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Excellent article about how COVID's transmitted,

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

Yes, we've come to a point at which many Mastodon users think the perfect fire-and-forget AI that delivers a Fediverse-style extensive and accurate image description is already here. That's because they can't be bothered to check what that AI has whipped up, much less correct it.
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:

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:

#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 Mastodon doesn't have it, and Mastodon doesn't really need it.
The channels structure was created to make nomadic identity possible or at least facilitate it.
Basically, a Hubzilla channel is a Friendica account with boatloads of extra stuff on top. All stuffed into a container. And that container resides on an account on one server.
What nomadic identity does is copy that container to another account on another server. A 1:1 identical copy. Even keeping the same identity, using the domain of the original server. Whenever one of them changes, the other one is kept in sync. They stay identical.
So yes, the identity of that container on foo.social is alicefoo.social, and the identity of its clone on bar.social is still alicefoo.social. At least it is for servers that understand nomadic identity. Mastodon, for example, will see any post sent from the clone on bar.social as coming from alicebar.social which to Mastodon is a wholly different actor from alicefoo.social.
Hubzilla still uses the Zot protocol, it must have been around 2020 when it switched to the current and last version to come out, Zot6.
(streams) is based on Nomad. Nomad should actually be Zot12, but it is so much different from Zot that it is no longer directly compatible with Zot, and it got its own name.
(streams) has actually got even better ActivityPub support than Hubzilla. However, while Hubzilla federates with almost everything that moves, just like its predecessor Friendica, (streams) only supports Nomad, Zot6 and ActivityPub.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #CWFediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Zot #Zot6 #Nomad #NomadicIdentity #Channels Find the latitdue and longitude of any place tldr: Hubzilla has had at least some of this for over a decade now. And it won't replace any of it with a new standard tailor-made for Mastodon.
If you look past projects based on ActivityPub and at projects that have ActivityPub as an additional protocol, some of this already exists.
- Data portability. In my opinion, this is the most important problem. I'm in favor of , which also solves identity portability and unlocks many new features.

Exists in the shape of nomadic identity. Invented by Mike Macgirvin in 2011 with his Zot protocol and first deplayed in 2012 with the Red Matrix, nowadays known as . Also available on , Mike's current project at the end of a string of forks from Hubzilla, now based on the Nomad protocol.
Mike would like to see nomadic identity and other special features of the Zot and Nomad protocols included in the ActivityPub protocol. He has actually submitted a number of proposals for this. They were all rejected. Even though he is a protocol developer first and foremost, and he has both created and worked on more Fediverse protocols than anyone else, so he should be considered competent.
Nomadic identity with ActivityPub won't come unless either Evan Prodromou and the W3C commission cave in and allow Mike's suggestions, or someone re-invents the wheel from scratch in a way that's utterly incompatible to Hubzilla and (streams). And it won't come to Mastodon unless Eugen Rochko can imply that Mastodon has had it first.
And there will never be a nomadic identity standard that meets Mike's requirements as well as Eugen's wishes.
- End-to-end encryption. has become a standard, and it would be wise to adopt it. provides a good overview of what we have at the moment (not much). Some variation of is likely needed to make end-to-end encryption work.

AFAIK, all three of Mike's still existing projects, from 2010, Hubzilla from 2012/2015 and (streams) from 2021, have it. Optionally, but still. I think Friendica actually advertises military-grade encryption.
- Plugins. Something like , but cross-platform (e.g. Wasm-based). Also, pluggable timeline algorithms.

Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have had support for add-ons, including third-party add-ons, plus a number of official add-ons since their respective inceptions. If you want a cross-platform add-on standard, I hope you don't expect these three to throw their own standards over board in favour of the new standard. Otherwise, good luck developing a replacement for Pubcrawl that makes Zot-based Hubzilla compatible with ActivityPub while working on ActivityPub-based Mastodon just the same. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) rely on add-ons for all federation beyond their respective base protocols (DFRN, Zot, Nomad).
- Groups. We have several competing standards for groups: , , Mastodon developers are working on their own standard. It would be nice to converge on a single standard, that also supports private groups.

Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have had support for discussion groups/forums since their respective inception. On Friendica, a group is a user account with special settings on Hubzilla and (streams), it's a with special settings. In addition, especially Hubzilla and (streams) have access permission control on a level that most people for whom the Fediverse is only ActivityPub couldn't imagine in their wildest dreams. All three can be used by users from all over the Fediverse already now.
Good luck forcing Friendica to give up its 13-year-old standard that's used by , just to name one, and Hubzilla to give up its 11-year-old standard that blows everything else but what (streams) does out of the water. Good luck forcing them to adopt something inferior.
On the other hand, good luck forcing and to switch to a wholly different standard. Don't forget that these two exist as well. And good luck having the Fediverse outside of Hubzilla and (streams) adopt both server-side and client-side OpenWebAuth.
And I'm not even talking about how different Fediverse projects handle threads differently. Mastodon has a Twitter-like thread structure: many posts, tied together with mentiones. Just about everything that's built on ActivityPub has taken this over. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have a Facebook/blog/Tumblr-like thread structure: one post, the start post, and many comments which aren't posts. It's similar on Lemmy and /kbin which are Reddit clones, only that they don't allow thread starters to moderate their own threads.
- Quoting. is a proposed standard, but most fediverse applications still use non-standard properties. Mastodon developers are trying to invent something completely different.

This is something that almost the whole Fediverse has implemented, save for Mastodon.
And again, Friendica has had quotes since its inception in 2010, almost six years before Mastodon was launched (which, by the way, federated with Friendica and Hubzilla on the spot). Hubzilla has had quotes since 2012, inherited from Friendica. Their way of quoting is dead-simple: BBcode. quote/quote (streams) supports Markdown and HTML in addition to BBcode, but otherwise it's the same.
Oh, and by the way: Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have also supported quote-posts a.k.a. quote-tweets a.k.a. quote-toots a.k.a. quote-boosts from their very beginnings.
- Markets. So far there's only server implementation capable of processing payments.

At least two. Hubzilla has a payment add-on, too. It isn't installed on all hubs, but it's there.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CWFedisplaining #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #ActivityPub #Friendica #DFRN #Hubzilla #Zot #Streams #(streams) #Nomad #Lemmy #kbin #/kbin #NomadicIdentity #OpenWebAuth #Group #Groups #Forum #Forums #Quote #Quotes #Encryption #E2EE #E2EEncryption I think hopes were high last year that the Twitter Migration would lure more tech-savvy geeks into the Fediverse, seeing as they were its initial target audience.
Instead, the Fediverse got millions of phone-wielding tech illiterates who simply have noped away from Musk. People who actually still feel there's too much tech talk and especially too much talk about Linux going on in the Fediverse. People who wouldn't even have come here, hadn't they been railroaded to their first home instance and mollycoddled into believing the Fediverse is only that one instance, just to let them find out what the Fediverse really is after they've settled in.
In the meantime, the geeks have barely heard of the Fediverse because nobody in their filter bubble is talking about it. Those who have may still be sceptical that something like the Fediverse could work, and since they know better, it probably doesn't anyway. Many have left social networks/social media altogether because "social media" equals the big corporate American silos plus TikTok in their minds, and again, many are completely unaware that free, open-source, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised alternatives a) exist, b) work and c) are used by someone. Those who haven't cling to their accounts on and Instagram because "but muh thousands of followers, but muh weekly likes."
Last but not least, I think especially the newest generation of developers can mostly only develop mobile apps anymore. Another reason why we got a deluge of new "Mastodon and whatever else happens to work with this, idk and idc" iOS apps while server projects are struggling to find devs.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Fediverse

Here are 10 key lessons from the book that can transform your outlook:

