two months before Diaspora*. Also, everyone distrusted GAFAM. Today, the most wide-spread end-user device on Mastodon is the iPhone back then on Friendica, it was the Linux PC/laptop.
Not exactly few ran their own nodes. Some ran public nodes on rented Web space, others hosted their own private nodes on a machine of their own at home, also so that they wouldn't be affected by yet another public node shutting down without an announcement (which inspired nomadic identity, by the way).
In 2012, Red came up, originally a Friendica fork, later known as the Red Matrix. It introduced nomadic identity while offering just about the same federation possibilities as Friendica, including Friendica itself. Basically, it tried to recruit its target audience from Friendica's users, especially self-hosters. That only failed because a) you don't need nomadic identity if you self-host, and b) hardly anyone knew that the Red Matrix existed.
It got a wee bit more popular when it was retooled into that monster now known as Hubzilla in 2015. Even then, it lived on word-of-mouth within Friendica because it wasn't even mentioned anywhere else outside. I mean, only very few Diaspora* users even only knew that Friendica existed although there were Friendica connections all over Diaspora*, but even fewer found out about Hubzilla.
As Hubzilla was basically nomadic Friendica on 'roids, its target audience ended up being the most adventurous hard-core bernerds from Friendica. What sold them was not so much nomadic identity but Hubzilla's enormous wealth of features.
Little has changed since then. A few people have ventured from Mastodon to Friendica because they wanted something that Mastodon couldn't offer, e.g. more characters or text formatting or quote-posts. Some of them have settled with some Forkey meanwhile because it was prettier and less overwhelming (and it had polls and Mastodon-style content warnings). Even fewer have taken that step because they wanted to launch a Fediverse forum.
Hubzilla is still the nerdiest and most hard-core Fediverse project, hands down. It's still the second-oldest, and while it isn't the most technologically advanced (that'd be (streams)), it piles up the most features behind the most repelling and overwhelmed UI and the most useless user documentation ((streams) doesn't have any at all, so it doesn't count) while being impossible to use with any iOS app. I'd say it's the one project from where adventurous Mastodon "normies" nope away the most quickly because it might actually require the most adjustment.
While this might change with the arrival of the new third-party UIs that are currently being developed, Hubzilla has one of the highest tech nerd densities in the Fediverse.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla
For example, it might be useful to implement the following:
1. A standard way to announce to other projects who the administrators or moderators are.
2. A standard way to report a post via ActivityPub that automatically gets delivered to the correct people.
3. A moderation system for handling reports on each platform.
4. Bounce messages if a message cannot be delivered.
It would still be up to the projects to implement this, but developers are more likely to implement it if there is a standard.
Good luck getting Mastodon to implement any standard they haven't invented themselves.
This will end in
- Mastodon trying to push their own standard upon everyone else, Mike Macgirvin having it in dev alreeady, but Mario Vavti staunchly refusing it because he doesn't let Mastodon push anything upon him
- Mike Macgirvin making his own proposal, the best one of them all, which is rejected by everyone from the W3C to Eugen Rochko
- maybe, if they get their act together, the W3C making a proposal which Mike Macgirvin either rejects for being ridiculously weak or implements within 15 minutes, which Mario Vavti rejects because it'd be next to impossible to weave into Hubzilla and Zot6, and which Eugen Rochko rejects because Mastodon already has something that covers this, and everyone else must adopt this or else
For those concerned about privacy, if you are in a country that does not require you to disclose who runs the website, you could just put "Administrator" as the name of the Administrator. Even though you did not give a person or organization's name, there is still a listed Administrator for the instance.
This won't change much about many public, open-registration Friendica/Hubzilla instances not providing a link to the account/channel of the admin. Or any admin contact at all. All because the admin didn't bother to edit that page/hasn't gotten to it yet.
And it changes nothing about Mastodon users/admins trying to reach Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) admins the exact same way as they always try to reach other Mastodon admins. And failing because it doesn't work like on Mastodon. Even less in a mobile app that's geared towards Mastodon and Mastodon only.
Don't forget: On Hubzilla, everyone's on a Linux PC using a standard browser. On Mastodon, everyone's on a phone using a Mastodon app.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta If done the Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) way, that'd be disturbing to Mastodon users again.
I think nobody on Mastodon knows this, but these three projects have a Facebook-like/Tumblr-like/blog-like one-post-many-comments thread structure as opposed to Mastodon's Twitter-like many-single-posts-tied-together thread structure.
This means the thread starter owns the whole thread. This also means the thread starter can moderate their own thread and even delete comments from their own thread. Even if they weren't appointed moderators by the admin. AFAIK, the deletion is actually forwarded to the source.
So a Mastodon user may e.g. troll around in a thread started on Hubzilla or attack the thread starter. A bit later, that Mastodon user will discover that their toots in reply to that Hubzilla posts are gone. Maybe the thread starter even mentions they've moderated their own thread and deleted comments.
The short form: Regular users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can delete Mastodon toots. In fact, posts from anywhere. Only toots/posts in reply to their own posts, but yes, they can. And they could before Mastodon even existed.
If this started happening often enough, and word started spreading around especially Mastodon, it'd be perceived as invasive and disruptive by many. It might cause such a big uproar that even more Mastodon users would call for defederating Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) completely.
As for actual, traditional moderation, I'm not saying it's bad per se.
I'm saying that many Mastodon admins really don't know anything about the Fediverse outside Mastodon.
They think everything else that does *blogging is basically Mastodon with a different UI. Like an alternative mobile app for Mastodon itself. Or it's Mastodon + feature x on top. But otherwise like Mastodon.
And then they act accordingly. They try to interact with Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) admins the same way as they interact with other Mastodon admins. And they neither know nor realise that these three projects are too different from Mastodon for these methods to even work!
Again:
You can't report a Hubzilla user to a Hubzilla admin using the report system because Hubzilla does not have Mastodon's report system!
You can't expect Hubzilla admins to follow hashtags for Mastodon instance admins either. Not only because they aren't Mastodon admins, and they probably don't even know that hashtag. But because you can't follow hashtags on Hubzilla!
And so forth.
So what appears to be a Hubzilla admin's laziness or carelessness or ignorance are actually technical differences between Mastodon and Hubzilla that Mastodon admins are unaware of.
This has nothing to with moderation by admins/mods only being bad. This has everything to do with Hubzilla being vastly different from Mastodon. And with Mastodon admins/mods not knowing jack shit about Hubzilla.
(Good thing this is so long that nobody will read it. Otherwise it'll empower those who say that Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) must be redesigned to be exactly like Mastodon or face full defederation otherwise for being too different.)
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta gave me to think.
Could it be that countless Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users are blocked on countless mostly Mastodon instances by the admins because reporting users the Mastodon doesn't work on these projects
So there's a user who doesn't fully act according to the Mastodon community standards. That user's posts appear on some Mastodon instance.
The wrongdoing: For example, what's perceived as hashtag abuse see the linked thread. Or no Mastodon-style content warning where Mastodon culture would demand one*. Or something like that.
What does the admin do Use the report system to report that user to the admins and moderators of their own home instance.
Problem: That particular user isn't on Mastodon. Not on anything that was modelled after Mastodon either. That user is on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams). Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK, neither has Mastodon's report system implemented.
The report never reaches the admin of that instance. And the instance doesn't have any more staff.
Well, then they could write directly to the admin of that instance. If only the Fediverse contact of the instance admin was available on the instance frontpage. Or anywhere on the instance Web interface.
Even if they could, they might get the idea that they could catch the admin's attention by mentioning them in a public post. Spoiler: Doesn't work with Friendica accounts, Hubzilla channels and (streams) channels.
Oh, and at least Hubzilla and (streams) allow you to restrict from whom you receive direct messages. Regardless of whether or not that's a good idea, it's possible to make it so that DMs from random Mastodon users no longer end up in your stream. Worse yet: These Mastodon users don't even know that their DMs don't reach the recipient.
