Two drugs, two trials, two definitions

BTW I had account on identi.ca, which was StatusNet powered (I believe).

It was. At least until Evan and Erin could no longer justify it running on that janky OStatus protocol. The result was the ActivityPump protocol, the pump.io software and Identi.ca's switch to pump.io with all hands on board.

Yes, and it should not be implemented in Ruby or PHP or something like that. I have seen one online discussion forum being rewritten from PHP to Rust few years ago, and the improvement in responsiveness of the web platform was amazing. (I do C, not Rust, but C is too oldschool now, and the performance penalty of Rust is minor, probably not noticeable at all)

This reminds me of how the Fediverse is all over the place in terms of programming languages. Everyone has their own Holy Grail.
Friendica and its descendants are written in PHP. They may not be the fastest (even though what bogged down early Friendica were its heavyweight federation connectors to everywhere, especially the one for Facebook that came in 2011). Mike either discarded or rewrote these when he rewrote Red. But they happily run on a run-of-the-mill LAMP stack.
Mastodon is written in Ruby on Rails. Hubzilla runs circles around it in terms of performance per account/channel, and that has to say something. The only thing that managed to top this was early diaspora*, written in Ruby on Rails for Mac with MongoDB as the database system.
The *omas are built in Elixir. Granted, they're utter featherweights, especially considering their features. They're legendary for their low server impact. Then again, Pleroma apparently is spaghetti code straight from hell. Its own devs often don't have a clue where to go look for bugs, much less how to fix them. (Miraculously, the Akkoma devs do manage to get ride of quite a number of them.)
The *keys are built in TypeScript and Vue.js. I guess one reason why Misskey is infamous for having so many forks and forks of forks is because there are tons of people who can code in JavaScript, the primary mobile programming language.
Iceshrimp.NET is a still very incomplete "rewrite" of old Iceshrimp in C#. It was largely tackled to get rid of all those nasty bugs inherited from Misskey that even Misskey doesn't manage to get rid of. I've heard quite some outcry: Iceshrimp.NET is a sell-out to Microsoft. I guess whoever uttered that didn't go check who owns TypeScript.
PieFed is a dead giveaway: Python. And PieFed makes more headlines in the Threadiverse for server politics than for its underlying technology, except that Lemmy pales in comparison.
GoToSocial is a dead giveaway, too: Go. And it was one of the first Fediverse server applications to not come with a Web UI. Those who use it for a single-user server often don't even bother installing one and use some Mastodon app or other instead. Besides, why drag around a Web UI if there are much better third-party Web UIs than whatever you could whip up
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BTW I had account on identi.ca, which was StatusNet powered (I believe).

Yes, and it should not be implemented in Ruby or PHP or something like that. I have seen one online discussion forum being rewritten from PHP to Rust few years ago, and the improvement in responsiveness of the web platform was amazing. (I do C, not Rust, but C is too oldschool now, and the performance penalty of Rust is minor, probably not noticeable at all)

I believe there was always the best interest of Mastodon developers to enable their users to engage with content like PeerTube videos, WordPress blog posts, and so on.

WordPress has always been the tricky one out of these.
On the one hand, there was the promise to be able to follow WordPress blogs from Mastodon without resorting to RSS or Atom. And there was the promise to WordPress users to increase their subscribers by the folks in the Fediverse.
On the other hand, there was Mastodon's refusal to render Article-type objects such as those that WordPress sent. And I'm not even talking about rendering them without utterly defacing them. AFAIR, Automattic wasn't really pleased to see Mastodon only linking to WordPress blog posts. (By the way, the *omas and *keys show WordPress blog posts with no problems, even though they consider themselves microblogging apps, too.)

You also mention, that Hubzilla was first application ready to deliberately block other platforms... and then accuse Mastodon of doing the same

Not Hubzilla. (streams) and Forte were the first to have the User Agent Filter and even that not before September, 2024. FedUp, which locks out everything that's incompatible with enclosed conversations, wasn't there before 2025. Neither of these two was backported to Hubzilla.
All that Hubzilla has is ActivityPub being optional. And even that comes from ActivityPub still being an add-on plus the potential desire of Hubzilla users to have a 100% nomadic channel with nothing non-nomadic interfering. Mario and Harald do see it as a potential drawbridge. But it's mostly a historical relic from the times when Mike dreamt of the Grid. In fact, Hubzilla still has Friendica's "federate with everything that moves" attitude deep inside its DNA.
Also, if anyone is interested in blocking the non-Mastodon Fediverse, or large parts of it, from Mastodon, it's individual Mastodon users who have never gotten over their first message from Calckey or Friendica or whatever. The Mastodon devs, well, probably not so much. They want to make the non-Mastodon Fediverse look as bad as they can get away with, but they can't afford locking it out entirely.
I mean, I've actually taken into consideration submitting a feature request in Mastodon's GitHub repository for one or various means of excluding the non-Mastodon Fediverse from individual accounts or even entire servers, if only to see the comments. But I don't think the devs would even only take building that option into consideration, also because it might anger certain other actors like Ghost, Flipboard, Automattic...

But there is no reason to block entire platforms.

Mike Macgirvin will disagree with you.
In fact, almost everyone will disagree with you if you tell them that one of the platforms that can be blocked is Threads.

Myself, I would like to learn Rust and perhaps join some ActivityPub project in Rust, which would not be so strictly focused on being Xitter clone and would support more media options, would display more than 4 image attachments, would be very user configurable, be aware of status size limits of platforms of mentioned users, etc.

Plume is written in Rust. As it so happens, its development is, let's say, dormant. I mean, it outclasses WriteFreely in a whole bunch of ways, be it because it has its own built-in image file space, be it because it supports likes and comments, be it because its Web UI is more straight-forward than WriteFreely's. But its devs don't have any time for it, they won't have any for the foreseeable future, and they recommend everyone who is interested in Plume to join WriteFreely instead.
Maybe they can use an additional main dev who can forward the project (along their plans anyway), merge 3rd-party pull requests and such. It'd be a shame to see it go to waste.
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I believe there was always the best interest of Mastodon developers to enable their users to engage with content like PeerTube videos, WordPress blog posts, and so on.

You also mention, that Hubzilla was first application ready to deliberately block other platforms... and then accuse Mastodon of doing the same

But there is no reason to block entire platforms.

Mike Macgirvin will disagree with you.
In fact, almost everyone will disagree with you if you tell them that one of the platforms that can be blocked is Threads.

Myself, I would like to learn Rust and perhaps join some ActivityPub project in Rust, which would not be so strictly focused on being Xitter clone and would support more media options, would display more than 4 image attachments, would be very user configurable, be aware of status size limits of platforms of mentioned users, etc.

The wiki reveals even different timeline:

"The wiki" sounds funny to someone who has three wikis of his own on his Hubzilla channel. Anyway...

To me, it seems, that Gargon simply was not as colossal nerd, as others, and somehow managed to create cult following of sufficient number of users, which were not really techies.

Gargron simply was lucky.
I think it was in 2016 already that German tech media got interested in decentralised alternatives to corporate silos. Mastodon caught their interest, being developed in Germany and all. Pleroma didn't, in spite of being developed in Germany, too, not to mention more feature-rich than Mastodon. Friendica was developed in Germany back then already, too, but it seemed like either tech media weren't interested in alternatives to something that needed alternatives much more than Twitter, or Friendica managed to continue to fly under the radar even then.
Anyway, Mastodon got media coverage, and nothing else did.
In 2017, right-wingers started attacking furries and queers on Twitter. They had to escape somewhere. Tumblr wasn't it, having been pretty much killed by being bought out and G-rated. But someone happened to know Mastodon due to the media coverage whereas nobody happened to know Pleroma due to no media coverage at all. So those furries and queers escaped to Mastodon. "Awoo" was briefly part of Mastodon's culture in the late 2010s due to the high furry-to-non-furry rate.
From then on, Mastodon had the two advantages of past media coverage and more users. The rest was like a snowball, essentially. The more users something has, the more users something gains by inviting them.
I guess Friendica and Hubzilla, both of which already existed back then, suffered from the same choice of mindsets: "If you build it, they will come," "We'll first need to get this and that fixed before we're ready for prime time," "Can't someone else take care of that I'm bad at advertising stuff!" Plus, of course, people who really were bad at advertising stuff to anyone who's neither a developer nor a server admin.

I was thinking about need for decentralized social media since at least 2009, as I was watching the old web to slowly loose any relevance. (My Facebook account was canceled without any explanations as soon as perhaps sometimes like 2010).

In 2009, there already was StatusNet. Granted, it was so obscure that vastly more people knew the "lighthouse server" Identi.ca than StatusNet itself. StatusNet supported the Twitter client API, but there were vastly more mobile apps that were hard-coded to Identi.ca than such where you could choose a StatusNet server because the huge majority of those who knew Identi.ca didn't even know it was part of a network. Identi.ca held some 90% of all StatusNet users.
By the way, what killed StatusNet was when Identi.ca changed its backend from StatusNet to pump.io and its protocol from OStatus to ActivityPump, thus becoming incompatible with the rest of StatusNet. What remained was largely unable to stand alone. What kind of helped Identi.ca (OStatus as a profile sucked so badly that Evan and Erin themselves had to whip up ActivityPump) did the opposite to StatusNet. A bit later, the FSF scooped it up, forked it to GNU social and eventually merged what was left of StatusNet into GNU social. It got ActivityPub support later on, but it's gone now, too.
Also, in 2010, Mistpark was around, and so was diaspora* (or what already existed of it at that time). diaspora* had tons of advance publicity due to its crowdfunding stunt, but then the four devs didn't manage to deliver before public interest had faded away, even with Mike's help on the protocol (not even kidding here). And speaking of Mike, he built Mistpark, but almost nobody came because he did nothing in terms of advertising. Even though Mistpark of May, 2010 was more powerful than diaspora* is today. Even though Mistpark took two months for a public alpha and four for a stable point release whereas it took diaspora* years to go beyond alpha, not to mention the entire development team being replaced.
I guess you would have been a prime Friendica user candidate. Particularly, you would have been one of those who were happy on a Friendica node without the performance-hogging Facebook connector in times when everyone was seeking out and piling onto the nodes with that connector, just to see them close registration at not even 150 accounts.

I was thinking about basing it on bunch of combined RSS feeds, the publicly compatible vs. the activity stream, which is not so different from from like ActivityPub is made today, except that signing of content with public keys is more advanced concept, that what I was able to imagine.

Well, they say that ActivityPub is glorified RSS with a rubbery spec.
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The wiki reveals even different timeline:

"The wiki" sounds funny to someone who has three wikis of his own on his Hubzilla channel. Anyway...

To me, it seems, that Gargon simply was not as colossal nerd, as others, and somehow managed to create cult following of sufficient number of users, which were not really techies.

I was thinking about need for decentralized social media since at least 2009, as I was watching the old web to slowly loose any relevance. (My Facebook account was canceled without any explanations as soon as perhaps sometimes like 2010).

I was thinking about basing it on bunch of combined RSS feeds, the publicly compatible vs. the activity stream, which is not so different from from like ActivityPub is made today, except that signing of content with public keys is more advanced concept, that what I was able to imagine.

Well, they say that ActivityPub is glorified RSS with a rubbery spec.
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Friendica is missing polls altogether and the stunt with language auto-detection is damaging built-in translation feature in Mastodon.