Book:


reads

Gaining RECORD Speed With THE WORLD LONG DRIVE CHAMPION KYLE BERKSHIRE

Seems like the original intestines of my most powerful machine are giving up the ghost by and by. I had already replaced the old Radeon HD 7770 graphics card with a Radeon RX 590 a few months ago.
Now something else must have broken.
All I know that the whole machine froze while running under high load, including playing a video. Not even the mouse cursor moved anymore.
Ever since, I can't boot any operating system anymore. The installed Debian seems to halt around the point when it's supposed to create the RAM disc. A Manjaro live system wouldn't boot. Live Debian doesn't boot either, not from an USB drive and not from DVD. It simply stops with a black screen with backlight on. So the boot process starts, but it always halts at some point.
Memtest86+ works. One run didn't show any issues, but I didn't want to leave it running for hours over night or so until something shows up.
Now I'm wondering what broke this time.
RAM: Will be easy to detect by re-installing the old RAM. I got me some used replacement RAM along with the RX 590, also to increase the amount of RAM in the machine. It didn't come in appropriate packaging, though. Still, it worked. Could be it no longer does.
CPU: An old 3-core Phenom II, older even than the mainboard. Might not have survived the mistreatment over the lasts few years. A lot of load for at least one core over hours continuously, and I've never replaced the cooler or the thermal paste. A damaged CPU would be easy to replace for now by acquiring an AMD FX for cheap and adding a second-hand cooler for both the AM3+ and the AM4 socket which I could keep after eventually upgrading the mainboard.
Mainboard: A 970A-UD3. Newer than the CPU, but has seen over a decade of duty. Mainboards should take a lot of beating, but I think they're more susceptible to aging than CPUs. If the mainboard is broken, a repair would be more costly, and I'm on a budget already. Replacement full-size board, replacement CPU (Ryzen 5 Zen probably), replacement RAM, and I'll need a replacement cooler anyway.
SSD: Well, I'd replaced the original HDD with an SSD that had run in another machine previously, although it's still newer than the mainboard. But I don't think live systems refuse to start due to a faulty SSD.
Graphics card: Nope. The graphics card is the second-newest component in that machine. I've installed it only a few months ago. And believe me, I know what a failing graphics card looks like. That wasn't it.
PSU: Nope. That's the newest component, and I think 500W are sizable for this machine.
Come to think of it, not long after installing the replacement graphics card, I experienced a full shutdown. Like, the machine went out completely at once. That happened when I had two instances of the Firestorm viewer running with both avatars at the same party. I did that because the machine finally had the oomph to handle two Firestorms now with 8GB of VRAM instead of 1GB and 16GB of identical RAM instead of a 12GB hodge-podge partly salvaged from the same machine as the SSD.
I can test the SSD and the RAM tomorrow. As for the rest, no idea.
#ComputerIssues #HardwareFailure #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost

I've put my three randomish ambient fog tunes, rainfog, freezefog and glowfog into a playlist for your convenience.

fog - one hour, forty seven minutes and one second of atmospheric order from chaos