Okay, last resort, complaints about that user can be posted publicly under the hashtag #MastoAdmin. Should reach lots of admins, right
Yes, but almost exclusively Mastodon admins. It's MastoAdmin, after all. Why should an admin of, say, a Friendica node or a Hubzilla hub follow that hashtag Neither of them is Mastodon, and neither of them has anything to do with Mastodon. They didn't even federate with Mastodon, Mastodon federated with them.
Oh, and besides, to my best knowledge, they can't even follow hashtags in the first place. Or is Hubzilla the only one out of the three that doesn't have that feature yet
Anyways, the warning with the #MastoAdmin hashtag doesn't reach them either.
So whatever you try to let some Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) admin know that a user on their instance "misbehaves", the admin doesn't react and "moderate" that user.
Conclusion for your typical Mastodon admin: That instance is unmoderated. From the point of view of people who only know Mastodon beyond the name, the admin must ignore all reports.
We can be glad if this leads only to blocking the "misbehaving" user on lots of Mastodon instances and not to what's standard for unmoderated or undermoderated instances on Mastodon: blocking the whole instance.
*Footnote: Neither of the three projects mentioned here has a "Content Warning" field. Hubzilla and (streams) have a "Summary" field which is the same thing, but especially newbies and those who are hardly in touch with the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse don't know it's the same. Also, that field is only available for posts (= first posts) and not for comments (= replies which are something entirely different on these projects). Friendica doesn't even have that a pair of BBcode tags is needed for a Mastodon-style content warning, and AFAIK, this isn't documented anywhere.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #BlockingMeta #BlocklistMeta #CWBlocklistMeta Add your location to a Google Map
I report the behavior through the report system and do my own justice. Maybe post a link to the account and the offending content with MastoAdmin and Fediblock tags and let people do their own research.
But what if the offending user is on an instance
a) of something that is not Mastodon, that wasn't even inspired by Mastodon because it's older than Mastodon, and that doesn't have Mastodon's report system implemented
b) whose admin doesn't follow MastoAdmin because they aren't Mastodon admins
c) whose admin doesn't follow MastoAdmin because that project doesn't have following hashtags implemented
So whatever you do the Mastodon way never reaches the admin in the first place
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Defederation #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Just out of curiosity:
Let's suppose you come across someone whom you find misbehaving. You try reporting them to their instance moderation.
But they aren't on Mastodon. They're on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams). And you can't for the life of you figure out how to get into contact with the admin of that specific instance via Mastodon. And yes, it's a public instance.
What do you do Defederate the whole instance because its management doesn't appear to be up to Mastodon's community standards Demand it be fediblocked altogether for that reason
Or what if there's only an e-mail address, but no link to a Fediverse account If that's a problem for Mastodon instance admins, I might single-handedly be responsible for hub.netzgemeinde.eu being defederated by dozens or hundreds of Mastodon and *key instances for "non-Mastodon-standard" behaviour.
(Hashtags below mostly for filter-triggering purposes. Text filters are the CW standard where I come from and have been since at least 2012.)
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Defederation #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta Ich mache das anders. Ich warne im Summary (Mastodon: Content Warning) vor allem, was jemandem auf Mastodon unangenehm sein kann, und die eigentlichen Content Warnings dopple ich noch einmal mit jeweils einem und mehreren Hashtags fr die, die Filter verwenden.
Das ist auch ein bichen eine Demonstration dessen, was dabei rauskommen kann.
Zeichen habe ich selbst mehr als reichlich zu verbrennen, will sagen, praktisch unbegrenzt viele. Daran soll's nicht scheitern. Und wenn der Post lnger als 500 Zeichen wird, gibt's dafr eine Content Warning und die Hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong und #CWLongPost und bei deutschsprachigen Posts - wobei ich die Postsprache nicht einstellen kann - zustzlich #LangerPost und #CWLangerPost.
Bei Kommentaren gibt's dann nur die Hashtags, weil Mastodon-CWs nicht gehen.
CC: He may have a point, yes. There may be more people in the Fediverse who think like him, yes. He even sounds like he has come across one of my posts.
But if I did what he asked for, all my regular posts would grow to thousands upon thousands of characters and take hours to write because I'd have to break everything down to the very basics. Both the primary and the secondary topic of this channel are niche within a niche, maybe within yet another niche for a non-technical audience.
Essentially, I couldn't post anything anymore without long-post content warnings for Mastodon users who are disturbed by everything longer than 500 characters.
And my image descriptions for moderately complex in-world images, now sitting at 35,000 to 40,000 characters for the first image in a post and not counting the preamble, might easily grow beyond 50,000 or 60,000 characters. The preamble would grow well over 5,000 characters. Even longer if I took people's attention spans into consideration and explained certain things again and again.
This wouldn't even really help people outside my niche with understanding my posts. Even fewer of them would read them in the first place, and even more of them would mute or block me to get rid of those monstrous posts in their timelines.
And no, I can't explain the implications of the current scheduled OSgrid downtime in one simple sentence and in plain, everyday language to someone who doesn't even understand what a server is and knows exactly nothing about 3-D virtual worlds. Not in a way they'd fully understand.
Some of ya'll need to step back from the hyper-specific niche topics you post about and take a second to think about explaining your topics to normies, like ELI5 once in a while. Sometimes I'm scrolling my feed and I'm like wtf is all this this about.
Maybe I just curated a bunch of people with hard to follow niche interests.
Am I the only one
It seems like people aren't posting to have a conversation, It's just monologuing. I prolly fall into this once in a while as well.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
Well, Lemmy is pretty much established right now and growing as well, despite being something different. Right now, this seems the biggest competitor to Mastodon in a way. But the limitation of Lemmy accounts not being able to follow other accounts (and only communities instead) makes it a bit of an outsider. Like, you can follow users from Friendica, Mastodon, even Hubzilla I think, and see their activity (comment, post), but they cannot see yours.
This also leads to the creation of a more specific culture, with people that are also unaware of other platforms and capabilities (albeit less pronounced, as the devs did a better job of keeping the whole ecosystem decentralized). For example, some users are surprised to hear that you can see their upvotes on other platforms.
The latter is mostly because the vast majority of Lemmy users didn't come from Mastodon but from Reddit. They weren't told much about the existence of a Fediverse, only that there's a thing called Lemmy which is many copies of Reddit before its enshittification, and these are connected with each other. That's all that many know. Just like many Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
It doesn't help that Lemmy barely gets any interaction from other projects. Mastodon is huge, and Mastodon users should be all over Lemmy. But many Mastodon users have never heard about Lemmy. Those who have may find it too inconvenient to follow a Lemmy community because that involves using the account search and copy-pasting. Don't forget that the huge majority of Mastodon users is on phones. And those who do manage to follow Lemmy communities say that the interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is too limiting.
For the record: I do have Lemmy followers.
Kbin and Mbin could have brought a solution to this issue, as they do support following users, even those from *blogging platforms, but because the projects are younger and less stable - and more so at the time of the Reddit migration - they failed to gain the required traction (i.e. more servers, user numbers more spread out across them) until now. There is still activity on these, they are still growing (people are joining them mostly because they are dissatisfied with the political leanings of the Lemmy devs, as well as their moderation policy on .ml which is subjective to say the least), but you can clearly see a bigger culture formed around Lemmy as of now.
/kbin made bidirectional *blogging-style following possible only by bolting microblogging onto a Reddit clone. Lemmy is a more purist Reddit clone, it doesn't support domestic *blogging, so users of *blogging projects can't follow Lemmy users in the traditional sense.
As for lemmy.ml, that instance doesn't matter that much anymore. Even lemmy.world has been surpassed as the biggest instance.
There seems to be something similar happening to Pixelfed, with user numbers growing month after month, and I am sure something similar will happen to Peertube when YouTube will flop badly again and PeerTube will be mature enough, or with Bookwyrm, Friendica, Hubzilla etc.