Mastodon has no concept of enclosed conversations which is damaging threaded conversations at least on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, as they were created by Mike Macgirvin for Mistpark (now Friendica) in 2010. Mastodon has no chance whatsoever to implement FEP-171b "Conversation Containers" because it lacks even the bare basics.
This is the very reason why Mike Macgirvin (creator of Friendica and Hubzilla and still maintainer of (streams) and Forte) has introduced yet another server-wide anti-Mastodon countermeasure named FedUp to both (streams) and Forte. Its effect is that it blocks all Fediverse server software that doesn't understand enclosed, one-post-several-comments conversations and the principle of all comments always going directly to the original poster who then forwards them to all other participants in the conversation.
(streams) and Forte already have the server-wide User Agent Filter that can block entire Fediverse server applications by their user channel. It was created and mostly marketed as a way of blocking Threads without a URL list, without constantly having to add new URLs to a list because Threads changed its URLs. But it's just as capable at entirely blocking all present and future Mastodon servers, and Mike even describes it as such.
Also, want to know the reason why Mike still keeps Nomad-based (streams) alive in spite of also having ActivityPub-based Forte with almost feature parity It's because ActivityPub is optional on (streams) at channel level. The ActivityPub switch can be used as a last-resort anti-Mastodon countermeasure even though its side-effects are tremendous. The most important (streams) group, a support group, by the way, used to have ActivityPub off with the very purpose of keeping obnoxious Mastodon users out. It only turned ActivityPub on when it also became the unofficial support group for Forte.
As I've said elsewhere: It isn't Mastodon that's the ActivityPub reference implementation of ActivityPub with everything that's different being broken. Mike Macgirvin has built all his ActivityPub implementations by the book, and so have Hubzilla developers Mario Vavti and Harald Eilertsen, two months before Mastodon itself had ActivityPub support. In the meantime, Mastodon's developers deliberately and intentionally break compatibility with the rest of the Fediverse to fool Mastodon users like you into considering the non-Mastodon Fediverse broken.

I would also appreciate longer HTML files as kind of "media attachments" and not body of the post. The main problem is perhaps that Mastodon chose to ignore the post title field altogether and does not allow markup in post body (but there is entire huge fork called Glitch, which supports markup, but perhaps markup is what you want in longer texts, kind of attachments - but not short on-wall posts)

The solution for this would lie in the dichotomy between Note-type objects (tweets are supposed to be this) and Article-type objects (longer posts are supposed to be this).
Mastodon supports both in a way. But it only renders Note-type objects. Even then, it still throws away the title and all attached images except for the first four. Its HTML sanitiser removes half of the text formatting, including embedded images. As for Article-type objects, it shows them as a small "toot" with the title and a link to the original. Only recently, probably also under pressure from commercial players like Ghost, Mastodon added the summary which it otherwise uses as the CW field.
But this is highly inconvenient. Hardly any Mastodon user can be bothered to click or tap the link to the original. They don't understand that there's a Fediverse post behind that link, much less that if they comment on the "toot" with the link, they comment on the post behind the link itself. Besides, what's behind the link won't show up on their Mastodon interface. Instead, if they're on a phone, their browser will open.
From this stems a debate that's as old as Mastodon's participation in the Fediverse. A prime example of culture clash.
The developers and users of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte want Mastodon as well as all its apps to fully render all their contents in the timeline. Including the title, including all text formatting, including as many embedded images as there are, as images actually embedded within the text, of course. The very same thing happens where they are. It's normal for them. It's the standard for them. It's part of their culture. What Mastodon does on their Note-type objects is crippling and defacing, and what Mastodon does on their Article-type objects is silencing to the point of wholesale censorship of several competitors.
On the other hand, the Mastodon devs refuse to add full HTML rich text rendering to Mastodon, and the Mastodon users don't want it anyway. In fact, many Mastodon users are highly disturbed by there being "toots" that are longer than 500 characters, and some are disturbed by there being any text formatting (displaying support for which was only introduced in October, 2022 with Mastodon 4.0, by the way). Their culture is that of purist microblogging in plain text with no more than 500 characters. It's already too much what Mastodon and its apps show already now. Thousands upon thousands of Mastodon users would go and block each and every server that sends anything over 500 characters if they knew that this is an option.
At the same time, hardly anyone on Mastodon even takes into consideration that whatever "long posts" come from has something like a culture of its own in the first place. It can't be culture if it isn't Mastodon's.

As I mentioned in the previous answer, Hubzilla just does too many things differently and focuses on experience of local users of instance - not on federated interoperability.

Seriously
Hubzilla has had full-blown nomadic identity since almost four years before Mastodon came out.
Hubzilla is almost as much an omni-federational monster as Friendica.

It has optional ActivityPub support, unlike Mastodon almost strictly by the official W3C specification, and it has had ActivityPub support before Mastodon had it.
It used to have optional StatusNet support which is how Mastodon federated with it immediately.
It can optionally federate with diaspora* Mastodon can't do that.
It can optionally federate via ActivityPump, the protocol that replaced StatusNet on Identi.ca Mastodon can't do that.
It can optionally cross-post to Dreamwidth, Libertree, LiveJournal and WordPress. It has been able to do either years before WordPress got its ActivityPub plug-in. Mastodon can't do either.
It still has the optional technology to bidirectionally connect to Mastodon doesn't have that.
It still has an optional built-in XMPP client Mastodon doesn't have that.

Mastodon is simply lights years ahead.

I sincerely hope that you only mean that Mastodon is ahead of others in terms of easy on-boarding of clueless newbies. And not that Mastodon is generally ahead of Hubzilla technologically and in features.
If the latter, I'll gladly prove you wrong.

I would prefer moderation to be more collective responsibility, so posts can receive perhaps kind of negative points, and people can choose to join shared blocklists and so, instead of relying of some superhero capabilites of moderators (which I don't have).

The problem with this is blind faith in those who maintain the blocklists.
Big blocklists tend to be automatically generated from smaller blocklists, letting everything from each one of these blocklists in, only weeding out double entries, if at all. Single persons have unlimited power over who is allowed to interact with thousands upon thousands of Mastodon servers and who isn't.
Now imagine that someone who maintains a popular blocklist is too disturbed by non-Mastodon content. It's too long, it doesn't follow Mastodon guidelines, it goes against Mastodon's culture, so it has to go. And then they start adding every single server URL from which obvious non-Mastodon content comes to their blocklist. Or they even use a script to harvest FediDB and Fediverse Observer for URLs of servers of certain non-Mastodon Fediverse applications and automatically add them to their blocklist.
And all of a sudden, almost entire non-Mastodon Fediverse server applications are completely blocked from thousands upon thousands of Mastodon servers just because they aren't Mastodon, just because they don't act like Mastodon. Essentially, just because one individual wants the Fediverse to be only Mastodon "again" (which it never was).
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Friendica is missing polls altogether and the stunt with language auto-detection is damaging built-in translation feature in Mastodon.

I would also appreciate longer HTML files as kind of "media attachments" and not body of the post. The main problem is perhaps that Mastodon chose to ignore the post title field altogether and does not allow markup in post body (but there is entire huge fork called Glitch, which supports markup, but perhaps markup is what you want in longer texts, kind of attachments - but not short on-wall posts)

As I mentioned in the previous answer, Hubzilla just does too many things differently and focuses on experience of local users of instance - not on federated interoperability.

Seriously
Hubzilla has had full-blown nomadic identity since almost four years before Mastodon came out.
Hubzilla is almost as much an omni-federational monster as Friendica.

It has optional ActivityPub support, unlike Mastodon almost strictly by the official W3C specification, and it has had ActivityPub support before Mastodon had it.
It used to have optional StatusNet support which is how Mastodon federated with it immediately.
It can optionally federate with diaspora* Mastodon can't do that.
It can optionally federate via ActivityPump, the protocol that replaced StatusNet on Identi.ca Mastodon can't do that.
It can optionally cross-post to Dreamwidth, Libertree, LiveJournal and WordPress. It has been able to do either years before WordPress got its ActivityPub plug-in. Mastodon can't do either.
It still has the optional technology to bidirectionally connect to Mastodon doesn't have that.
It still has an optional built-in XMPP client Mastodon doesn't have that.

Mastodon is simply lights years ahead.

I would prefer moderation to be more collective responsibility, so posts can receive perhaps kind of negative points, and people can choose to join shared blocklists and so, instead of relying of some superhero capabilites of moderators (which I don't have).

Two drugs, two trials, two definitions of success against long COVID

If this matters to you, share it.

Also, ALT text translates with the rest of the post, which can be helpful for images which contain only foreign language text.

Hubzilla is the most incompatible ActivityPub software in Fediverse. You do just lot of things wrong, to put it mildly.

You still seem to think that Gargron invented ActivityPub and the Fediverse, that Mastodon is the one and only reference implementation of ActivityPub, and that everything that doesn't work exactly like Mastodon is broken.
Here are the facts:
Mastodon was launched in January, 2016.
Hubzilla was launched in March, 2015. Counting an earlier incarnation named Red, it was created in May, 2012, when Friendica's creator re-wrote his own fork of a Friendica fork of his own.
Mastodon implemented ActivityPub in September, 2017, when the spec wasn't finalised yet.
Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub in July, 2017. Two months before Mastodon. Hubzilla was the first software to ever implement ActivityPub.
Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub strictly by the book. It has always tried to stick as close to the official W3C ActivityPub spec as possible.
Mastodon, in stark contrast, has always been stretching the ActivityPub spec until it broke. Not only that, but it has always been adding stuff outside the spec. First it did so to take over certain features from StatusNet which was its original protocol. More recently, it did so with the very intention to break compatibility with the rest of the Fediverse and make everything that isn't Mastodon look broken. And people like you keep falling for it because they think they know for a fact that Mastodon is the ActivityPub reference implementation.
The whole Fediverse has to break the ActivityPub spec just to be able to federate with Mastodon.

yes, the Hubzilla author is writing Streams, with nomadic identity, but it also means, that he understands, that Hubzilla approach is kind of dead-end.