fog


Our cute tiny Wood Mice are over wintering in the conservatory again

- animal wildlife

Good thing you've limited this to corporate platforms. Otherwise, strictly speaking, you'd have to start finding and blocking all Hubzilla instances.
Hubzilla has been decentralised before Mastodon even existed. But by default, new channels only federate through Hubzilla's own Zot protocol which only Hubzilla and (streams) understand. ActivityPub is one out of several optional protocols that have to be manually activated per channel.
Also, I've yet to see a public Hubzilla hub with hub-wide moderators beyond the admin(s), even though Hubzilla hubs tend to be small in comparison to Mastodon instances. On top of that, most Hubzilla hubs don't give you a link to the admin's channel/the admins' channels, not even on the Web interface. If you only use mobile Mastodon apps, you're completely out of luck.
Oh, and as if that wasn't enough, unlike Mastodon users, Hubzilla users aren't notified if you mention them out of the blue in a public post without being connected to them. You have to send them a DM, and you have to know that.
At least it's .
CC:
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla For starters, there is the so-called "Threadiverse" in the shape of fairly young and , both launched as drop-in replacements for Reddit. Which means they largely handle like Reddit. I think LemmyBB, the alternate Lemmy UI that mimicks the look-and-feel of phpBB3, is discontinued.
is the oldest project in the ActivityPub-centred Fediverse, created by Mike Macgirvin in 2010, and it has been in active development ever since. Case in point: Its latest stable release is only a few days old and made it the only Fediverse project with full native Bluesky federation. It's quite versatile, and forums are part of what it can do see , for example. In fact, forums are nothing but regular user accounts with specific settings.
For completion's sake: , originally created by the same developer out of a Friendica fork, is a heavyweight jack-of-all-trades that has both public and private community groups/forums amongst the things you can use it as. The UI might not be appealing right now, but new UIs are being developed as we speak, AFAIK including one specifically for discussion groups.
Finally, technically nameless and brandless, is still being maintained and developed by Mike, and he's quick, especially if you run a development version. It's at the end of a string of forks of Hubzilla, and while it has a greatly reduced feature set, it has improved ActivityPub connectivity, it has improved access permissions settings, and it can still host community groups/forums. It's probably more convenient to start your own instance because finding one of the few public instances with open registration is .
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Groups #Forums #Lemmy #kbin #/kbin #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) "Image description" if it's an image, "audio transcript" or maybe "audio description" if it's audio, "video transcript" or maybe "video description" if it's a video, "media description" as a more general term.
Mastodon only refers to it as "alt-text" because that's where Mastodon users always put it. After all, alt-text gives them 1,500 characters per image, but the toot only gives them 500 characters minus content warnings minus hashtags minus mentions etc.
I use more appropriate terms and more appropriate places to put my descriptions because I don't have to worry about character limits here on Hubzilla.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #AltText #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #MediaDescription #MediaDescriptions #AudioDescription #AudioDescriptions The question that nobody can agree on an answer to is: How detailed is the minimum requirement for media descriptions How detailed is optimal How detailed is too much, and is there such a thing as "too much"
I'm someone whose "optimal" for image descriptions is probably beyond "too much" for many readers and definitely "too much" for almost all writers, and it keeps getting worse. I can post a 37,000-character description for one image that took me over 13 hours to research and write and find it lacking in multiple ways afterwards. In fact, I've done so.
Now I'm wondering what'd be an optimal audio description for music. Since I'm also a hobbyist musician, I might try to approach describing music in a way that goes into similar detail as sheet music, only that it includes sounds as well. Something that involves describing each audio part separately, although I'm not sure whether I should use the time within the whole audio file, the time only for the song, the bar-based timecode for the song or two or all three of them.
So I guess reading my audio description for one song is likely to take longer than listening to the whole album, if not multiple albums. But it'd be detailed and hopefully informative. That is, if I find a way to describe individual sounds including what effects do to them that's satisfying both for people who have turned deaf and people who were born deaf, both being complete laypeople when it comes to music.
But whether that's the right way, still not sufficient or way overkill, I don't know.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #AltText #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #MediaDescription #MediaDescriptions #AudioDescription #AudioDescriptions I do.
Not what most people think "The Metaverse" is, namely a.k.a. "Facebook's Metaverse" a.k.a. "Zuckerberg's Metaverse" a.k.a. "Meta's Metaverse" a.k.a. Horizons, though.
Not what the cryptobros want the Metaverse to be either, i.e. a cash grab based on blockchains, cryptocurrencies, NFTs and artificially expensive land in clunky, buggy 3-D worlds.
In fact, nothing that was hyped after Zuck's "Metaverse" announcement.
I'm using something non-corporate, free-as-in-free-beer, free-as-in-free-licenses, open-source, even decentralised that has been around since 2007 and established a so-far unique connection between worlds in 2008.
It's called , OpenSim in short. Basically, it's a free and open-source server-side re-implementation of Second Life's technology and used with largely the same third-party clients ("viewers") as Second Life. And it can be used without a VR headset on just about any desktop or laptop computer with halfway decent graphics performance.
And yes, I'm using what's called the "Metaverse". This term has been used in OpenSim circles before 2010 already, very likely as early as 2008 when the Hypergrid was established which makes travelling between OpenSim worlds ("grids") possible, maybe even in 2007 already.
By the way, there are quite a few OpenSim users in the Fediverse, and there are also Second Life users. Just check the hashtags #OpenSimulator, #OpenSim and #SecondLife.
#Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPostAbout time that Mastodon introduces groups. That'd be the only way to actually discuss stuff with Mastodon users.
Sure, Mastodon users can discuss in groups already, namely on Guppe, Firefish, Lemmy, /kbin, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams)... But seriously, the vast majority of Mastodon users never looks beyond Mastodon. They don't know that discussion groups/forums exist outside of Mastodon, or if they do, they find them too cumbersome and inconvenient to join because they can't do that with one click or tap. And not few don't even know that there's a Fediverse beyond Mastodon.
On the other hand, if there were Mastodon groups, they'd probably be populated by 99.9% Mastodon users, so there wouldn't be any insight from non-Mastodon users. Especially the users of projects that have their own group/forum functionality would be absent because they wouldn't need Mastodon to join a group. So next to nobody would even have a vague idea what the Fediverse outside of Mastodon is like. If I wrote about what things are like on Hubzilla, for example, that'd be totally unimaginable for most users. And I'd constantly be fighting "Fediverse = Mastodon" windmills.
So it's actually about time that groups started becoming compatible to one another and federating across the Fediverse, along with Mastodon introducing that feature. Just imagine your Mastodon app listing Lemmy communities, /kbin magazines and Hubzilla forums next to Mastodon groups. But not even Lemmy and /kbin are really sufficiently compatible with one another yet. These two are too different from Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams). And Mastodon is probably going to re-invent the wheel and intentionally make its own groups incompatible with everything else out there.
P.S.: The reason why this post is so long is because I had a lot to say. And it didn't matter anymore. I had a nice draft with 499 characters. Then I realised I needed a whole bunch of extra hashtags for those who use them to filter out any Fediverse meta discussions. And as I had to go over 500 characters anyway, there was no reason to limit myself.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Guppe #GuppeGroups #Firefish #Lemmy #kbin #/kbin #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Groups #Forums