Pixelfed could become big if Instagram was enshittified so tremendously that everyone except the biggest attention whores ("But muh followers, but muh fame") will start looking for alternatives. The advantage of Pixelfed for Instagram users over Mastodon for Twitter users is that Pixelfed allows direct imports of Instagram accounts with all content.
I'm not so sure about PeerTube, not only because that'd require gigantic amounts of hard drive space, but also because many users are on YouTube for the money, and PeerTube won't pay them a penny. If they moved to PeerTube, they'd lose a source of income. Also, fewer YouTube users have ever heard of PeerTube than users have heard of Mastodon.
BookWyrm would be easier, but I can't see right now how Goodreads could be enshittified enough to cause a mass migration. Maybe, however, BookWyrm becomes interesting for people who don't even know Goodreads and its whole concept, and they find out about BookWyrm before they find out about Goodreads.
Friendica tried to take a chance long ago, back in the early 2010s. It even tried to facilitate the transition of whole social circles from Facebook by federating with Facebook by means of a cross-poster. It didn't work out. People didn't want to leave their "friends" behind, not to mention that the average Facebook user was even less technologically adept than the average Twitter user a good decade later. Even trying to mimic Facebook's UI didn't help.
Maybe it was for the better. Typical server hardware that Friendica ran on back in the day could barely handle over 130 accounts on one node. The notoriously power-hungry Facebook connector cut a dozen or two out of this number. Many public Friendica nodes with the Facebook connector on closed their registrations at a bit over 100 accounts. I think not even the biggest root servers would have given you a four-digit capacity.
It would simply have been impossible to accommodate a flood of Facebook refugees on Friendica. Even if Friendica users with Facebook contacts had started their own private nodes, most of them would have needed multiple nodes to even have space for a fraction of their Facebook "friends".
As for Hubzilla, it'll first need a lot of polish. And then I can't see from where people would come flooding to Hubzilla. Facebook refugees would rather pile onto Friendica, the traditional more-powerful-than-Diaspora* Facebook "clone", or maybe (streams), the Fediverse champion in permission control.
Hubzilla could be something for companies, for organisations, for political offices, for journalists, for scientists etc. I could even see modern and progressive left-wing parties use it Pirate Parties, anyone They wouldn't have to worry about hub capacities because they could either use specialised hubs, e.g. for journalists, or they'd run their own hubs anyway, just like they run their own Mastodon instances now. In fact, if that thicket of instances run by German public broadcasters was Hubzilla instead of Mastodon, everyone could go nomadic without having to use general-purpose hubs for their clones.
But getting them from something as dead-simple as to the Leatherman of Fediverse projects is difficult, to say the least. Even from Facebook.
And private persons will only really tackle Hubzilla and stick with it if they're geeks enough.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Lemmy #kbin #/kbin #Pixelfed #PeerTube #BookWyrm #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseMigration How about projects that use ActivityPub as a secondary protocol ((streams)) or as an optional add-on (Friendica, Hubzilla) while using something different with different features as the main protocol
I mean, I could write a lot about Hubzilla, and I occasionally contribute to the . But most of what could be written about Hubzilla would be about its inner workings (channels, permission control, no limits, theming etc.), stuff that doesn't federate in the traditional sense at all (articles, wikis, websites, the file space, CalDAV, CardDAV etc.) and stuff that only works on Hubzilla's main protocol Zot (nomadic identity).
While this is all part of what makes Hubzilla Hubzilla, none of it has got that much to do with ActivityPub, if anything.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla
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Nothing per se. The issues I've mentioned are different.One is that Mastodon users, of course, expect everyone to add alt-text to all their images. That's easy for Mastodon users: Images are attached to toots, and you get a nifty text field into which you put your alt-text.
This is different on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams). Not only do you embed images much like in blog or forum posts. No, you don't have an alt-text field either. You embed these images using automatically generated BBcode, again, much like in forum posts. If you want alt-text, you have to edit that embedding code and graft the alt-text into it. Manually.
There is no official documentation on this whatsoever for either of these projects. The knowledge about this spreads by word-of-mouth only.
So users of these projects risk being ostracised for something they don't know a) that they have to do, b) that they can do and c) how they could possibly do.
The other issue is "image description == alt-text, full stop, end of discussion". The assumption that "alt-text" and "image description" are always mutually fully synonymous with no exception.
This comes from Mastodon's post length limitation. 500 characters. These are for the actual post, for mentions, for hashtags and for the content warning which actually counts into the post length. Doesn't leave you much room to describe an image, does it
But in alt-text, you have 1,500 characters. Per image. Always. No matter how much you want to toot otherwise.
With such a "high" limit, Mastodon users often don't simply add an alt-text of a maximum of 150-200 characters as defined in those many "how do I write alt-text for my static webpage with thousands of characters for explaining stuff" guides. No, they go well into detail. They give in-depth descriptions. They explain stuff. After all, they've got 1,500 characters of room.
Other Mastodon users love that, and they may do it themselves. Yet other Mastodon users see that the aforementioned Mastodon users love it and thus do it themselves.
With image descriptions of 700, 800, 1,000 or more characters, Mastodon users don't even question putting the descriptions into the alt-text. It's simply technologically impossible to do otherwise. So it doesn't even come to their minds. Image description == alt-text.
Okay, now here comes the catch.
First of all, you must never describe or explain something in alt-text that can't be accessed from anywhere else in the image.
That's because some people can't access alt-text, e.g. if they have a physical disability that prevents them from using a computer mouse, so they have to do everything with the keyboard, so they can't hover a mouse cursor over an image which is necessary to see alt-text in a desktop browser.
If they can't access alt-text, they can't access the information in it. If that information is only available in the alt-text but neither in the post text nor in the image, it's lost to them. Such information always goes into the post text.
Mastodon users are likely to be highly irritated upon reading that. How are you supposed to put that in the post text in the Fediverse! Mastodon doesn't give you enough characters! You can only put a detailed image description into the alt-text!
On Mastodon maybe. But only on vanilla Mastodon. Okay, and on Threads if it supports alt-text.
But everything that is not vanilla Mastodon gives you either more characters in the post text than in alt-text or no limits for either.
Even Misskey gives you 1,500 characters in alt-text and 3,000 in the post which is 2,500 more than on Mastodon. That's a thread of at least six posts rolled into one.
The other Forkeys give you 3,000 by default. Pleroma, Akkoma and their other forks give you 5,000 by default.
Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) don't have any defined limits. Not for the post text and theoretically not for the alt-text either which, as I've explained above, is grafted into the post text and not put into a dedicated text field.
That's plenty of room for description and explanation, depending on how much you go into detail. In fact, you aren't even bound to a 1,500-character limit anymore!
I still expect Mastodon users to be highly irritated whenever I describe images. That's because my alt-text usually only contains a brief image description that doesn't actually describe anything. In addition, it says that the actual, fully detailed image description is in the post which is hidden behind a Hubzilla-style summary/Mastodon-style content warning combination.
I expect someone to try and educate me about all image descriptions always only belonging into alt-text because that's how it's done on Mastodon, yada yada yada. Regardless of the image description of even only one of the images being over 25 times longer than Mastodon's alt-text, so it wouldn't even fit in there.
Mastodon doesn't do it like this, so it's wrong everywhere else as well. Even though Mastodon doesn't do it like this because it can't, and everything else can, and Mastodon can happily display what everything else can.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta Late, but still:
It has been around since the 2000s. No, really. No, I'm not kidding.
The community has been using the term "Metaverse" in its common daily lingo since at least 2008. Want proof
, the first public OpenSim grid, the oldest, the largest by active users and still the second-largest by land area, has referred to itself as the "Open Source Metaverse" .
The Metropolis Metaversum, the first grid hosted in Germany, called itself just that , too.
The news site Hypergrid Business has used the name "" for its OpenSim category for quite a while already.
Oh, by the way, , active since as early as 2003, has jumped upon the bandwagon meanwhile and refers to itself as a "metaverse", too.
#Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #SecondLife #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost I can't help but wonder if there's any influence or inspiration or experience from Second Life, the pioneer of highly modular and highly customisable avatars, going into this. And I mean actually using it, not hearsay or reading about it. (Mentioning OpenSim is probably futile here.)
Especially female avatars are tricky. Linden Labs has learned that the hard way after only supporting male/unisex clothes. When people wanted their female avatars to optionally wear high heels, or when they wanted them to wear skirts that move with the legs, Second Life's avatar standard had to be changed. All that was stuff that nobody had thought of early on, even if the default starter avatar was technically female.
For good skirts, look at Sinespace and Overte, by the way.
#Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Avatar #Avatars #VirtualClothing #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostCan everyone please with a cherry on top stop referring to Meta's virtual worlds as "the Metaverse"
They're called "Horizons"!
Zuckerberg did not invent the Metaverse. Zuckerberg did not even invent the term Neal Stephenson did in 1991. A Second Life in-world expo in the year 2007 was called "Metaverse". And the OpenSim community has been using the word "Metaverse" on a daily base down to grid names before 2010, too.
Thanks from someone who has been in OpenSim and thus known and used the term "Metaverse" in 2020 already in behalf of everyone in Second Life, OpenSim and all other virtual worlds that already existed before 2022.
P.S.: Second Life did not shut down in 2008 nor in 2009 either.
#Meta #Horizons #HorizonWorlds #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost
, , : Warning issued January 9 at 2:23PM EST until January 9 at 3:00PM EST by NWS Charleston SC Source: NWS Charleston SC*
for Liberty, , : National Weather Service: WARNING in this area until 3:00 PM EST. Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris. Check media. Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
for Liberty, , : National Weather Service: WARNING in this area until 3:00 PM EST. Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris. Check media. Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
for Liberty, , : Warning issued January 9 at 2:23PM EST until January 9 at 3:00PM EST by NWS Charleston SC Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
for Liberty, , , : National Weather Service: WARNING in this area until 2:15 PM EST. Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris. Check media. Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
for Liberty, , , : National Weather Service: WARNING in this area until 2:15 PM EST. Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris. Check media. Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
for Liberty, , , : Warning issued January 9 at 1:46PM EST until January 9 at 2:15PM EST by NWS Charleston SC Source: NWS Charleston SC** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***
What's even the point in writing a server application in a Microsoft language Maybe requiring dotnet6 or any other dotnet to be installed on the server Something that Debian has good reason to staunchly refuse to add to its repositoriesJust because you can't get anyone who can still develop in truly cross-platform languages because everyone can only "code" Windows apps in C# or .NET or mobile apps in JavaScript anymore
Or is it worth it because more and more Fediverse instance servers run on Windows machines because aspiring instance admins can't be bothered to learn Linux
Strongly reminds me of OpenSim which, back in the mid-2000s, was built in .NET and originally Windows-only. A server application. It was eventually made compatible with Mono. It may still cause trouble on Linux or macOS, so even amongst the grids that aren't DreamGrids, about every other one is running on a Windows machine. It got worse when OpenSimulator 0.9.3 switched from .NET for Windows and Mono for everything else to dotnet6 for everything.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CSharp #DotNet #Iceshrimp #OpenSim #OpenSimulator
Excellent article about how COVID's transmitted, how our bodies reactions have changed since the beginning of the pandemic (it's not over!), and the complexities of transmission, from exposure to symptoms.
so is
I rarely post pictures anymore, but when I do, I always describe them before posting them. In order to make my pictures understandable, I have to write very detailed descriptions and explanations which require special niche knowledge. If hardly anyone but me has that knowledge, how could an AI possibly have it
Also, I describe my own original images not by looking at the images, much less at the resolution at which I'll post them, but by looking directly at what the images show. I can see many more details that way, and I can transcribe text verbatim that's illegible or practically invisible in the image. AI can't do that.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Just by not having a feature, masto can kill it across the fedi, as the lowest common denominator matters in the same way a common protocol does.
In addition, Mastodon and only Mastodon dictates all culture all across the Fediverse, no matter where.
This means doing everything the Mastodon way. Content warnings for sensitive content in the summary. Friendica doesn't even have a summary field. Alt-text for all media which neither Friendica nor Hubzilla nor (streams) has a text field for or even only documentation on how to graft it into BBcode.
At the same time, doing anything that can't be done on vanilla Mastodon is bad. Quotes. Shared posts (= "quote-posts" = "quote-boosts" = "quote-tweets" = "quote-toots"). Text formatting. Code blocks. Bullet-point lists. Embedded links. Even only over 500 characters. All stuff that Mistpark 1.0 (now Friendica) could do as early as 2010, almost six years before Mastodon.
The key reason why Mastodon is so dominant is not only because it has twice as many active users as everything else combined. It's because it's the one and only gateway into the Fediverse.
Everyone who comes here believes that the Fediverse is only Mastodon because telling them that the Fediverse is more than that only confuses them. Hell, they wouldn't even join if the official app didn't railroad them hard onto mastodon.social because decentrality would scare them away even before they were forced to pick an instance.
Then they spend multiple months with that belief that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. And the Mastodon-only Fediverse is what they get used to. Their new, nice, friendly, cosy, fluffy home. It's also in that phase that the first-wave and second-wave Twitter refugees were in when they shaped Mastodon's culture, completely ignoring the rest of the Fediverse which didn't even exist for them.
Then they eventually come across the very first "toot" in one of their timelines which is somewhat weird. Mostly that's because it's very long. Or maybe it does stuff of which they don't know how to do it on Mastodon because they can't do it on Mastodon at all like italics without Unicode trickery. And whoever wrote that "toot" tells them it isn't a "toot" because it's not from Mastodon, it's from XYZ, and no, XYZ is not Mastodon, it isn't a fork of Mastodon either, and yes, it's absolutely normal and intentional and legal that you can post from XYZ to Mastodon.
And then they freak out because they're disturbed by someone who has intruded into their nice and cosy and fluffy Mastodon Fediverse. And they don't want this to happen ever again.
Still, I think the majority of Mastodon users have never knowingly come across anything from anywhere that isn't Mastodon. Those who say they know the Fediverse is more than Mastodon mostly only know the Fediverse beyond Mastodon from hearsay and name-dropping, but they assume it's basically Mastodon with different names, different UIs and maaaaaybe longer posts because they've read somewhere that you can post thousands of characters on this-or-that project.
So nobody on Mastodon takes the non-Mastodon Fediverse and its perks into account when shaping the Fediverse culture.
Everyone uses "alt-text" and "image description" synonymously because Mastodon toots are too ridiculously limited in size for proper image descriptions, so there's no other way in "the Fediverse" to describe an image more thoroughly than in alt-text which offers 1,500 characters. They're completely unaware that the circumstances are vastly different everywhere outside vanilla Mastodon and Threads because everything except vanilla Mastodon and Threads offers you thousands of characters by default.
The debates on whether or not to allow quotes or "quote-toots" should be possible on Mastodon are out-right hilarious. Friendica and Hubzilla have been able to both quote and "quote-toot" any post on Mastodon with no resistance from the very second that the first Mastodon instance spun up in 2016. But nobody knows that. The *keys are capable of both, too, AFAIK, but the greater Mastodon community is unaware of that as well and keeps debating only about Mastodon.
So it isn't much of a surprise that all behaviour rules for the Fediverse are made by Mastodon users for everything that connects to Mastodon, but completely disregarding the existing culture of whatever connects to Mastodon. Sometimes they disregard the capabilities of whatever connects to Mastodon, sometimes they forbid them because these capabilities are disturbing to those who want the Fediverse to feel like only Mastodon.
You're only exempt from these rules if you're on Hubzilla or (streams), and you've got Pubcrawl off. If at all.