You know nothing. Whereas I can rattle down the whole history from Mistpark in 2010 to today.
Mike Macgirvin, creator of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte created his post-Hubzilla server applications because he kept advancing the Zot protocol. And he couldn't implement these advancements into Hubzilla because they bore the chance of breaking compatibility with what already existed.
(streams) is not a completely new development, nor is it a straight Hubzilla fork.
(streams) is a 2022 fork of Roadhouse.
Which was a 2022 fork of either the third Osada or Mistpark 2020 or Redmatrix 2020.
Which were 2020 forks of Zap (or each other, but at least one of them was forked from Zap).
Which was a 2018 fork of either Hubzilla itself or the first Osada, which was a 2018 fork of Hubzilla.
Osada and Zap were created to develop Zot6. In its early stages of concept, Mike expected Zot6 to be incompatible with everything else. Mind you, he didn't see that as something bad. Advancing Zot was necessary because the then-current version of Zot was less than optimal. And Mike's vision was a decentralised, nomadic network named the "Grid", entirely based on Zot. The Grid would have been vastly superior to the existing Fediverse in every way possible.
So the issue with his early draft of Zot6 was that it was quite incompatible with non-nomadic protocols. Nomadic Zot6 content could not be translated into non-nomadic protocols like the diaspora* protocol or ActivityPub.
Thus, developing Zot6 on Hubzilla was out of question. Zot6 would have broken too much on Hubzilla. Besides, Hubzilla was bad as a platform to experiment on due to its wealth of supported protocols and other features, all of which would have had to be made compatible with Zot6.
And this is the real reason why Mike created Osada and Zap. From how I see it, and how I remember what he talked about back in the day (I was there, yes), he first forked Osada from Hubzilla. Then he ripped everything out that he didn't need, including support for all protocols except for Zot itself, ActivityPub, RSS and Atom, including the CMS stuff like articles, planning cards, notes, wikis and webpages, etc. Then he modified what was left against his early version of Zot6.
Then he discovered that a cloned Osada channel couldn't properly send content via ActivityPub.
Then, shortly afterwards, he forked Osada into Zap. He removed nomadic identity from Osada which kept ActivityPub and ActivityPub support from Zap which stayed nomadic.
The idea was to have a nomadic, cloned channel on Zap as your main channel that would only connect to Hubzilla, Osada and Zap, and to have an additional, non-nomadic channel on Osada that would serve as a "gateway" between nomadic Zap and the non-nomadic ActivityPub Fediverse.
Of course, this was highly impractical. But by 2019, Mike found a way to make Zot6 compatible with non-nomadic protocols. So, in early 2019, Mike discontinued Osada and forked a new Osada from Zap which only differred from Zap by having ActivityPub support while still being nomadic. This enabled Mike to have one development platform for Zot6 in conjunction with non-nomadic protocols and another one on which ActivityPub did not stand in the way.
Later in 2019, both Osada and Zap got stable releases. At that point, Osada and Zap were identical in code. Both had ActivityPub support. It was included into their cores now and no longer an add-on like on Hubzilla. They only had two differences. One was the branding. The other one was that Osada servers had ActivityPub activated by default, and Zap servers had ActivityPub disabled by default. Keeping Osada around was unnecessary now, so ActivityPub was activated by default on Zap, and Osada was discontinued. Zot6 was so stable that it was soon backported to Hubzilla.
Mike wasn't done yet, though. He now wanted to develop Zot8. Again, he did not want to develop protocol changes on stable production software that people potentially daily-drove.
Thus, three new forks emerged in 2020: another Osada, Mistpark 2020 (a.k.a. Misty) and Redmatrix 2020 (named after the Red Matrix, the name that Hubzilla bore from late 2012 to early 2015 between being created as Red and being re-branded into Hubzilla). Mike used them to develop Zot8. They were identical in all but brand identity.
This was fully intentional on Mike's part to confuse the hell out of the brand fetishists that were growing more and more numerous in the Fediverse. His goal was for people to declare Osada or Misty or Redmatrix the best Fediverse software and superior to everything else, just for him to tell them that Osada, Misty and Redmatrix are absolutely identical. In fact, the three remained identical to Zap in features.
Zot8 never got stable because Mike kept advancing it further and further. In early 2022, he was at Zot11. But Zot11 was so incompatible with everything else, including previous Zot versions, that Mike declared it a new protocol of its own and renamed it Nomad. In order to test-drive it, he forked Osada or Misty or Redmatrix into Roadhouse. After all, there were people who were daring enough to daily-drive production channels on Osada, Misty and Redmatrix, albeit only few. Roadhouse was still identical in features to Zap, Osada, Misty and Redmatrix.
It was now possible to crossgrade between Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse by simply rebasing the server code.
Later in 2022, he created a new fork of Roadhouse itself. The reason for this was not further protocol advancement. No, this time, it mostly had branding and licensing reasons.
First of all, he wanted to make that fork as easy for others to fork and adopt as possible. Everything he had developed so far was under the MIT license (he himself had relicensed Friendica under the AGPLv3 in 2011, but he didn't actually develop on Friendica he developed on a fork named Free-Friendika that was still MIT-licensed and then backported the changes to the Friendica repository, and Red was a Free-Friendika fork). This new repository was released into the public domain. At first, the whole thing was never primarily intended to be installed on servers as it was, but rather to be forked as the base of something new.
At least the core and Mike's own add-ons were. What third-party add-ons from Hubzilla times were still there got to keep their maze of licenses. This was intentional on Mike's part, too. It would make it impossible for commercial players to scoop up the whole thing and relicense it into something non-free and commercial without breaking any licenses, or without pumping tons of money into their legal department to work around that maze of licenses.
Also, Mike removed any and all naming and branding from the software. He absolutely intentionally made it nameless. You've read that right. He did this for two reasons. One, whoever wanted to fork it would have to give the fork an individual name and an individual branding. Two, this was to mess with brand fanbois and brand fetishists even more: This thing had no brand to gush over to begin with.
Furthermore, Mike removed all nodeinfo code that he could possibly get away with removing. Again, this was intentional. One intention was to stop this software from automatically joining the "my Fediverse project is bigger than yours" and "my server is bigger than yours" rat races. He intentionally did everything he could to keep this software away from The Federation, Fediverse Observer, FediDB and the like.
The other intention was for the case of commercial players looking for free code to steal. If this software had really taken off and left its stats proving its popularity everywhere, some big commercial player would have been likely to try and steal this software, make it commercial and non-free and release it as their own original creation. So his intention was for them to not even be able to find it in this case. (This, by the way, was the reason why he relicensed Friendica under the AGPLv3, and why he hardly ever spoke about Free-Friendika: Now that Friendica was growing popular, he didn't want big commercial players to scoop up code of his under a license that they could change to non-free.)
This server application became the first and only one in the Fediverse with no fixed server type identifier, in fact, with none at all by default. It has one text field for the server name, just like Mastodon and Friendica and Hubzilla and the like. But it has an additional field where the server type, i.e. the identifier for the software, can be entered. If none is entered, it's derived from the server name. Mike used to have a server that identified as "Y" because, as he said, "Y is not X."
While the application itself is nameless (for it still is), the code repository did require a name of sorts. Mike named the repository "streams".
Now, the community needed something to call that nameless software when they spoke about it. So they unofficially established "(streams)", complete with parentheses that make sure that this is not actually the name of this software. Those who say, "Streams," with a capital S and no parentheses, and who use that term as if it's an official name, usually sincerely believe that this is the official name.
Mike himself uses "streams" without the parentheses because even he needs something to call his own software by. Before Forte was made, he preferred talking about the streams repository without directly mentioning the software. And he himself denied that (streams) is even a project. It's just a bunch of code that runs.
As far as I know, it was now possible to freely crossgrade between six different server applications because they were still identical in features. Only that Mike also had six server applications to take care of now.
So on December 31st, 2022, Mike discontinued Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse. Admins who ran either of these on their servers were recommended to rebase their servers to the streams repository. In this case, by the way, the old branding was kept. I've seen a server that still had "zap" as its subdomain which indicated that it was set up as a Zap server, that had Misty branding, but that actually ran (streams).
From then on, Mike dedicated his time to maintaining and developing only the streams repository. He still occasionally helped Hubzilla out, though.
In 2023, the Mitra creator and developer silverpill approached Mike. The goal was to make Mitra nomadic. I guess earlier attempts using a blockchain and crypto technology didn't come to fruition, so it had to be Mike's way which had proven itself stable for more than a decade. However, Mitra was to remain based on ActivityPub.
It was in this exchange that Mike realised that ActivityPub could indeed be used for nomadic identity if a few things were added to it. One outcome was FEP-ef61 "Portable Objects" which introduced decentralised IDs (DIDs) that would not be bound to any one server domain.
Instead of creating a whole new server application to play with, Mike simply made a "nomadic" branch in the streams repository (even though the software was already nomadic) in which he implemented support for nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Support as in (streams) understanding it while internally still using Nomad for nomadicity.
In June, 2024, Mike considered the "nomadic" branch reliable enough and merged it into the "dev" branch.
In July, 2024, Mike merged the "dev" branch into the "release" branch which caused DIDs as per FEP-ef61 to be rolled out to existing production servers. On accounts created on this new version, channels would have a DID internally. On accounts greated on any previous version, even new channels would keep the old ID system for the time being. This way, existing accounts and channels weren't messed with.
However, what had worked under supervised and restricted lab conditions completely blew up under real-life conditions. Again, I was there on (streams) with a pre-DID account and two channels on it. I still have them. (streams) channels wouldn't federate with anything anymore. It had become impossible to send anything anywhere. What Mike was facing was nothing short of an enigma because not even he knew what was going in.
So he started tinkering. In mid-August, Mike forked the streams repository into something named and branded Forte. He did so so he could rip the Nomad protocol out while still keeping the entire functionality. He had to get rid of Nomad because he had discovered that (streams) got confused juggling all the many IDs it had to deal with, so he had to weed out the Nomad and Zot6 IDs to make things easier. But he couldn't possibly have done that on (streams) proper.
This way, Mike created the very first Fediverse server software that uses ActivityPub for full nomadicity, including cloning.
By the end of August, things got back to normal. But Mike, having spent every free minute in the last few weeks to get (streams) back into working condition, was burned out. He sent an open message around in which he declared that he would completely retire from Fediverse development, and both the streams repository and Forte were up for grabs.
But nobody was found who could take over either. (streams) and Forte probably had way fewer than 100 users combined. Those few who would have been able to maintain either didn't have time. One did have time and was willing to do so, but he didn't know how to code. He eventually did start teaching himself, and he occasionally contributes merge requests, but there was no way he could take over as the only dev for either, much less both. So Mike had to go on, whether he wanted or not, albeit at a somewhat slower pace.
This is why Mike is still developing (streams) and Forte to this day.
By the way: The reason why Mike "abandoned" his old software was because he needed to invest all his time into protocol development and advancement. Mike isn't the one to constantly maintain stable server software unless he absolutely has to.
In 2011, he handed Friendica over to two new developers so that he had time to create the Zot protocol.
In 2015 already, he handed Hubzilla over to two new developers so that he had time to explore the advancement of the Zot protocol. He still contributed to Hubzilla's development.
In 2019, he wanted to hand Osada and Zap over to the community, now that they were stable, so he had time to develop Zot8. But the Osada/Zap community was so tiny that he couldn't get a new dedicated developer team together.
In 2024, he wanted to hand (streams) and Forte over to the community because fixing (streams)' huge identity bug, which led to Forte's creation, had burnt him out. He wanted to quit. But, again, he couldn't because (streams) didn't have a single user who had both the time and the knowledge to take over as the new main dev.
Consider this: Gargron was a young man when he made Mastodon. I think he was still at university. Mike Macgirvin made Friendica, he had some three decades of professional work in IT and software under his belly. Gargron was at the beginning of his career. Mike had quit and moved from the USA to the western Australian outback where he has been living as a farmer ever since. He might actually be older than Gargron's parents.

while nomadic identitity would be cool thing, currently it does not exist

Take off your Mastodon glasses and look at the Fediverse and what it actually is like.
Nomadic identity does exist. Not as a vague idea, not as a concept on paper, but as a stable, production-grade feature that has been used to its full extent for well over a decade now. Just because Mastodon doesn't have it, doesn't mean the Fediverse doesn't have it. And just because Mastodon doesn't recognise it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The Fediverse has loads of features which Mastodon users want "the Fediverse" to have. It has features which many Mastodon users have never wanted "the Fediverse" to have such as quote-posts, introduced by Mike Macgirvin on Mistpark in 2010. It even has features that are completely and utterly unimaginable for Mastodon users, and it has had even these since as early as 2010, 2012 or 2015.
Nomadic identity was invented by Mike Macgirvin in 2011 with the Zot protocol.
It was first implemented by him in mid-2012 when he rewrote Red against Zot. This means that Hubzilla itself has been offering full-blown nomadic identity since 2012, almost four years longer than Mastodon has existed.
This very Hubzilla channel that I'm commenting from right here, right now, is actually nomadic. It is cloned across two servers: hub.netzgemeinde.eu and hub.hubzilla.de. And it has been since before Elon Musk announced to take over Twitter in early 2022. When I sent you this comment, it was automatically sync'd over to hub.hubzilla.de. When you sent the comment that I'm replying to, it was automatically sync'd over to hub.hubzilla.de. The clone has actually been of great help at least once.
Unfortunately, non-nomadic software identifies cloned channels as fully separate accounts with fully separate identities. But rest assured: on hub.hubzilla.de is my clone. It's the live, hot, real-time, bidirectional backup of the main instance of my channel, on hub.netzgemeinde.eu that you're following now. They're both one and the same channel with one and the same identity, jupiterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu, even though Mastodon is unable to see it as such. Go check both. You'll see they've got all the same content in them, including comments from others. Including your comment. How else can jupiterrowlandhub.hubzilla.de possibly have one of your comments under a post if you've only sent that comment to jupiterrowlandhub.netzgemeinde.eu if it weren't for nomadic identity
Even nomadic identity via ActivityPub is available as a stable, production-grade feature in stable, production-grade software right now as we speak. Forte was the first to be fully nomadic via nothing but ActivityPub, as of mid-August, 2024. Tootik, based on Gemini instead of the World Wide Web, is fully nomadic at server level, too. Mitra is fully nomadic by means of the Minimitra client.
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Also, ALT text translates with the rest of the post, which can be helpful for images which contain only foreign language text.

Hubzilla is the most incompatible ActivityPub software in Fediverse. You do just lot of things wrong, to put it mildly.

yes, the Hubzilla author is writing Streams, with nomadic identity, but it also means, that he understands, that Hubzilla approach is kind of dead-end.

while nomadic identitity would be cool thing, currently it does not exist

People know, that there are alternatives, and explore them.

Just because you know, doesn't mean literally everyone knows.
Every single Mastodon newbie is being implied to or outright told that Mastodon is the only thing in the Fediverse. They don't choose Mastodon because it suits them the best. I mean, most of them by far already have problems choosing a Mastodon server. In fact, they don't choose Mastodon within the Fediverse at all. They don't even know they have a choice. If they did, Sharkey and Friendica would be much bigger.

I think it can replace also Facebook and Instagram.

People know, that there are alternatives, and explore them.

I think it can replace also Facebook and Instagram.