When you turn in your quest but the questgiver kindda makes you flustered
"You have done well, Knight! You know how to please your *gorgeous* Countess! "

For MattTheToonCat

I sincerely hope it hasn't become an absolute requirement for everyone whose posts may show up on Mastodon to describe preview images automatically placed by Mastodon.
I know that accessibility demands that. And I'm usually someone who takes it seriously. My descriptions for my own original images have to be the longest and most detailed in the whole Fediverse by far. And I'm worried about triggering autistic users with eye contact if there's an eye smaller than 1/10,000th of a pixel somewhere in the picture. I've issued an alcohol content warning due to a strawberry cocktail that was only 4 pixels.
But I'm on Hubzilla and not on Mastodon. While this gives me the advantage of no character limit, editing in a description for an image that's only visible on Mastodon would be a huge endeavour that'd require checking two Fediverse projects, not to mention a timespan of probably multiple hours between submitting the post and submitting the edit.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
- And while we're on the algorithm topic, people on the Fediverse, should remember that what they're using here (probably Mastodon) doesn't have an algorithm. If they're anything they're not happy about their timeline in terms of content, well... They have the power to change it. Follow and Unfollow buttons are one click away. Mute and Block are only two clicks.

This can only be mitigated by immediately launching tutorials for new Mastodon users both on all official Web interfaces and in the official app. These tutorials would walk them through their first steps, including how to find interesting content, e.g. by following hashtags.
That way, there'd be fewer people who try out Mastodon and leave it again in frustration after finding their personal timeline empty. I mean, they were promised a 1:1 pre-Musk Twitter clone.
And overall, regardless of the platform, service or app you're using, go through the settings. Understand them. The number of people who never do that is scary.