Using nomadic identity is actually fairly safe. Mastodon users usually don't notice it unless you often post to the same people from your main instance and then from a clone. And besides, except for those who try to create imaginary scenarios of using nomadic identity as a harassment tool, those Mastodon users who know Hubzilla and (streams) offer nomadic identity envy them for their ease of moving instance and their resilience against sudden instance shutdowns.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPosttroet.cafe, one of the biggest German-speaking Mastodon instances, was on the verge of closing.
firefish.social, Firefish's lighthouse instance, has stopped working due to half a year of neglect by its only admin who is also Firefish's only core maintainer.
It's time the people behind ActivityPub finally accept Mike Macgirvin 's proposals. Nomadic identity shouldn't stay exclusive to Hubzilla and (streams).
#Fediverse #ActivityPub #NomadicIdentity #TroetCafe #FirefishSocial #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostWell, it might be possible to keep Hubzilla or (streams) users from quote-posting/quote-boosting/quote-tweeting/quote-tooting Mastodon toots, i.e. sharing them the good old-fashioned Friendica way.
When fetching a Mastodon toot, Pubcrawl would have to dig deep into Mastodon and check for the no-quote-post flag. If it's set, Pubcrawl would have to notify Hubzilla's core which, in turn, would have to tell Redbasic or whichever theme is active to deactivate (grey out) the "Share" button. It wouldn't even be necessary to keep a post with a share from being sent because it'd be impossible to generate the share in the first place.
Preventing quotes would be more difficult and more prone to false positives or negatives.
If e.g. Mastodon accounts can set a flag for not being quoted ever, the post/comment editor would have to check if a) someone is mentioned who doesn't want to be quoted, and b) there is a substring of a post from that user in the draft between a pair of
quote/quote tags. If it's posts that are flagged, the mention check is unnecessary. Either way, if no-quote post content is detected, the "Send" button would be disabled/greyed out.However, this would be so easy to circumvent for Hubzilla's/(streams)' typical tech-savvy users that it would have to be extended. After all, almost all of us are on desktop/laptop computers instead of on phones, and we use standard browsers instead of dedicated apps. Copy-pasting anything from anywhere to anywhere is easy for us.
Posts or bits of posts can be copied and pasted into a whole new post draft, thus starting a whole new thread with a quote. This would make checking an existing thread for unquoteable posts impossible, so the whole database of the instance would have to be checked. Even then, our likes could go to Mastodon, copy something from a post there and paste it into a new Hubzilla or (streams) post without first fetching the Mastodon post to be quoted.
Also, there are many ways to quote a post. Apart from the standard
Quote
there are
>Quote
> Quote
"Quote"
Quote
Quote
Quote
Quote
Quote
>>Quote<<
etc.
Hubzilla and (streams) would have to be able to catch them all. And if bad came to worse, that'd be a game of whack-a-mole because those who absolutely want to quote unquoteable posts will keep inventing new ways of quoting.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Quote #Quotes #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuotedPostsScott M. Stolz
Right now they are the big kid on the block, and they feel like they can do what they want and tell everyone else to live with it, but that is not always going to be the case. There are a lot of competitors in the space and eventually someone else will dethrone them as king of the hill.
This will take a lot of time to happen.
Currently, Mastodon is just about the only gateway for new users into the Fediverse, also because everything written about the Fediverse outside the Fediverse is either mostly about Mastodon and just name-drops other projects in one half-sentence somewhere, or it's entirely about Mastodon and sweeps everything else under the rug. In addition, almost all Mastodon newbies land on one and the same instance owned and controlled by the devs.
So almost all Fediverse newbies spend their first one, two, three or more months thinking that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. My personal record was someone who learned from me that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon after five months.
Then they read about Threads being (increasingly) part of the Fediverse. Then they read about Pixelfed and PeerTube. Then they read about Pleroma, Misskey and maybe Friendica from people who don't know more about these than the names. Add a few more weeks or months until they learn about Akkoma and the still maintained Forkeys, all of which are Mastodon's actually serious competitors. It'll probably take them even longer to find out about Hubzilla, not to mention (streams).
And even then they will only know that these projects exist, and that they're federated with Mastodon. But they will still believe that all these projects were created after Mastodon and glued onto Mastodon because Eugen Rochko has invented Mastodon, ActivityPub and the Fediverse in 2022 in the wake of Musk's Twitter takeover announcement.
They will not, however, know what these projects can do. By and by, they will learn a little. The first thing they learn is that non-Mastodon projects may have a higher character count, and be it by finding a 1,200-character "toot" in their federated timeline, wondering or complaining about it and then learning it's not a Mastodon toot, it's from Iceshrimp which is totally not Mastodon. As slim as chances are, they might also find out about other projects' text formatting capabilities.
Everything else stays hidden from them unless it's slammed right into their faces in their Mastodon apps. Members of marginalised groups that have been harassed on Twitter can't for the lives of them imagine that every other *blogging project in the Fediverse is fully capable of those dreaded "quote-tweets" until others share (= "quote-tweet") their own posts to themselves repeatedly. And then they'll demand Mastodon introduce a feature that makes it absolutely impossible for users of e.g. Hubzilla to "quote-tweet" them. Or even only quote them.
Either way, Mastodon will stay the big kid on the block as long as Mastodon stays the only kid on the block for every Fediverse newbie and for everyone who hasn't joined the Fediverse yet, including most mainstream media. And as long as Mastodon has a monopoly on mobile app compatibility because just about all iPhone apps and almost all Android apps are built against Mastodon and its API rather than the ActivityPub standard.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #NotOnlyMastodonI've noticed a trend in avatar clothing.
Single pieces of clothing and fatpacks with the same piece of clothing in many colours/variants have been superseded by outfit boxes with tops and bottoms over the years, almost always including footwear and often offering everything in only one colour. We've reached a point at which the former two are basically dead, as seems to be mixing and matching your own outfits. Granted, it doesn't help that clothes-makers often try to make their own mesh clothes incompatible with those by their competitors to keep you from combining tops by maker A with bottoms by maker B.
But outfit boxes themselves are increasingly superseded by complete avatars which add a mesh body plus a mesh head plus necessary HUDs, one shape, one skin, one eye texture and one hairstyle which often doesn't come with a colour HUD. As if you didn't have these already. Yes, you'll look like on the box art, but you won't look any different without out-of-the-box stuff or editing the shape.
These have been around since long before mesh and mostly targeted at newbies who wanted or had to change their look away from default Ruth and didn't know how. But nowadays, complete avatars are increasingly replacing outfit boxes.
Admittedly, that's even more convenient because you don't have to make the outfit work with your avatar if you replace your whole avatar. And right-clicking a folder with a complete avatar in it and then clicking "Replace" is less work than taking your previous clothes off, putting new clothes on, adjusting alphas if necessary and then saving the result as an outfit, not to mention learning what "outfits" in the viewer are in the first place.
Also admittedly, this means that your whole avatar looks different whenever you put on something new if you only ever wear complete avatars as they come out of the box. But over the last years, fewer and fewer users have actually put work into customising their looks anyway because they can't make the shapes that come with mesh heads, starter avatars and complete avatars any sexier.
There used to be a time when most users put work into their avatars by selecting or even modifying a skin, eyes and a hairstyle and editing the shape. But then they had a unique, individual look. You could recognise your acquaintances or well-known avatars by looking at them without paying the name tags above their heads any attention. A killer feature that's pretty unique to Second Life and OpenSim.
This is increasingly sacrificed to convenience and maxed-out sexiness.
I hope that the arrival of Maxine and Maxwell will not only kick-start the increased creation of native OpenSim clothes for these bodies, but since they start out with no clothes at all, cover the basics first with fatpacks.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #Avatars #VirtualWorlds #VirtualClothing #OldAndBusted #NewHotness
Maybe Mastodon could come back to W3C and help re-energize
I sincerely hope not.
The last thing the Fediverse needs is Mastodon assuming control over all other projects by officially assuming direct control over the official ActivityPub standard. For example, Mastodon could dictate other projects to remove features that Mastodon doesn't have and thus kill all incentives to use these alternatives by having the ActivityPub standard re-written in such a way that everything that Mastodon doesn't do becomes "non-standard".