It's a far cry from either.
Pixelfed was created as an Instagram clone and a drop-in replacement for Instagram. You can literally import entire Instagram accounts into Pixelfed.
Friendica was created as early as 2010 as an alternative to Facebook. It has all the features a social network needs. Bidirectional contacts like Facebook friends. Dedicated profile fields as opposed to only a small handful of multi-purpose profile fields. Contact suggestions based on your and their profile. Contact suggestions based on how many contacts you have in common. What everyone believes Google+ has invented with its circles (Mastodon lists on 'roids). Discussion groups. Moderated discussion groups. Private discussion groups. No ridiculously low arbitrary character limit.
I challenge you to use Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte as your only daily driver for a year. Not just dip a toe in, but take off the Mastodon glasses and exclusively daily-drive it. Use it for everything that you use Mastodon for right now without ever falling back to your Mastodon account for that time. And then I want to hear from you whether Mastodon really is a full-blown, fully-featured Facebook alternative and better at being that than Friendica and its family.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Add your location to a Google Map Exactly this exists on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. With even more options, actually. Hubzilla calls them "privacy groups", (streams) and Forte call them "access lists".
Now it comes: You can not only post to one specific such group/list. You can also post to several ones. Or to any combination of privacy groups/access lists and single contacts.
Better yet: You can even exclude single contacts or the members of certain privacy groups/access lists. You can post to the members of privacy groups Foo and Bar, except if they're also in privacy group Baz, and except for Alice, and in addition, you can post to Bob and Carol.
In addition, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte don't just define who receives the post. They don't simply flag it a DM either. They flag it "restricted" and only grant the recipients permission to read the post, read any comments and interact with anything in the conversation. In practice, this also means that those who have these permissions can not only interact with the original poster, but just as well with each other, because it isn't a DM.
Anything that doesn't understand these permissions, e.g. Mastodon, do understand it as a DM. This limits their possibilities to interact, but it's the safe way.
And yet, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte still have private and/or secret groups with moderation (like Facebook groups) on top of all this. (streams) and Forte even optionally have two levels of non-moderator users.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are much closer to Facebook-style social networking than to Twitter-style social media. In fact, they're descendants of Friendica, the first decentralised dedicated Facebook alternative. (Let's set aside that Hubzilla is usually referred to as something like a "social CMS" for a moment.)
They have multiple ways of rendering groups private, all of which go beyond Mastodon's way of making something private by limiting the receiving actors.
For starters, private groups only grant their own members permission to receive any content from the group. Also, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group stream. Furthermore, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group channel profile and its contacts. On Hubzilla, these are all separate options.
On top of all this, they can hide groups from directories. That way, these groups can be made known only by hearsay and/or personal contact to interested users. This doesn't necessarily make them private it makes them secret.
All these options are available for normal, non-group-actor channels as well, by the way.
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, chief economist at Apollo Global Management: Why are at the highest level in 20 years
1)
2) problems
3)

What more is needed
A full visual description of the settings, the people (of course, avoiding their gender and describing their skin tone rather than their race), their outfits, the surroundings
The title of the film, including an explanation what this film is, who made it, what it is about, when it was released, who the characters are and who the actors are
Regardless of neither of this belonging into the alt-text because information that is neither available in the message text nor plainly visible to sighted users in the image does not belong into the alt-text Because there are people who cannot access alt-text

And, pray tell, how is all this supposed to fit in 512 characters or fewer so that Misskey, Calckey, Firefish, Iceshrimp-JS, Sharkey, CherryPick and the other Misskey forks won't discard the alt-text

# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # In this regard, Mastodon has only got one major advantage: It has an official app.
Phone users used to see Twitter as a phone app that they loaded from their app store. Mastodon is the only *blogging thing in the Fediverse that they can load from their app store.
This is one reason why just about all Mastodon newbies use the official app and why they're on mastodon.social (it's the default in the official app, and since they don't know what this setting does, they leave it on default).
Mastodon even gets away with an official app that's far from good, much less fully features. All the newbies don't have anything to compare with. If Mastodon is a phone app to them, then the official app's feature set is Mastodon's feature set. If a feature isn't implemented in the official app, then Mastodon doesn't have it. I dare say that well over 80% of all Mastodon users have never in their lives used Mastodon's Web UI.
If someone takes the step and moves from the official Mastodon app to Ivory or Mona or IceCubes or Tusky or Fedilab or something like this, it's almost always the first time in their lives that they use an online service through an app that has a different name than the online service. Many people couldn't even imagine doing that.
This means that if Friendica and Hubzilla want to be more successful, growing beyond Mike's old "if you build it, they'll come" credo and advertising more isn't sufficient. People must be able to load Friendica/Hubzilla onto their phones from their app store. This requires an official app named "Friendica"/"Hubzilla" with a native, up-to-date iOS UI in the Apple App Store and one with a native, up-to-date Android UI in the Google Play Store. The existence of an official phone app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store is essential for being considered existent in the first place.
A commonplace attitude on Friendica and even more so on Hubzilla is that both can be installed as a PWA. But seriously, 99.9% of all phone users don't even know that PWAs exist. They don't know what that is. Not to mention that they expect and demand a native mobile UI in the style of their phone OS and not a generic Web UI.
Now, what would this app have to look like
If the advantages of Friendica and Hubzilla over Mastodon are to be emphasised and underlined, and if this app is to become people's one and only daily driver UI, it will have to be fully featured. Minus the settings for the Web UI (e.g. the theme settings and the PDL editor on Hubzilla), minus stuff that you'll never need if you only ever use the phone app and never the server UI (e.g. Webpages on Hubzilla), but otherwise fully featured. This would also demonstrate just how vastly more powerful Friendica and Hubzilla are than Mastodon.
The obvious downside is that such an app would be a feature monster. Bigger and more feature-laden than any Android e-mail app or OpenStreetMap editor.
There has been some talk about building an official Hubzilla phone app. Some Hubzilla users have proposed an app that only offers the very basics. However, their idea behind this is not to make the app easier for newbies to use, but to make it easier for the developers to build. They're often still stuck in the early 2010s when phone apps for websites were considered gimmicks. They think that people will only use the app when they're out and about, and when they're back home, they'll sit down behind their computers and use the Web interface. Thus, phone apps only need the most basic features implemented.
But 2026 is not 2011. The huge majority of Mastodon users only use Mastodon through a phone app. Even when they're at home. As I've said: If the app doesn't have a feature, the whole product doesn't have the feature, regardless of whether or not the feature is implemented in the server backend and even in the Web frontend.
Besides, even Friendica's basic features that you'll need all the time are a lot. Hubzilla's basic features that you'll need all the time are even more numerous.
Shall people be limited to posting in public when they're on a phone because the phone app doesn't have any permission settings
Shall people be limited to posting to their contacts when they're on a phone because someone decided that support for groups would make the phone app too complex
Shall people wait until they're home, and they've got some time to fire up a computer, open a Web browser and log onto the Web interface to accept connection requests because the phone app doesn't have any connection settings What if they don't have a computer
Let's face it, social networking itself is a complex thing. And I mean actual social networking. Not misusing glorified SMS as a social network. Real social networking. Facebook-level social networking. Google+-level social networking. MySpace-level social networking.
Thus, a social networking phone app with all features necessary for real social networking has to be complex. This isn't a Friendica/Hubzilla issue. Don't believe that the official Facebook apps are simple.
This is also why so many prefer over Facebook. Facebook is complex. Facebook isn't just register, follow, post. is much more simple. is glorified SMS. is literally just register, follow, tweet. Facebook is rocket science whereas is for dumb-dumbs.
And it's because Mastodon is so lacking that it's for dumb-dumbs by Fediverse standards. In fact, if you don't read those panicky "it's too complicated because you have to know what a server is" posts, if you just load the app and create an account, Mastodon, through the official app, is for dumb-dumbs by all standards.
However, those who actually are on Facebook are willing to put up with something more complex. They need something more complex than glorified SMS for dumb-dumbs. They need the extra features that Facebook has that doesn't, even if these are the very features that deny Facebook the "for dumb-dumbs" attribute.
Send them to Mastodon, and they'll be irritated and even repelled because this feature isn't there, and that feature isn't there, and that feature is cut down beyond recognition, and they can't find any interesting people (not because Mastodon is decentralised, and the interesting people are on other servers, but because Mastodon's directory sucks arse in comparison with Facebook's), and what's with that stupid character limit
On Friendica and Hubzilla, this feature and that feature have been there for longer than Mastodon itself, that feature is even more powerful than on Facebook proper, interesting people are being shoved into their faces once they've filled out their profile, even more so once they've got some connections, and there is no character limit worth speaking of.
But as long as Friendica and Hubzilla don't have official, fully daily-driveable phone apps named "Friendica" and "Hubzilla" respectively, they simply don't exist.
Granted, there's another obstacle. Many Mastodon users say the Fediverse needs a Facebook alternative. If you tell them about Friendica and its descendants, some will be very thankful because they've genuinely never heard of any of these.
Others will tell you that they know Friendica and maybe even Hubzilla. But they also say that none of these are Facebook alternatives. For when they say, "alternative," what they really mean is, "1:1 clone, just with a different name and decentralised and with ActivityPub and without spying and without the recent enshittification and without the evil CEO, otherwise absolutely identical."
One big aspect of this is that, as they say, the Fediverse needs an alternative to Facebook Groups. Friendica groups are exactly that because they were designed to be exactly that. Hubzilla forums, (streams) groups, Forte groups, all just that. But according to these people, they don't count because they aren't handled in precisely the same way as Facebook groups. Facebook groups aren't separate accounts. And different equals bad.
What really has me shake my head is that those who want a 1:1 Facebook clone continue to use Mastodon as a Facebook alternative. Even though Friendica and its family are vastly closer to Facebook regardless. Even though Mastodon not only doesn't have groups at all, but it doesn't even have any support for external groups. Is shouting into the void with a bunch of hashtags and hoping the right people will hear you really that much better than a Friendica group or a Hubzilla forum or maybe a PieFed community
By the way: Just how faithful a Twitter clone is Mastodon really, seeing as Misskey and the Forkeys have the odd Twitter feature that Mastodon still lacks, seeing as even Mastodon gradually becomes more complex than , much more so than when-it-still-was-good Twitter
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # In this regard, Mastodon has only got one major advantage: It has an official app.
Phone users used to see Twitter as a phone app that they loaded from their app store. Mastodon is the only *blogging thing in the Fediverse that they can load from their app store.
This is one reason why just about all Mastodon newbies use the official app and why they're on mastodon.social (it's the default in the official app, and since they don't know what this setting does, they leave it on default).
Mastodon even gets away with an official app that's far from good, much less fully features. All the newbies don't have anything to compare with. If Mastodon is a phone app to them, then the official app's feature set is Mastodon's feature set. If a feature isn't implemented in the official app, then Mastodon doesn't have it. I dare say that well over 80% of all Mastodon users have never in their lives used Mastodon's Web UI.
If someone takes the step and moves from the official Mastodon app to Ivory or Mona or IceCubes or Tusky or Fedilab or something like this, it's almost always the first time in their lives that they use an online service through an app that has a different name than the online service. Many people couldn't even imagine doing that.
This means that if Friendica and Hubzilla want to be more successful, growing beyond Mike's old "if you build it, they'll come" credo and advertising more isn't sufficient. People must be able to load Friendica/Hubzilla onto their phones from their app store. This requires an official app named "Friendica"/"Hubzilla" with a native, up-to-date iOS UI in the Apple App Store and one with a native, up-to-date Android UI in the Google Play Store. The existence of an official phone app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store is essential for being considered existent in the first place.
A commonplace attitude on Friendica and even more so on Hubzilla is that both can be installed as a PWA. But seriously, 99.9% of all phone users don't even know that PWAs exist. They don't know what that is. Not to mention that they expect and demand a native mobile UI in the style of their phone OS and not a generic Web UI.
Now, what would this app have to look like
If the advantages of Friendica and Hubzilla over Mastodon are to be emphasised and underlined, and if this app is to become people's one and only daily driver UI, it will have to be fully featured. Minus the settings for the Web UI (e.g. the theme settings and the PDL editor on Hubzilla), minus stuff that you'll never need if you only ever use the phone app and never the server UI (e.g. Webpages on Hubzilla), but otherwise fully featured. This would also demonstrate just how vastly more powerful Friendica and Hubzilla are than Mastodon.
The obvious downside is that such an app would be a feature monster. Bigger and more feature-laden than any Android e-mail app or OpenStreetMap editor.
There has been some talk about building an official Hubzilla phone app. Some Hubzilla users have proposed an app that only offers the very basics. However, their idea behind this is not to make the app easier for newbies to use, but to make it easier for the developers to build. They're often still stuck in the early 2010s when phone apps for websites were considered gimmicks. They think that people will only use the app when they're out and about, and when they're back home, they'll sit down behind their computers and use the Web interface. Thus, phone apps only need the most basic features implemented.
But 2026 is not 2011. The huge majority of Mastodon users only use Mastodon through a phone app. Even when they're at home. As I've said: If the app doesn't have a feature, the whole product doesn't have the feature, regardless of whether or not the feature is implemented in the server backend and even in the Web frontend.
Besides, even Friendica's basic features that you'll need all the time are a lot. Hubzilla's basic features that you'll need all the time are even more numerous.
Shall people be limited to posting in public when they're on a phone because the phone app doesn't have any permission settings
Shall people be limited to posting to their contacts when they're on a phone because someone decided that support for groups would make the phone app too complex
Shall people wait until they're home, and they've got some time to fire up a computer, open a Web browser and log onto the Web interface to accept connection requests because the phone app doesn't have any connection settings What if they don't have a computer
Let's face it, social networking itself is a complex thing. And I mean actual social networking. Not misusing glorified SMS as a social network. Real social networking. Facebook-level social networking. Google+-level social networking. MySpace-level social networking.
Thus, a social networking phone app with all features necessary for real social networking has to be complex. This isn't a Friendica/Hubzilla issue. Don't believe that the official Facebook apps are simple.
This is also why so many prefer over Facebook. Facebook is complex. Facebook isn't just register, follow, post. is much more simple. is glorified SMS. is literally just register, follow, tweet. Facebook is rocket science whereas is for dumb-dumbs.
And it's because Mastodon is so lacking that it's for dumb-dumbs by Fediverse standards. In fact, if you don't read those panicky "it's too complicated because you have to know what a server is" posts, if you just load the app and create an account, Mastodon, through the official app, is for dumb-dumbs by all standards.
However, those who actually are on Facebook are willing to put up with something more complex. They need something more complex than glorified SMS for dumb-dumbs. They need the extra features that Facebook has that doesn't, even if these are the very features that deny Facebook the "for dumb-dumbs" attribute.
Send them to Mastodon, and they'll be irritated and even repelled because this feature isn't there, and that feature isn't there, and that feature is cut down beyond recognition, and they can't find any interesting people (not because Mastodon is decentralised, and the interesting people are on other servers, but because Mastodon's directory sucks arse in comparison with Facebook's), and what's with that stupid character limit
On Friendica and Hubzilla, this feature and that feature have been there for longer than Mastodon itself, that feature is even more powerful than on Facebook proper, interesting people are being shoved into their faces once they've filled out their profile, even more so once they've got some connections, and there is no character limit worth speaking of.
But as long as Friendica and Hubzilla don't have official, fully daily-driveable phone apps named "Friendica" and "Hubzilla" respectively, they simply don't exist.
Granted, there's another obstacle. Many Mastodon users say the Fediverse needs a Facebook alternative. If you tell them about Friendica and its descendants, some will be very thankful because they've genuinely never heard of any of these.
Others will tell you that they know Friendica and maybe even Hubzilla. But they also say that none of these are Facebook alternatives. For when they say, "alternative," what they really mean is, "1:1 clone, just with a different name and decentralised and with ActivityPub and without spying and without the recent enshittification and without the evil CEO, otherwise absolutely identical."
One big aspect of this is that, as they say, the Fediverse needs an alternative to Facebook Groups. Friendica groups are exactly that because they were designed to be exactly that. Hubzilla forums, (streams) groups, Forte groups, all just that. But according to these people, they don't count because they aren't handled in precisely the same way as Facebook groups. Facebook groups aren't separate accounts. And different equals bad.
What really has me shake my head is that those who want a 1:1 Facebook clone continue to use Mastodon as a Facebook alternative. Even though Friendica and its family are vastly closer to Facebook regardless. Even though Mastodon not only doesn't have groups at all, but it doesn't even have any support for external groups. Is shouting into the void with a bunch of hashtags and hoping the right people will hear you really that much better than a Friendica group or a Hubzilla forum or maybe a PieFed community
By the way: Just how faithful a Twitter clone is Mastodon really, seeing as Misskey and the Forkeys have the odd Twitter feature that Mastodon still lacks, seeing as even Mastodon gradually becomes more complex than , much more so than when-it-still-was-good Twitter
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A travers le banc de sable (Ko Un)