I guess that's because the vast majority of Mastodon users is on phones, using mobile apps. And I guess the official app is so lacking that it doesn't offer access to all settings either.
At the same time, most of these people have never seen and will never see the Web interface of their instance. They might not even know that Mastodon has as Web interface and believe it's mobile apps only.
So they'll never in their lives come across these settings. Ever.
Also, people tend to be either too lazy to configure anything or too afraid of breaking something while doing so. They want their personal preferences to be either the default settings or hard-coded, regardless of what someone else might prefer.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon There are already projects in the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon that support long-form posts will all bells and whistles from unlimited character count to text formatting to embedding images within the post.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #WriteFreely #Plume #Friendica #Hubzilla #LongForm A large part of this is EU politics.
Meta wanted to harvest as many former Twitter users as possible, that's the reason why Threads exists.
The reason why Threads has implemented ActivityPub is mainly EU politics and EU laws. In America, IT corporations have free reign. But the EU requires at least newly-started online services to be interoperable with others, full stop, end of discussion.
When Threads was launched, it was completely banned in the EU. Totally inaccessible. You know when the ban was lifted It was lifted when Threads started federating. Even with that little federation, Threads sufficiently fulfilled the requirements to operate in the EU. For now.
And why the Fediverse Why ActivityPub Because a) established with lots of users already, b) open standard with no license fees to pay, c) not controlled by another corporation, and d) they had heard of it.
I mean, they could just as well have implemented Bluesky's protocol, but Bluesky is corporate and doesn't want to federate with anything non-Bluesky. They could have implemented the Diaspora* protocol, but Diaspora* isn't interested in external federation either, so they'd have to crack and reverse-enginner Diaspora*'s inner workings just like Friendica did a dozen years ago. They could have implemented OStatus, but hardly anybody uses that anymore. They could have implemented Zot or Nomad, but they don't know that either exists, not to mention that they would have had to bow to the will of one individual protocol developer who would not let them one-sidedly meddle with his protocol against his will.
That's why ActivityPub.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Meta #CWMeta #Threads #MetaMeta #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #EUPol #CWEUPol

Greenery ! by Sabina BD

s/Firefish/Sharkey because both Firefish and one of its official instances have been pretty much unmaintained for months, and some see the whole project in its death throes if won't come back.
But yes, Misskey gives you 3,000 characters, and all the Forkeys (Firefish, Sharkey, Iceshrimp etc.) give you at least the same amount because the admin can configure it.
And Friendica doesn't have a character limit at all. At least not a defined one. Neither do Hubzilla and (streams), all created by the same guy as Friendica. I've actually managed to post over 77,000 characters in one piece on Hubzilla a few months ago.
But be aware: Some Mastodon users are extremely irritated when they come across a post with something in it that couldn't possibly be written on vanilla Mastodon, e.g. over 500 characters. And they won't leave it at blocking you.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Fediverse #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters #Mastodon #Misskey #Firefish #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #ForkeysCome to think of it...
Imagine someone made an automatically generated instance filter list for Mastodon that tries to contain all instances of everything that isn't vanilla Mastodon. No matter if it's Glitch or Pixelfed or Lemmy or Sharkey or Hubzilla or Threads or whatever.
Imagine whatever created that filter list even scraped the Communities pages of (streams) instances and then started scraping the Communities pages of new (streams) instances it found there. That'd be the only way to discover (streams) instances. Imagine that scraper even went for the last remaining Osada, Zap, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse instances.
What do you think, how many Mastodon instances would actually include that filter list How many Mastodon users would demand that list be used on whichever instances they're on if they find out that the list exists
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotMastodon #Blocklist #Blocklists #BlocklistMeta #CWBlocklistMeta #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
Last updated: 2024-01-09






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