On the other hand, Mastodon isn't even interested in being standard-compliant. Mastodon can use its deliberate, intentional incompatibilities to everything else to make everything else look bad in comparison. And it actually works. People flock back from places like Akkoma, Friendica and the Forkeys because they aren't enough "like Mastodon". Sabotaging connections between Mastodon and the non-Mastodon Fediverse adds to this.
Don't forget that the Fediverse didn't start with Mastodon, and Rochko invented neither the Fediverse nor ActivityPub. The term "Fediverse" itself is four years older than Mastodon.
If Eugen Rochko and Mastodon shall have a saying in the development of the W3C standard, then Mike Macgirvin, experienced protocol designer and creator of the DFRN, Zot and Nomad protocols as well as their respective projects, shall have just as much of a saying without his suggestions being constantly blocked out of principle.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ActivityPub #Fediverse #Mastodon #W3Ctldr: Must add lots of hashtags because some people use them for CW text filters, some people only do that for CW, others may want to find my stuff, and yet others want to hide my stuff with filters.
Guilty as charged. I regularly use a lot of hashtags. But I always put them all at the end of the post unless I'm talking about certain hashtags.
I actually have to. I know that not everyone in the Fediverse is using Mastodon 4.x like it's still Mastodon 3.x or older. Some Fediverse users use text filters to automatically generate content warnings. Some prefer it.
Here on , what Mastodon perceives as a content warning field is actually a summary field. Content warnings are optionally automatically generated by a text filter. All this has been part of Hubzilla and its culture since its first release in 2015, a year before Mastodon was launched. In fact, Mastodon's content warning field has actually been StatusNet's summary field since 2008.
When I write a post, I always give out content warnings two-fold: in the summary field so that those used to Mastodon 3.x and older have their content warnings and as hashtags so that those who use text filters have their content warnings automatically generated.
When I write a comment right now, I can't write a Mastodon-style content warning. Hubzilla doesn't have Mastodon's Twitter-like many-posts thread model. Hubzilla has a one-post-many-comments model like Facebook, Tumblr or blogs. And why would you want to put a summary on a blog comment! That's why Hubzilla doesn't have a "content warning field" for comments. That's why I can't write Mastodon-style content warnings for replies. Hashtags are my only way of flagging sensitive content in replies.
I take content warnings seriously. And I post a whole lot of potentially sensitive or triggering content.
This starts with long posts. Many Mastodon users don't want to see posts with more than 500 characters. Hubzilla doesn't have a character limit at all, and it's extremely hard for me to stay under 500 characters. At least some Mastodon users demand all posts with over 500 characters have a content warning. So whenever I exceed 500 characters, I add "(CW:) long (n characters)" to the Mastodon-style content warning and the four hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost to the end of the post because I can't know who uses what for their filters.
Then there are those who don't want to read about the Fediverse on Mastodon. It's too technical for them or I don't know what. So whenever I write about the Fediverse, I add "(CW:) Fediverse meta" and often also "non-Mastodon Fediverse meta" to warn those who don't want to read about the Fediverse not only being Mastodon. In addition, I add the hashtags #FediMeta, #FediverseMeta, #CWFediMeta and #CWFediverseMeta for those who use filters.
If I explain something Fediverse-related without having been asked to do so, not even indirectly, I add "(CW:) Fedisplaining" and the hashtags #Fedisplaining and #CWFedisplaining.
If I write about content warnings, I add "(CW:) content warning meta" and the hashtag #CWMeta.
If I could write a summary/Mastodon-style content warning for this, I'd write, "I need hashtags not only to cover the topics I write about, but also to trigger text filters which some people use for automated content warnings CW: long (almost 6,400 characters), Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta, Fedisplaining, content warning meta, hashtag meta, doing things differently from the standard Mastodon way in the Fediverse".
Similarly, all my other content warnings are always present as hashtags and in (start) posts as Mastodon-style content warnings as well.
Also, of course, I have to indicate what I write about so that my posts can be found by those who might be interested in the topic and filtered by those who aren't. And this regularly requires multiple hashtags.
The primary topic of this Hubzilla channel is 3-D virtual worlds, especially those based on OpenSimulator. In order to make such posts discoverable, I add the hashtag #OpenSimulator. But there's also the short-hand OpenSim which is used even more often, so I also have to add the hashtag #OpenSim. If my post is partly or entirely about Second Life, I add #SecondLife.
In addition, I need more general hashtags. One is #Metaverse. No, this term wasn't invented by Zuckerberg in 2022. The OpenSim community has used it a lot before 2010, maybe as early as 2008 or even 2007. And it was the name of a Second Life conference in 2007. The other one is #VirtualWorlds.
If I write about a special topic within this topic, e.g. if I mention a certain grid or an event, I add that as a hashtag. Larger events in OpenSim usually have their official hashtags for commercial social media, and I use them here. And so forth.
The secondary topic of this channel has become the Fediverse itself. As I've written above, this alone requires four hashtags by default even without going over 500 characters.
If it's somewhat about the Fediverse as a whole or in general, I add #Fediverse. If it touches one or multiple certain projects, I tag them all. And I know a lot of Fediverse projects.
If a post explains that the Fediverse extends beyond Mastodon to an actual or imaginary audience that thinks otherwise, my go-to hashtags, all of which have existed before, are #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse, #NotOnlyMastodon and most recently #FediverseIsNotMastodon.
Certain details such as protocols, OpenWebAuth or nomadic identity require their own hashtags.
I can never know who might be searching for what, especially if I'm about to provide exactly what they're looking for. And I can also never know who's tired of reading what, and who has set up a hashtag filter to get rid of that kind of content.
As far as alt-text is concerned: I never skip the image description when I post an image, not even when I link to one. And I write the longest and most detailed image descriptions in the whole Fediverse.
There are only two exceptions. One are my profile picture (Mastodon: "avatar") and my channel picture (Mastodon: "banner"). There are no adequate means for me to describe them in such a way that the descriptions can easily be associated with the images. And I'd need a whole lot of character space for that. The other one are link preview images automatically generated by Mastodon because I can never know beforehand which image Mastodon will place there, if any.
What will I get that I don't have with CTRL-C and CTRL-V
This.
"Quote postswhich have already been implemented in several other Fedi projects and even some Mastodon clientsare on the Mastodon roadmap for 2024."
What will I get that I don't have with CTRL-C and CTRL-V
Disclaimer: I'm on . I can both quote and share/quote-post/quote-tweet/quote-toot any post in the Fediverse that can show up in my streams or in my search. Hubzilla has had these capabilities since its inception in 2015, and it has inherited them from Friendica which has had them from its own beginnings in 2010.
I didn't create this share with copy-paste. It was automatically generated from a code which, in turn, was automatically generated by Hubzilla. And as you can see, it offers both a link to your profile and a link to your original post. The latter makes it possible to verify the share is genuine and neither falsified nor manipulated. Both are technically impossible to create by hand on Mastodon because Mastodon doesn't support embedding links under text.
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedSharesMastodon might introduce a "proprietary", home-brew "No quote-toots allowed" flag outside the ActivityPub standard that probably won't be documented anywhere. Just like their "sensitive image" flag, but even more critical.
And if that happens, all Fediverse projects that have a quote-post/quote-boost/quote-tweet/quote-toot/share feature will have to have that flag reverse-engineered from Mastodon's source code and implemented a functionality that greys out the corresponding button under "no quote-toot" posts. And all their instances will have to upgrade to a version that fully supports that flag before Mastodon rolls out that flag. Or else Mastodon will defederate all their instances for being non-compliant.
This will at least affect Friendica and everything that can be traced back to it, including Hubzilla and (streams), as well as Misskey and everything that can be traced back to it, including Firefish whose development is dead and dozens upon dozens of other Forkeys.