A travers le banc de sablesans un motdans la mersans un motle bb tortue fait un long trajet(Ko Un)Illustration Kennst du Mbin
Mbin ist ein Fork von /kbin. /kbin war die sekundre Reddit-Alternative im Fediverse neben Lemmy.
Als der Ansturm von Reddit aufs Fediverse kam, sind viele auch zu /kbin gegangen, das da aber lngst noch nicht fertig fr den Produktiveinsatz war. /kbin hatte damals genau fnf Server, alle in Entwicklerhand, vier davon experimentell. Weil die ehemaligen Redditors bombenstabile Software erwarteten, /kbin aber in jeglicher Hinsicht noch nicht fertig war, stagnierte die Weiterentwicklung. Daher der Fork zu Mbin.
"Magazin" meint "Gruppe" oder im Hubzilla-Jargon "Forum". Lemmy und PieFed nennen es "Community", /kbin und Mbin nennen es "Magazin".
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # Das war schon vor 20, 25, 30 Jahren so.
Wer Forenbeitrge schreibt wie analoge Briefe, also konsequent immer mit Anrede, Gru und hndisch geschriebener Signatur (also, statt die Signaturfunktion, die im Forum eingebaut ist, genau dafr zu verwenden), galt schon in den 90ern als Digital Immigrant, mit der Netzkultur nicht vertraut und hoffnungslos von gestern. Das ginge eigentlich nur noch zu toppen, wenn man alle Zeilen per Hand umbricht, als schriebe man an einer mechanischen Schreibmaschine.
Im Grunde ist das auch unflexibel. Nicht jedes Mal will man fr jede Kleinigkeit einen vollstndigen Brief formulieren. Manchmal will man etwas nur kurz kommentieren. Da dann jedes Mal eine hfliche Anrede, eine hfliche Gruformel und per Hand eine Signatur dranzuflicken, wre absoluter Overkill.
# # # # # # I'm already trying my best. I'm probably way ahead of your requirements. And I'm still constantly trying to up my game and be ahead of everyone's requirements.
I've been "studying" alt-texts and image descriptions both generally and in the Fediverse/in Mastodon's culture for a few years. I've read over 50 alt-text guides on the Web here's a list I've compiled, complete with links: .
In case the page behind this link wasn't obvious enough: Yes, I'm working on a wiki about image descriptions and alt-texts in the Fediverse. I take this topic that seriously. As it stands now, I have a bit over 30 rules that had better or actually must be followed when describing images and writing alt-texts in and for the Fediverse.
When I post images, I try hard to follow all these rules. I take into consideration who may receive my image post, what they know about what's in the image, what they don't know, what they may want to know and how curious they may potentially be about the topic, and I write my image descriptions accordingly. I also take the special culture in the Fediverse and particularly on Mastodon into consideration, especially Mastodon's fondness of very detailed image descriptions as well as Mastodon's dislike of having to ask for further information at least I perceive the latter.
This is also why I rarely post images anymore. (Don't go looking for recent images on this channel that I'm commenting from right now. I've quit posting images here two years ago. I post them elsewhere in the Fediverse now and even that only rarely.) Posting and describing images properly is a huge undertaking if your image posts are all about super-obscure topics. And mine are.
The only images I've posted over the last two years are memes. They're fairly easy to handle. They only need one visual description, ideally a fairly short one even, and it goes into the alt-text. Still, they require explanations if folks won't understand them right off the bat. And they certainly won't understand my memes about the Fediverse or about very obscure 3-D virtual worlds.
In order to keep my meme posts a bit less extensive, I resort to linking to KnowYourMeme for explanations of meme templates. The alternative that many would prefer would be for me to explain the meme templates in the post, but that would add another five-digit number of characters to the post. Been there, actually done that: "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor" required over 12,000 characters of explanation.
I'd also post renderings from the 3-D virtual worlds that I sometimes meme about. But the effort to do so is a whole lot bigger. That's because I describe each one of my virtual world renderings twice. One is the "short" description that goes into the alt-text. The other one is the "long", actually fully detailed description that goes into the message text. The latter contains transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image, readable in the image or not. It also contains all explanations necessary to understand the image and its descriptions.
I haven't posted any virtual world renderings in two years now. I've been working on and off on a series of simple avatar portraits in slightly different outfits for over a year and a half now, and even the first image with three portraits isn't done yet, much less all four image for the first post or actually all images in the series.
My personal record of fairly uninterrupted image-describing is two full days, once for three images with some 73,000 characters of long descriptions, once for a single image with over 60,000 characters of long description. The latter does not include distilling the short description for the alt-text from the long description I had to do that the morning of the third day.
Why they have to be that long Here's my explanation: .
Unfortunately, I don't have any example of a 3-D virtual world rendering that's recent enough that the image descriptions aren't painfully outdated.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Line breaks and the quotation marks from your keyboard are both terrible ideas in alt-text. Both are not officially count as elements supported in alt-text, and especially line breaks in alt-text are an invention by complete laypeople on Mastodon.

Line breaks are a bad idea because screen readers will consider each paragraph in your alt-text an individual alt-text for an individual image. And screen readers tend to start reading out alt-texts for images with something like, "Graphic."
So if your alt-text has three paragraphs, a screen reader will start reading out each one with, "Graphic."
Reference #1: Steve Faulkner (), Short note on coding alt-text, TPGI, September 15th, 2015 .
Reference #2: Adrian Roselli, Long alt, adrianroselli.com, April 20th, 2024, last update November 8th, 2024

Double quotes from your keyboard are an even worse idea. That's because they can make certain Fediverse server applications malfunction. I'm not even joking here.
First of all, there's Hubzilla, the most feature-rich Fediverse server software of all and one of the most technologically advanced ( ). I'm commenting from Hubzilla right now.
When there are keyboard double quotes in an alt-text, Hubzilla renders them as their corresponding HTML entities: ". A screen reader will read them out as something like, "And quot," and raise its voice afterwards unless a full stop follows.
And then there are (streams) ( ) and Forte (), both descendants of Hubzilla, created and still maintained by Hubzilla's original creator.
These two use keyboard double quotes as alt-text delimiters internally. So when they encounter the first keyboard double quote in an alt-text, they will assume that this is where the alt-text ends. They will not render the parts of the alt-text starting with that first keyboard double quote. Instead, they will silently discard them.
Quotation marks are unnecessary in alt-text anyway. In stark contrast to what everyone on Mastodon believes, alt-text is mostly for screen reader applications. But if you absolutely need quotation marks in alt-text, either use single quotes or typographically correct quotes ( or or ).
One more thing: You've mentioned "supplemental info". I sincerely hope that you aren't talking about explanations for the image itself.
Explanations, credits, license information and any other information that is neither present in the message text nor visible to sighted users in the image does not belong into alt-text.
Explanations and other extra information must always go into the message text where everyone can access it who can access the message!
Why Because there are people who cannot access alt-texts. I'm still not joking.
I've explained this in my WIP wiki about image descriptions and alt-texts in the Fediverse:
Reference: kwbell.eu (), 'Alt' text for Mastodon images, April 9th, 2023, last edited June 1st, 2023
Another reference: these actual Mastodon posts which are comments on one of my posts from a few years ago, posted by a user whose hands don't work sufficiently enough to have the physical ability to open an alt-text.
RE:
RE:
RE:
RE:
RE:
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

NORMAL SWING VS. LONG DRIVE SWING

If you absolutely need a dedicated mobile app with a mobile UI, and you're on Android, then Friendica is without an alternative.
Otherwise I'd recommend Hubzilla (including if you're on an iPhone, for this means that you will have to use the Web interface either way). Yes, it's feature-rich. Yes, it may have a staggering learning curve. Yes, it isn't recommended to use your new channel at default settings, so you will have to put some work into it before you start.
But: You won't be on your own while trying out Hubzilla, even less than on Mastodon. Hubzilla has a small but active community, it has a support forum (), and it probably has the best user documentation of all Fediverse software, fairly recently re-written by .
Pepe also wrote .
Now, picking a good server is more difficult than on Mastodon, not only because there aren't exactly many. Of course, it's important that you can join it in the first place. Keep an eye on those that require admin approval, though.
Then there's the software version. If a Mastodon server is running an old version, this can mean that the admin disapproves of certain changes such as new features and tries hard to run the last major version (or even the last major version but one) for as long as it's still supported. If a Hubzilla server is running an old version, it's underadministered, full stop.
The current Hubzilla version is 11.2.1. It has been out for so long that even a server running 11.2 should give you to think. By the way, anything newer than this such as 11.5 is a bleeding-edge development version. Daily-driving zotum.net is somewhat like daily-driving mastodon.online: You get all the new features before everyone else, but you're also much more likely to have to deal with breakage, incompatibilities and so forth, including incompatible third-party apps and themes on Hubzilla.
Speaking of apps, they're important, too. Adding /siteinfo/json after the domain of a hub reveals things like the Hubzilla version, the admins along with links to their channels, but also which apps are activated. For example, might look tempting. But it was only launched last month, even the admin doesn't appear to be really active, a glance at reveals that it's almost bare-bone, and the small selection of activated apps is kind of weird. It has Articles, it has the LiveJournal crossposter, but it lacks both NSFW and Superblock. Compare this with and which even has 's great third-party themes installed.
In general, interaction with Lemmy appears to work reasonably well, only that you have to go to the source to get the link in a start post. I may have to check how easy it is to start a new thread on Lemmy from Hubzilla.
Connecting with PeerTube works, too, only that Hubzilla understands PeerTube channels as groups for some reason.
Pixelfed hasn't caused me any trouble yet either, but then, I don't interact with it, I only receive image posts from it.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # If you absolutely need a dedicated mobile app with a mobile UI, and you're on Android, then Friendica is without an alternative.
Otherwise I'd recommend Hubzilla (including if you're on an iPhone, for this means that you will have to use the Web interface either way). Yes, it's feature-rich. Yes, it may have a staggering learning curve. Yes, it isn't recommended to use your new channel at default settings, so you will have to put some work into it before you start.
But: You won't be on your own while trying out Hubzilla, even less than on Mastodon. Hubzilla has a small but active community, it has a support forum (), and it probably has the best user documentation of all Fediverse software, fairly recently re-written by .
Pepe also wrote .
Now, picking a good server is more difficult than on Mastodon, not only because there aren't exactly many. Of course, it's important that you can join it in the first place. Keep an eye on those that require admin approval, though.
Then there's the software version. If a Mastodon server is running an old version, this can mean that the admin disapproves of certain changes such as new features and tries hard to run the last major version (or even the last major version but one) for as long as it's still supported. If a Hubzilla server is running an old version, it's underadministered, full stop.
The current Hubzilla version is 11.2.1. It has been out for so long that even a server running 11.2 should give you to think. By the way, anything newer than this such as 11.5 is a bleeding-edge development version. Daily-driving zotum.net is somewhat like daily-driving mastodon.online: You get all the new features before everyone else, but you're also much more likely to have to deal with breakage, incompatibilities and so forth, including incompatible third-party apps and themes on Hubzilla.
Speaking of apps, they're important, too. Adding /siteinfo/json after the domain of a hub reveals things like the Hubzilla version, the admins along with links to their channels, but also which apps are activated. For example, might look tempting. But it was only launched last month, even the admin doesn't appear to be really active, a glance at reveals that it's almost bare-bone, and the small selection of activated apps is kind of weird. It has Articles, it has the LiveJournal crossposter, but it lacks both NSFW and Superblock. Compare this with and which even has 's great third-party themes installed.
In general, interaction with Lemmy appears to work reasonably well, only that you have to go to the source to get the link in a start post. I may have to check how easy it is to start a new thread on Lemmy from Hubzilla.
Connecting with PeerTube works, too, only that Hubzilla understands PeerTube channels as groups for some reason.
Pixelfed hasn't caused me any trouble yet either, but then, I don't interact with it, I only receive image posts from it.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # Let me be honest: Mastodon isn't the right thing to rely on for this.
There are two common misconceptions on Mastodon about Mastodon. The first one is that Mastodon is the only free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything. Once Mastodon users are over this, they still think Mastodon is the best free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything.
I've seen Mastodon being advertised by users as a Fediverse alternative to literally everything, including Reddit (because, like, you can communicate, right) and even YouTube (because, like, you can upload videos, right).
But again, let me be honest: The only thing that Mastodon can hope to be an alternative to is . Because it's a Twitter clone. A purist Twitter clone whose developers intentionally reject feature requests because the requested features don't fit into their image of purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging. They want to keep Mastodon a slightly more glorified SMS than .
Mastodon isn't even the only microblogging server application in the Fediverse. It isn't even the best at that. 80-90% of Mastodon's users don't and probably will never realise that Mastodon is an intentionally crippled resource hog. Many believe that Mastodon is the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking.
By the way, even the Mastodon developers claim that Mastodon is fully featured. I've had a Mastodon dev try hard to convince me that Mastodon is fully featured although I've told him that I'm on Hubzilla. He essentially tried to tell me that Mastodon has every last feature that Hubzilla has plus even more on top.
In reality, Mastodon isn't the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking. It isn't even a social network. It's social media, just like is social media. It's designed for pumping out content and being followed because it's designed as a Twitter-like microblogging application. And it isn't even the best at microblogging.
Almost everyone on Mastodon is fully convinced that Mastodon has to be the best. After all, it's the biggest. It's what everyone chose.
No.
Mastodon is the biggest because everyone who wants to leave or Threads or Bluesky is railroaded to Mastodon. It's the biggest because all the newbies are only told about Mastodon. It's the biggest because none of the newbies even learn upon on-boarding that other alternatives exist in the Fediverse, that anything else exists in the Fediverse other than Mastodon. It's the biggest because mainstream media, tech media and even Fediverse activists only ever talk about Mastodon, Mastodon, Mastodon. (Granted, it's also the biggest because it's the only one with an official phone app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Even though that app sucks.)
All these Mastodon users who claim that Mastodon is the best choice don't realise that they themselves did, in fact, not choose Mastodon. They didn't know they had a choice. All they were told about was Mastodon. Seriously, if they'd had a choice, they'd probably be on Sharkey now and not on Mastodon.
I've read what people had to say who moved from Friendica to Misskey. Or to now defunct Calckey/Firefish. Or to Sharkey. Or to Akkoma. All these are microblogging server applications in the Fediverse. But none of them are intentionally crippled to stay close to Twitter, at least not to such a degree as Mastodon.
It was nothing short of eye-opening to them. Only by daily-driving something else than Mastodon did they realise what the non-Mastodon Fediverse can be like. And how crippled Mastodon actually is. That Mastodon is far from being the absolute pinnacle in decentralised social media.
They no longer had only 500 characters. They had thousands of characters. They would have had thousands of characters on every server running that software without having to ask around which one has more than 500 characters. It felt like a restraint being removed which they had never considered a restraint, at least not that much of it.
They saw text formatting which they considered technologically absolutely impossible in the Fediverse when they were on Mastodon. In fact, they had considered text formatting entirely impossible while on Mastodon until they had come across the first message from outside with text formatting. Actual text formatting, not Unicode trickery. Now they suddenly saw a lot of the stuff that Mastodon's HTML sanitiser removes. And they themselves could use it!
If they were on one of the *keys, they no longer had a timeline of single-message piecemeal. For the first time ever, they experienced what it's like to have something else than single-message piecemeal. Namely entire conversations right in front of them, right away. Without having to dig for them first.
They had features which they had always wished the Fediverse may introduce. They never knew that the Fediverse does have these features, only Mastodon doesn't. They had features that were completely unimagiable to them in the Fediverse.
There are users who have moved from Mastodon to something "minimalist" and lightweight like snac or GoToSocial, often on self-hosted, single-user, private servers. Even they suddenly had features they didn't have on Mastodon. Mind you, while not missing a single Mastodon feature (except maybe for a built-in Web UI).
And that's just the microblogging side of the Fediverse. None of this is actual social networking. You know, what Facebook does.
First of all, if it's about following and being followed, it's social media. A social network doesn't have followers. In case you don't know, Facebook doesn't have followers. It has "friends". Bidirectional connections. Not /Mastodon-like mutuals which are two connections, one in each direction, but one connection that goes both ways.
Besides, there are even more important social networking features missing from the microblogging side of the Fediverse.
Where are the contact suggestions Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on how many contacts you have in common with them Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on what profile information you have in common with them
Oh, right, the latter is impossible because Mastodon doesn't have profile fields with defined purposes. In fact, where are these Every good social network has them! But Mastodon only gives you four all-purpose profile fields (just like Mastodon only gives you four of everything, four file attachments, four options in polls...).
Where is the list of unread posts, unread comments and other unnoticed actions How are you to make sure you really catch everything your friends do Because you can't do that if all you have is a timeline to scroll through until you no longer see new stuff. If you manage to scroll down that far. And only absolute newbies can do that on Mastodon because they hardly follow anyone.
Where are groups Seriously, I've lost count of how many times Mastodon users said "the Fediverse" must introduce something like Facebook Groups. The huge majority of Mastodon users is fully convinced that the Fediverse does not have groups in any shape or form because Mastodon doesn't have them.
Where are all these things In the Fediverse, no less Where are they
I'll tell you where they are.
Friendica. Hubzilla. (streams). Forte.
The actual social networking side of the Fediverse (although Hubzilla is more like a social CMS or a "social Swiss army knife" that you can also use as a Facebook-like social networking application). I mean, I've already explained that Friendica was created in 2010 as a Facebook alternative. Not a faithful Facebook clone, though, but better than Facebook.
Mike Macgirvin took over from Facebook what social networks really need. And Farmville isn't that, and spying on your users and passing that data on to the NSA and selling it to the highest bidder isn't that, so he didn't take over that. He didn't want to build a clone that also adopts the bad sides just to be as close to the original as possible.
He took over the detailed profiles with profile fields with dedicated purposes. He took over profile privacy settings. In general, he took over a lot of privacy features. He took over advanced user discovery and connection suggestions. He took over bidirectional connections, only without that silly name "friends". He took over groups with moderation, only that a group on Friendica is just another account with a special automated reposter. He took over enclosed threaded conversations with one post at the top and otherwise only comments. He took over a "timeline" of full conversations as the default. He took over the event calendar. And so forth.
Instead, he added useful stuff on top. He gave Friendica all the posting features to make it fully capable of long-form blogging with all bells and whistles. No character limit (except for in the database, but I think that was over 65,000 back in the day already). All HTML text formatting features (only that Friendica only used BBcode back then now it can optionally also use Markdown). A post/thread title. Summaries. Embedded images and other media with no limit in number. He even added a spoiler tag like in forums that can hide parts of a message.
He took care of privacy beyond what Facebook had to offer. He introduced a permissions system. Friendica got multiple profile per account, only one of which is public, so that you can show different sides of yourself to different connections.
Now, if you want to embed images or other media in your messages, you have to store them somewhere. And not everyone could be expected to set up a little file space somewhere. So he built a file space into Friendica, one that can even be used as a Dropbox alternative, all the way to restricted access to certain directories.
Mike also added a content warning system that automatically generates content warnings on the reader's side, based on a keyword list. If you need something behind content warnings, add the keywords to the list, and you'll have the respective content warnings, but the next user receiving the self-same post or comment does not have these content warnings if they don't need them.
One important part of what makes Friendica Friendica is being able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. For example, Friendica could federate with StatusNet via the OStatus protocol from the get-go this is also how it immediately federated with Mastodon when the latter was launched. Mastodon generates an RSS feed, something that many users don't know. Friendica not only generates an Atom feed, but it can subscribe to feeds. Friendica can "federate" with e-mail. Over time, more and more connection features were added, including Tumblr, Twitter (!), Facebook (only for a few years before Facebook crippled it) and a WordPress cross-poster.
Lastly, he made it possible for third parties to add extra features by implementing an add-on system.
I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best Facebook alternative possible to use Friendica for a year. Not only dip one toe in to the water, but use it as their one and only daily driver for everything they've used Mastodon for. Not scratching the surface and using it like Twitter while ignoring any and all features the Twitter they remember didn't have, but going all in. In fact, I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is perfect and fully-featured to do the same.
And then there's Hubzilla. It came to exist by Mike forking Friendica in 2011, then forking that fork the same year, then rewriting that fork of a fork in 2012, then repurposing, rebranding, repositioning and greatly expanding it in 2015. Long story.
Hubzilla adds even more stuff on top. Most importantly, it introduced nomadic identity () in 2012.
Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, became the first decentralised social software that uncoupled the identity from the login. This was necessary for nomadic identity, but it also introduced the option to have multiple independent identities, basically what's an account elsewhere, on the same account, the same login. This makes sense, given the many different roles and purposes a Hubzilla channel can have. The big advantage over having multiple separate accounts is that you can switch between the channels on your account without logging out and back in.
Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, got an even more advanced and fine-grained permissions system. Hubzilla has 17 individual permissions on three levels, channel level, contact level, content level. At channel level, each one has seven or eight permission options to choose from, depending on whether or not it makes sense to give a permission to everyone on the Internet.
Mike added optional features to Hubzilla that were previously unseen on social anything, features that you'd rather expect from a CMS and maybe not even from that. Non-federating long-form articles. Planning cards that are based on these articles. Wikis that can be formatted with BBcode or Markdown. Webpages that can be formatted with BBcode, Markdown or HTML, that can include dynamic content from elsewhere on the channel, and that can add extra content to the channel pages.
Hubzilla can even act as groupware. It has a CalDAV calendar server the event calendar can double as a crude UI for the CalDAV calendars. It has an optional CardDAV addressbook server. Its built-in file storage can be accessed via WebDAV, so you theoretically even have some cloud file space you can mount as a network drive. Rather recently, there was even a way found to tie Collabora Office into Hubzilla.
If you should ever read about Bonfire: Bonfire is Hubzilla ordered from Wish.com. Whatever Bonfire promises to have or to introduce has been available as a rock-solid stable feature on Hubzilla for over a decade. Bonfire only gets away with what it's trying to do because nobody knows Hubzilla.
I think it's safe to say that those who "chose" Mastodon didn't choose it over the rest of the Fediverse because it's better. They "chose" it because they didn't even know they have a choice.
As for your post, the technology for redeveloping socialising is there. And it certainly isn't Mastodon, and it never will be Mastodon. Mastodon can't be that due to its design philosophy, due to it being a Twitter clone, due to its own developers intentionally crippling it.
If you want to move on from 1-way interaction, you have to move on from 1-way connections. Move on from Twitter followers to Facebook friends.