If this actually comes, and if it's enforced immediately after release with no grace period, Mastodon could just as well fully be defederated from the rest of the Fediverse due to being incompatible. It'd cause a rift between Mastodon and the non-Mastodon Fediverse anyway because the former would have a requirement for federation which the latter is incapable of fulfilling.
are coming to . It is on the of to implement.
Here is a to opt out of quote posts. Please vote:
Here is an interesting article about research on quote posts or
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuotedShares I'm wondering how the Fediverse-wide opt-in or opt-out is supposed to work. Like, you check a box that says you don't want to be quote-posted, and on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), the Share button is automatically greyed out under all your posts. And none of these three have ActivityPub as their main protocol.
This would require a whole lot of steps to be done:
- Mastodon must implement that switch.
- Either this must be added to the ActivityPub standard, or all Fediverse projects which can do quote-posts must reverse-engineer this non-standard, homebrew parameter from Mastodon's source code. Just like they'd have to if they wanted to support Mastodon's non-standard sensitive image flag.
- All Fediverse projects which support quote-posts must add the function of greying out or temporarily removing certain UI elements.
- All Fediverse projects which support quote-posts must start checking each post whether the actor behind it has that non-standard Mastodon no-quote-post flag checked and, if so, grey out the corresponding button.
Good luck getting Mario Vavti, main developer of that behemoth that is Hubzilla who said he'll never give in to Mastodon's incompatibility shenanigans, to add a whole new functionality the Redbasic UI which hasn't been changed in almost 14 years, adding support for a Mastodon-specific, non-standard flag to the Pubcrawl ActivityPub support add-on which AFAIK has been coded against vanilla ActivityPub until now and then wiring them together. All ASAP after Mastodon has rolled out that flag. And good luck catching the various current developers of new Hubzilla UIs like Scott M. Stolz to implement this even before the first stable releases, too.
Good luck getting Friendica which is almost six years older than Mastodon and which has introduced quote-posts six years before Mastodon to adopt a non-standard, Mastodon-exclusive flag. And several dozen Forkeys. Including Firefish whose development is pretty much dead, but which has still got lots of active instances and users.
And good luck pressurising all developers of all these projects into fully implementing this feature right now, otherwise all instances of their projects would be defederated by all Mastodon instances in no time.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fedisplaining #CWFedisplaining #QuotePost #QuotePosts #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Misskey #Forkeys #Firefish #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #Catodon #DefederationStill working on improving my meme posts.
I hope it was a good decision to link to the image rather than embedding it. Here on Hubzilla, I don't have the means to make it so that sensitive images are hidden from Mastodon users. Even though this means that all you mobile users will have to live with your Web browser opening.
I hope the headline above the image description isn't too disturbing for Mastodon users not used to seeing text formatting.
I hope the content warnings and hashtags for filtering are sufficient. And I hope putting both an eye contact content warning and a pair of eye contact filtering hashtags on a post which merely links to a page with an image with eye contact, another content warning placed next to the link, isn't overkill and not triggering too many people itself either.
I hope the image description is sufficiently descriptive and explanatory, too, although I relied on KnowYourMeme to explain the meme rather than doing it myself, I didn't go into details describing what the four pictures and the two characters in them look like, and I didn't describe what the captions look like.
And I hope I can get away with not actually adding alt-text to the image in the link because Hubzilla doesn't give me the means to do so either.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #CW #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #Accessibility #A11y
Given OSgrid's track record, I could impossibly not meme it. Content warning: eye contact, hence no embedding the image in the post itself. Sorry for having you open another webpage.
Image description
The linked image macro is based on the "" meme, also known as "Anakin and Padm".
It consists of four still captures from the film Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, cropped to squares around one character each and arranged in two rows of two images. The two images on the left show young Anakin Skywalker in a spring meadow inmidst high grass and various blooming flowers, the two images on the right show young Padm Amidala in the same meadow.
The caption at the bottom of the top left image has Anakin say, "OSgrid will have a scheduled three-day downtime, starting on Wednesday, January 10th."
The top right image shows Padm happy with a caption at the bottom that has her say, "Oh, no problem, it'll be back online on Saturday."
The bottom left image does not have a caption, implying that Anakin doesn't say anything.
In the bottom right image, Padm's expression has changed to sceptical, and the caption at the bottom has her say, "It will be back online on Saturday, right"
Padm's scepticism refers to OSgrid's track record of maintenance downtimes always taking a lot longer than scheduled or expected.
OSgrid is a 3-D virtual world, a so-called "grid", based on OpenSimulator, a free and open-source server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life.
is a commercial 3-D virtual world created by Philip Rosedale, also known as Philip Linden, of Linden Labs and launched in 2003. It is a so-called "pancake" virtual world which is accessed through desktop or laptop computers using standard 2-D screens rather than virtual reality headsets. Second Life had its heyday in 2007 and 2008. It is often believed to have shut down in late 2008 or early 2009 when the constant stream of news about it broke away, but in fact, it celebrated its 20th birthday in 2023, and it is still evolving.
, OpenSim in short, was first published in January, 2007. Unlike Second Life, it is not one monolithic, centralised world. It is rather a server application for worlds or "grids" like Second Life which anyone could run on either rented Web space or at home, given a sufficiently powerful computer and a sufficiently fast and reliable land-line Internet connection. This makes OpenSim as decentralised as the Fediverse. The introduction of the Hypergrid in 2008 made it possible for avatars registered on one OpenSim grid to travel to most other OpenSim grids.
Second Life and the OpenSim-based worlds are called "grids" because they are flat worlds divided into square areas of 256 by 256 metres each which is roughly 280 by 280 yards. These areas are called "regions".
is the oldest OpenSim grid. Launched in summer 2007, about half a year after the initial release of OpenSim, it was the first public OpenSim grid. It is also the largest OpenSim grid by registered users, active users including Hypergrid visitors and landmass. Since 2023, OpenSim has had a bigger landmass than Second Life.
At the same time, OSgrid has always been a testbed for new developments in OpenSim instead of running a stable release of OpenSim. This, together with its sheer size and its age, still carrying over lots of contents from over a decade and a half ago, made it hard to maintain. Especially the asset server which handles the contents both in-world and in the avatars' inventories tends to cause trouble and downtimes which, while expected to be a day or two, might last for over two weeks.
Thus, Padm's reaction symbolises the scepticism that when OSgrid announces to be offline for three days due to a server migration, it will actually be back online after these three days.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #OSgrid #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Meme #StarWars #StarWarsMeme #StarWarsMemes #PrequelMeme #PrequelMemes #AnakinAndPadme #EyeContact #CWEyeContact Thing is, Fediverse projects can't be whipped up from scratch short-term.
Mike Macgirvin put Friendica together from zero to 1.0 within four months, and that was out-right incredible, not only considering it took Diaspora* a whole bunch of devs, crowdfunding and a bit over seven years until it even went beta.
/kbin had been in development for several months when the Reddit crowd came piling in. It had like five or six instances, all operated by the devs, all but one of which were non-public and experimental. Not that the one sole public instance was anywhere near stable. It was a case of, "What do you all want here We're not ready yet!" In fact, /kbin still isn't really ready.
Most projects have exactly one spare-time maintainer. Maybe two. Few have additional developers, and even they can only do so much if the main maintainer doesn't get to merging their pull requests. And not everyone is as blazing fast as Mike. That's free, libre, open-source software to you.
Sure, it's more impressive to show off something that's really brand-spanking-new. Press and paying customers are the most likely to pay attention to something that basically didn't exist yesterday, and that had its 1.0 release today, along with shiny, fully-featured mobile apps in Apple App Store and Google Play Store. But you won't easily get that in the Fediverse. And in the Fediverse, 1.0 means "reasonably stable, but still missing a whole lot of features we still need to implement for this to shine." Also, nothing in the Fediverse ever starts with an iPhone app.
If you really want to show off what can be done in the Fediverse, I'd say Mike's projects could be prime examples. However, Mike has just turned (streams) into a construction site for the time being, not to mention you can't easily sell something that intentionally has no name, no brand and no documentation because what documentation it initially had was stuck in 2018, surviving about half a dozen subsequent forks in that state. Oh, and there's no app.