You have to offer better options for the users than shouting into the void, attaching a bunch of hashtags and hoping that some of their followers or someone who is following one of the hashtags happens to be bothered to scroll down their timeline far enough.
You have to make sure that people don't miss content due to basic design and philosophy decisions. You have to make sure that people don't miss content because they simply never know that this content is there in the first place, because they can't scroll down far enough their timelines until they reach that content. You need something else than a timeline of single messages to scroll down with the user not having an idea just how far down that timeline goes. You have to tell the user how much unread content there is, what it is, where it is, and take the user directly to that unread content.
You have to stop presenting content to users as a long list of single posts and more single posts with only tiny details telling them that these posts are, in fact, part of a longer conversation which they don't see. Where they have to click or tap themselves through various UI pages to see that post in its context. Users must see the whole conversation Right. Off. The bat.
You need groups. Not kluged onto something that had no group support whatsoever two seconds earlier, not intentionally crippled, not crippled by the technology they're built upon, not intentionally re-invented to be incompatible with whatever already exists (and this is how Mastodon would do them). But fully functional, on an appropriate base, interoperable, user-moderated, optionally private, optionally hiding from directories.
If you want to go "social", you really have to go social. You have to go Facebook, not Twitter.
Users must find other users based on common interests. Or users living close to them. Or users with lots of contacts in common with them. Not by being on the same local/regional server of the same server about a certain topic. Not by searching for hashtags in the main profile text. But by examining specialised profile fields and the contacts.
Users must have such users suggested to them as new connections. Users must have such users at the top of their directory. This is how Facebook does it. And this is one thing that Facebook has always done right.
Again, Mastodon will never offer any of this. But that doesn't mean that you'll have to compromise and lower your expectations. Because you don't have to. There are server applications in the Fediverse, fully federated with Mastodon, that offer literally all of that. They exist right now. And some of them have existed for longer than Mastodon.
If you need something better than today's Mastodon, stop wishing for a better Mastodon. Instead, use something that's better and more appropriate for the job than Mastodon right now. For it exists right now.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Let me be honest: Mastodon isn't the right thing to rely on for this.
There are two common misconceptions on Mastodon about Mastodon. The first one is that Mastodon is the only free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything. Once Mastodon users are over this, they still think Mastodon is the best free, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised social anything.
I've seen Mastodon being advertised by users as a Fediverse alternative to literally everything, including Reddit (because, like, you can communicate, right) and even YouTube (because, like, you can upload videos, right).
But again, let me be honest: The only thing that Mastodon can hope to be an alternative to is . Because it's a Twitter clone. A purist Twitter clone whose developers intentionally reject feature requests because the requested features don't fit into their image of purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging. They want to keep Mastodon a slightly more glorified SMS than .
Mastodon isn't even the only microblogging server application in the Fediverse. It isn't even the best at that. 80-90% of Mastodon's users don't and probably will never realise that Mastodon is an intentionally crippled resource hog. Many believe that Mastodon is the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking.
By the way, even the Mastodon developers claim that Mastodon is fully featured. I've had a Mastodon dev try hard to convince me that Mastodon is fully featured although I've told him that I'm on Hubzilla. He essentially tried to tell me that Mastodon has every last feature that Hubzilla has plus even more on top.
In reality, Mastodon isn't the fully-featured be-all, end-all of social networking. It isn't even a social network. It's social media, just like is social media. It's designed for pumping out content and being followed because it's designed as a Twitter-like microblogging application. And it isn't even the best at microblogging.
Almost everyone on Mastodon is fully convinced that Mastodon has to be the best. After all, it's the biggest. It's what everyone chose.
No.
Mastodon is the biggest because everyone who wants to leave or Threads or Bluesky is railroaded to Mastodon. It's the biggest because all the newbies are only told about Mastodon. It's the biggest because none of the newbies even learn upon on-boarding that other alternatives exist in the Fediverse, that anything else exists in the Fediverse other than Mastodon. It's the biggest because mainstream media, tech media and even Fediverse activists only ever talk about Mastodon, Mastodon, Mastodon. (Granted, it's also the biggest because it's the only one with an official phone app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Even though that app sucks.)
All these Mastodon users who claim that Mastodon is the best choice don't realise that they themselves did, in fact, not choose Mastodon. They didn't know they had a choice. All they were told about was Mastodon. Seriously, if they'd had a choice, they'd probably be on Sharkey now and not on Mastodon.
I've read what people had to say who moved from Friendica to Misskey. Or to now defunct Calckey/Firefish. Or to Sharkey. Or to Akkoma. All these are microblogging server applications in the Fediverse. But none of them are intentionally crippled to stay close to Twitter, at least not to such a degree as Mastodon.
It was nothing short of eye-opening to them. Only by daily-driving something else than Mastodon did they realise what the non-Mastodon Fediverse can be like. And how crippled Mastodon actually is. That Mastodon is far from being the absolute pinnacle in decentralised social media.
They no longer had only 500 characters. They had thousands of characters. They would have had thousands of characters on every server running that software without having to ask around which one has more than 500 characters. It felt like a restraint being removed which they had never considered a restraint, at least not that much of it.
They saw text formatting which they considered technologically absolutely impossible in the Fediverse when they were on Mastodon. In fact, they had considered text formatting entirely impossible while on Mastodon until they had come across the first message from outside with text formatting. Actual text formatting, not Unicode trickery. Now they suddenly saw a lot of the stuff that Mastodon's HTML sanitiser removes. And they themselves could use it!
If they were on one of the *keys, they no longer had a timeline of single-message piecemeal. For the first time ever, they experienced what it's like to have something else than single-message piecemeal. Namely entire conversations right in front of them, right away. Without having to dig for them first.
They had features which they had always wished the Fediverse may introduce. They never knew that the Fediverse does have these features, only Mastodon doesn't. They had features that were completely unimagiable to them in the Fediverse.
There are users who have moved from Mastodon to something "minimalist" and lightweight like snac or GoToSocial, often on self-hosted, single-user, private servers. Even they suddenly had features they didn't have on Mastodon. Mind you, while not missing a single Mastodon feature (except maybe for a built-in Web UI).
And that's just the microblogging side of the Fediverse. None of this is actual social networking. You know, what Facebook does.
First of all, if it's about following and being followed, it's social media. A social network doesn't have followers. In case you don't know, Facebook doesn't have followers. It has "friends". Bidirectional connections. Not /Mastodon-like mutuals which are two connections, one in each direction, but one connection that goes both ways.
Besides, there are even more important social networking features missing from the microblogging side of the Fediverse.
Where are the contact suggestions Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on how many contacts you have in common with them Where does Mastodon suggest new contacts based on what profile information you have in common with them
Oh, right, the latter is impossible because Mastodon doesn't have profile fields with defined purposes. In fact, where are these Every good social network has them! But Mastodon only gives you four all-purpose profile fields (just like Mastodon only gives you four of everything, four file attachments, four options in polls...).
Where is the list of unread posts, unread comments and other unnoticed actions How are you to make sure you really catch everything your friends do Because you can't do that if all you have is a timeline to scroll through until you no longer see new stuff. If you manage to scroll down that far. And only absolute newbies can do that on Mastodon because they hardly follow anyone.
Where are groups Seriously, I've lost count of how many times Mastodon users said "the Fediverse" must introduce something like Facebook Groups. The huge majority of Mastodon users is fully convinced that the Fediverse does not have groups in any shape or form because Mastodon doesn't have them.
Where are all these things In the Fediverse, no less Where are they
I'll tell you where they are.
Friendica. Hubzilla. (streams). Forte.
The actual social networking side of the Fediverse (although Hubzilla is more like a social CMS or a "social Swiss army knife" that you can also use as a Facebook-like social networking application). I mean, I've already explained that Friendica was created in 2010 as a Facebook alternative. Not a faithful Facebook clone, though, but better than Facebook.
Mike Macgirvin took over from Facebook what social networks really need. And Farmville isn't that, and spying on your users and passing that data on to the NSA and selling it to the highest bidder isn't that, so he didn't take over that. He didn't want to build a clone that also adopts the bad sides just to be as close to the original as possible.
He took over the detailed profiles with profile fields with dedicated purposes. He took over profile privacy settings. In general, he took over a lot of privacy features. He took over advanced user discovery and connection suggestions. He took over bidirectional connections, only without that silly name "friends". He took over groups with moderation, only that a group on Friendica is just another account with a special automated reposter. He took over enclosed threaded conversations with one post at the top and otherwise only comments. He took over a "timeline" of full conversations as the default. He took over the event calendar. And so forth.
Instead, he added useful stuff on top. He gave Friendica all the posting features to make it fully capable of long-form blogging with all bells and whistles. No character limit (except for in the database, but I think that was over 65,000 back in the day already). All HTML text formatting features (only that Friendica only used BBcode back then now it can optionally also use Markdown). A post/thread title. Summaries. Embedded images and other media with no limit in number. He even added a spoiler tag like in forums that can hide parts of a message.
He took care of privacy beyond what Facebook had to offer. He introduced a permissions system. Friendica got multiple profile per account, only one of which is public, so that you can show different sides of yourself to different connections.
Now, if you want to embed images or other media in your messages, you have to store them somewhere. And not everyone could be expected to set up a little file space somewhere. So he built a file space into Friendica, one that can even be used as a Dropbox alternative, all the way to restricted access to certain directories.
Mike also added a content warning system that automatically generates content warnings on the reader's side, based on a keyword list. If you need something behind content warnings, add the keywords to the list, and you'll have the respective content warnings, but the next user receiving the self-same post or comment does not have these content warnings if they don't need them.
One important part of what makes Friendica Friendica is being able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. For example, Friendica could federate with StatusNet via the OStatus protocol from the get-go this is also how it immediately federated with Mastodon when the latter was launched. Mastodon generates an RSS feed, something that many users don't know. Friendica not only generates an Atom feed, but it can subscribe to feeds. Friendica can "federate" with e-mail. Over time, more and more connection features were added, including Tumblr, Twitter (!), Facebook (only for a few years before Facebook crippled it) and a WordPress cross-poster.
Lastly, he made it possible for third parties to add extra features by implementing an add-on system.
I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best Facebook alternative possible to use Friendica for a year. Not only dip one toe in to the water, but use it as their one and only daily driver for everything they've used Mastodon for. Not scratching the surface and using it like Twitter while ignoring any and all features the Twitter they remember didn't have, but going all in. In fact, I dare those who are fully convinced that Mastodon is perfect and fully-featured to do the same.
And then there's Hubzilla. It came to exist by Mike forking Friendica in 2011, then forking that fork the same year, then rewriting that fork of a fork in 2012, then repurposing, rebranding, repositioning and greatly expanding it in 2015. Long story.
Hubzilla adds even more stuff on top. Most importantly, it introduced nomadic identity () in 2012.
Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, became the first decentralised social software that uncoupled the identity from the login. This was necessary for nomadic identity, but it also introduced the option to have multiple independent identities, basically what's an account elsewhere, on the same account, the same login. This makes sense, given the many different roles and purposes a Hubzilla channel can have. The big advantage over having multiple separate accounts is that you can switch between the channels on your account without logging out and back in.
Hubzilla, or its 2012 prototype form named Red, got an even more advanced and fine-grained permissions system. Hubzilla has 17 individual permissions on three levels, channel level, contact level, content level. At channel level, each one has seven or eight permission options to choose from, depending on whether or not it makes sense to give a permission to everyone on the Internet.
Mike added optional features to Hubzilla that were previously unseen on social anything, features that you'd rather expect from a CMS and maybe not even from that. Non-federating long-form articles. Planning cards that are based on these articles. Wikis that can be formatted with BBcode or Markdown. Webpages that can be formatted with BBcode, Markdown or HTML, that can include dynamic content from elsewhere on the channel, and that can add extra content to the channel pages.
Hubzilla can even act as groupware. It has a CalDAV calendar server the event calendar can double as a crude UI for the CalDAV calendars. It has an optional CardDAV addressbook server. Its built-in file storage can be accessed via WebDAV, so you theoretically even have some cloud file space you can mount as a network drive. Rather recently, there was even a way found to tie Collabora Office into Hubzilla.
If you should ever read about Bonfire: Bonfire is Hubzilla ordered from Wish.com. Whatever Bonfire promises to have or to introduce has been available as a rock-solid stable feature on Hubzilla for over a decade. Bonfire only gets away with what it's trying to do because nobody knows Hubzilla.
I think it's safe to say that those who "chose" Mastodon didn't choose it over the rest of the Fediverse because it's better. They "chose" it because they didn't even know they have a choice.
As for your post, the technology for redeveloping socialising is there. And it certainly isn't Mastodon, and it never will be Mastodon. Mastodon can't be that due to its design philosophy, due to it being a Twitter clone, due to its own developers intentionally crippling it.
If you want to move on from 1-way interaction, you have to move on from 1-way connections. Move on from Twitter followers to Facebook friends.
You have to offer better options for the users than shouting into the void, attaching a bunch of hashtags and hoping that some of their followers or someone who is following one of the hashtags happens to be bothered to scroll down their timeline far enough.
You have to make sure that people don't miss content due to basic design and philosophy decisions. You have to make sure that people don't miss content because they simply never know that this content is there in the first place, because they can't scroll down far enough their timelines until they reach that content. You need something else than a timeline of single messages to scroll down with the user not having an idea just how far down that timeline goes. You have to tell the user how much unread content there is, what it is, where it is, and take the user directly to that unread content.
You have to stop presenting content to users as a long list of single posts and more single posts with only tiny details telling them that these posts are, in fact, part of a longer conversation which they don't see. Where they have to click or tap themselves through various UI pages to see that post in its context. Users must see the whole conversation Right. Off. The bat.
You need groups. Not kluged onto something that had no group support whatsoever two seconds earlier, not intentionally crippled, not crippled by the technology they're built upon, not intentionally re-invented to be incompatible with whatever already exists (and this is how Mastodon would do them). But fully functional, on an appropriate base, interoperable, user-moderated, optionally private, optionally hiding from directories.
If you want to go "social", you really have to go social. You have to go Facebook, not Twitter.
Users must find other users based on common interests. Or users living close to them. Or users with lots of contacts in common with them. Not by being on the same local/regional server of the same server about a certain topic. Not by searching for hashtags in the main profile text. But by examining specialised profile fields and the contacts.
Users must have such users suggested to them as new connections. Users must have such users at the top of their directory. This is how Facebook does it. And this is one thing that Facebook has always done right.
Again, Mastodon will never offer any of this. But that doesn't mean that you'll have to compromise and lower your expectations. Because you don't have to. There are server applications in the Fediverse, fully federated with Mastodon, that offer literally all of that. They exist right now. And some of them have existed for longer than Mastodon.
If you need something better than today's Mastodon, stop wishing for a better Mastodon. Instead, use something that's better and more appropriate for the job than Mastodon right now. For it exists right now.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