Hubzilla is so feature-rich that it makes Firefish users gasp. It was actually created with professional users in mind. But it also has a Web UI that's stuck in 2012 with a few extra elements glued on for new features, a documentation that's every bit as terrible as (streams)' was before it was deleted, no official app, no iOS app at all and more than enough rough edges and out-right bugs for something that started its life almost a dozen years ago, not to mention only one developer who has to maintain this monster almost on his own. Oh, and it's anything but new. Even though the Hubzilla Association was founded in late 2023, Hubzilla is older than Mastodon.
At the end of the day, there's nothing that could be used to show off the Fediverse with something new and sparkly to aspiring commercial customers during a one-hour keynote at next week's CES like Microsoft would show off the newest Windows version, or Apple would show off the newest iPhone. In fact, it'd even be hard to impress a crowd of nerds and hackers at the Chaos Communication Congress.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) Well, something is already happening, and more will happen this year. Much of it will stay unnoticed by most Mastodon users, though, because just none of it will happen on Mastodon. Here's an attempt at a prognosis:
If anything, Mastodon itself will develop further away from the rest of the Fediverse. But this rest of the Fediverse is growing stronger, and it doesn't necessarily have to go on aping what Mastodon does, especially not if it breaks the ActivityPub standard. We may reach a point at which lack of compatibility between Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse can finally be blamed on Mastodon. And we may reach it this year.
The most obvious change visible to Mastodon's eyes is probably happening around the Forkeys. Firefish, 2023's shooting star of the Fediverse, may join FoundKey in Fediverse Heaven unless Kainoa resurfaces. Whether or not this happens, the legacy is already being taken over by the Misskey forks Sharkey and Catodon and the former Firefish fork Iceshrimp which has been rebased to more up-to-date Misskey itself. None of the three aim to be minimalist projects.
Hubzilla has a hot year ahead of it, at least I hope so. The Hubzilla Association has been founded recently, taking care of organisation, publicity etc. Its very own President is working on his own third-party advancements, especially new UIs, both general-purpose and specialised AFAIK. A blog-style UI is in development elsewhere. I'd be surprised if none of them saw the light of day this year. Not to mention main dev Mario's own plans for Hubzilla 9 which may come more quickly if the Association manages to reel in a few more devs.
And then there's (streams), as unnoticed by the Mastodon crowd as Hubzilla. Mike not only wants to turn its backend inside-out and rework it entirely, but he has already begun. Knowing Mike and how fast he is, (streams) may be even more awesome than it is already now before summer.
So, what I'd really like to see is something that, while highly unlikely, might catch the attention of not few Mastodon users, namely Mike's proposals being officially accepted into the ActivityPub standard, including but not limited to nomadic identity. Mastodon wouldn't adopt any of them if this happened, at least not right away. But the Forkeys certainly would. If they managed a way to go nomadic without adopting the channel model from Hubzilla and (streams), they'd have another big advantage over Mastodon. Enough stories by Forkey users of how they survived the sudden death of their home instance because they had at least one clone, and more and more Mastodon users would be sold, especially those who had to "move" manually because their home had announced its shutdown or simply vanished.
But again, this is unlikely to happen.
More realistically, third-party add-ons for (streams) being developed, and be it Hubzilla apps being forked and ported.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forkeys #Firefish #Sharkey #Catodon #Iceshrimp I've yet to use (streams) myself, but I guess interoperability issues are down to those few causes now:
- Structural differences, e.g. because (streams) uses the one-post-many-comments thread structure. Mostly stuff inherited from either Friendica or Hubzilla.
- Access permissions which (streams) is the king of, just to stumble into compatibility issues especially with Mastodon every once in a while. Good thing Mike is very quick at fixing such stuff.
- Cultural differences. That's because those from the old Friendica/Hubzilla guard now residing on (streams) collide with Twitter refugees on Mastodon who haven't heard of the Fediverse before November 2022, who have created their very own culture from scratch, and who want to have it all across the whole Fediverse.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams) I was a member of the "proto-Fediverse" as early as 2011. I started out on Friendica.
Back in the day, that proto-Fediverse was Diaspora*, Friendica and whatever else Friendica reeled in, e.g. the occasional few and far between StatusNet users.
Diaspora*'s users were a) hipsters who were too cool to remain on Facebook, b) normies who were concerned about their privacy and wanted to give Diaspora* a chance and c) tech nerds on the FLOSS side of IT who, like a) and b), had never heard of Friendica.
Diaspora* has never wanted to federate externally. The federation with Friendica was all Friendica's doing, including reverse-engineering Diaspora*'s source code, cracking its encryption and then latching directly onto Diaspora*'s inner workings. It was akin to connecting a new piece of external hardware to a computer by drilling a hole into the computer case and soldering 237 individual wires to certain points on certain circuit boards using self-made diagrams.
Thus, since Diaspora* has also never wanted to become compatible to ActivityPub, it is not considered part of the Fediverse nowadays because the Fediverse is defined as everything that can federate with Mastodon.
Friendica can. In fact, Mastodon immediately federated with Friendica after it was created. So the only project that was part of the Federated Social Web back then, and that's still part of today's Fediverse is Friendica. We can therefore sweep Diaspora* and GNU social, formerly StatusNet, under the rug.
Well, Friendica had a bunch of alternative left-wing activists who probably used it because it was so obscure. They may have been afraid of being discovered by whatever authorities even on Diaspora*.
Everyone else was hardcore tech geeks who found Diaspora* outright ridiculously underwhelming in comparison to what Mike Macgirvin had launched two months before Diaspora*. Also, everyone distrusted GAFAM. Today, the most wide-spread end-user device on Mastodon is the iPhone back then on Friendica, it was the Linux PC/laptop.
Not exactly few ran their own nodes. Some ran public nodes on rented Web space, others hosted their own private nodes on a machine of their own at home, also so that they wouldn't be affected by yet another public node shutting down without an announcement (which inspired nomadic identity, by the way).
In 2012, Red came up, originally a Friendica fork, later known as the Red Matrix. It introduced nomadic identity while offering just about the same federation possibilities as Friendica, including Friendica itself. Basically, it tried to recruit its target audience from Friendica's users, especially self-hosters. That only failed because a) you don't need nomadic identity if you self-host, and b) hardly anyone knew that the Red Matrix existed.
It got a wee bit more popular when it was retooled into that monster now known as Hubzilla in 2015. Even then, it lived on word-of-mouth within Friendica because it wasn't even mentioned anywhere else outside. I mean, only very few Diaspora* users even only knew that Friendica existed although there were Friendica connections all over Diaspora*, but even fewer found out about Hubzilla.
As Hubzilla was basically nomadic Friendica on 'roids, its target audience ended up being the most adventurous hard-core bernerds from Friendica. What sold them was not so much nomadic identity but Hubzilla's enormous wealth of features.
Little has changed since then. A few people have ventured from Mastodon to Friendica because they wanted something that Mastodon couldn't offer, e.g. more characters or text formatting or quote-posts. Some of them have settled with some Forkey meanwhile because it was prettier and less overwhelming (and it had polls and Mastodon-style content warnings). Even fewer have taken that step because they wanted to launch a Fediverse forum.
Hubzilla is still the nerdiest and most hard-core Fediverse project, hands down. It's still the second-oldest, and while it isn't the most technologically advanced (that'd be (streams)), it piles up the most features behind the most repelling and overwhelmed UI and the most useless user documentation ((streams) doesn't have any at all, so it doesn't count) while being impossible to use with any iOS app. I'd say it's the one project from where adventurous Mastodon "normies" nope away the most quickly because it might actually require the most adjustment.
While this might change with the arrival of the new third-party UIs that are currently being developed, Hubzilla has one of the highest tech nerd densities in the Fediverse.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla
Last updated: 2024-01-13
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