Gnomhaocht a bhaineann le longa ag Port Santos, So Paulo.
Atividade Embarcada no Porto de Santos, So Paulo

Struck by Lightning Mid-Flight, a Chinese Rocket Still Delivered Its Satellite to Orbit

I've just come across a toot from a Mastodon user who demanded that everyone who posts, quote, "on Mastodon," end quote, limit their posts to 500 characters.
This was far from being the first time I've read this very demand or similar demands. It just was the most recent time.
Where this comes from Well, it has two sides.

The Mastodon side

One side are Mastodon users. Not all of them, but most of them. Literally all of them were on-boarded onto Mastodon with the notion that Mastodon is its own enclosed network with nothing else in it. Those who pull them on board either think it's easier for them to understand if they aren't told about the non-Mastodon Fediverse, or they don't know about the non-Mastodon Fediverse themselves.
Some of these newbies think Mastodon is the network because they've never heard of the Fediverse. Others think the Fediverse is Mastodon and nothing else.
My estimation, and not only mine, is that more than 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse consists of nothing else than Mastodon. A great deal of the rest thinks the Fediverse doesn't extend beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube. Not much anyway.
It doesn't help that Mastodon, unlike other Fediverse server applications such as Misskey, the Forkeys, Friendica, (streams) or Forte, does not tell its users which server app a message came from. It doesn't help either that Mastodon "sanitises" away quite a few things that'd make non-Mastodon messages a dead giveaway. So the huge majority of Mastodon users believe that if they see it on Mastodon, it came from Mastodon.
So these people are dropped into a network which they think is nothing but a purist, minimalist microblogging service with no more than 500 characters, and whose only differences from Twitter are the name, that it isn't just one website, that it isn't owned by Elon Musk, and that it isn't overrun by fascists.
They get used to it. They get used to only having a maximum of 500 characters. They get used to the CW field being the CW field. They get used to Mastodon's entire culture which they see as the be-all, end-all of online culture.
And then they come across a message with a whole lot over 500 characters for the first time. Something which, to their best knowledge, shouldn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse. Something which mustn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse.
Some don't have any idea how it could be possible to "toot" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon", and they ask how one can do that. Others believe that all these "long toots" come from hacked Mastodon servers. Either way, they often demand that these Mastodon users adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and act like all good Mastodon users shall act. Including not "tooting" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon".
Both are being told that these "toots" aren't "toots" because they don't come from Mastodon. That the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon. That there's other server software in the Fediverse that has always been able to post way more than 500 characters.
That changes nothing for them. They still demand everyone in the Fediverse adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and only to these, and that everyone in the Fediverse use whatever they use exactly like vanilla, unmodified Mastodon.
And they feel absolutely justified. According to their gospel, Gargron invented the Fediverse when he created Mastodon. And everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon (once they discover that there is such stuff) has either been designed as an add-on glued onto Mastodon (Pixelfed, PeerTube), or it's an evil, savage intruder (everything that's capable of largely doing the same thing as Mastodon without being Mastodon).
The Fediverse is to Mastodon users what the ancient world was to the Romans. Mastodon is the Roman Empire. Literally the only place that has got something like culture. A few places have voluntarily joined the Roman Mastodon Empire. All the rest consists of primitive, savage, culture-less barbarians whose lands need to be conquered by force to bring them culture.

The non-Mastodon side

The other side are the non-Mastodon users. This sounds harsh, but while Mastodon users act by faith and belief, non-Mastodon users act by knowledge. It's them who know what the Fediverse really is. That there has never been a point in history at which the Fediverse has only been Mastodon. And that culture does exist outside of Mastodon. Only that these cultures are different from Mastodon's culture, largely because they're geared towards the technical capabilities of the underlying software.
To non-Mastodon users, the Fediverse feels like the New World when the European conquerors and settlers arrived. They demanded the natives adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianty or face death. The natives actually already had cultures. Cultures that suited them and their surroundings much more than the culture lived in European cities. But the Europeans didn't acknowledge the natives' cultures as such, nor did they care.
From non-Mastodon users' point of view, Mastodon users act to them like the Europeans acted to the natives in their colonies-to-be.
A very good example, also because it's such an extreme example, has to be Friendica. In case you don't know, Friendica ( ) is a free, open-source, decentralised, federated Facebook alternative that first came out as early as May, 2010. Friendica developed a wholly different culture from Mastodon's because it's vastly different from Mastodon.
Mastodon's culture was mostly coined in mid-2022 by those who escaped from Elon Musk's announcement to buy out Twitter in February/March, 2022.
Friendica's culture was coined by its early users in 2010 already.
Mastodon users are mostly used to living in a Mastodon-only network with no connection to anything that isn't Mastodon. They believe that Mastodon and the Fediverse were designed as such, and that Friendica is an illegitimate intruder.
Friendica users are used to being able to connect to everything that moves, including Mastodon, including the whole Fediverse, no matter which iteration of the Fediverse, including diaspora*, and the some. That's because Friendica was designed from the ground up to be able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. It's part of its concept.
Mastodon users believe that Mastodon was there before anything.
Friendica users know that Friendica was there long before Mastodon, even before diaspora*, and that Friendica still wasn't the first.
Mastodon users are used to only having 500 characters. They still consider that a lot in comparison with Twitter's 280 characters.
Friendica users are used to not having any character limit whatsoever. Friendica's actual technical character limit is imposed by the maximum size of the message text database field, and that's over 16.7 million characters.
Mastodon users are used to chopping long posts into threads. It's what they expect. Actual long posts irritate them.
Friendica users are used to posting long post in one piece. It's what they expect. One and the same post being chopped up into itty-bitty bits irritate them.
Mastodon users are used to putting CWs in a dedicated CW field.
Friendica users are used to the self-same text field actually being a summary field (Friendica calls it "abstract"). While Mastodon got that field in 2017 as a pull request from a user, Friendica had it from the get-go, i.e. since 2010. And Friendica actually adopted it from Evan Prodromou's decentralised Twitter alternative StatusNet from 2008 with which Friendica was able to federate with from the get-go as well.
Mastodon users "know" that Gargron invented the CW field.
Friendica users actually do know for a fact that they've had the same field as a summary field since long before Mastodon was even made. There are still enough Friendica veterans around from before 2016.
This also means that Mastodon users are used to poster-side CWs which all readers get just the same.
Friendica users are used to CWs being automatically generated on the reader's side, individually for each reader, by an optional text filter.
In fact, Mastodon can do the same. But nobody knows, it came way too late to become part of Mastodon's culture (Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022), it's too tedious to use, it probably isn't supported by that many phone apps, and next to nobody uses Mastodon's Web interface. In the meantime, Friendica has had this feature for some twelve years longer, and it's only an on-off switch and one editable keyword list.
Mastodon users are used to only having up to four images and to images always only being file attachments dangling below a post.
Friendica users are used to being able to embed a virtually unlimited number of images to a post. And to actually embed them, as in, with text above the image and text below the image and another image below that text and more text below that image. Theoretically, they could insert tiny images into lines of text. By the way, Mastodon refuses to display embedded images. It also rejects any file attachments beyond the first four. And up to version 4.0 from October, 2022, it didn't support any kind of text formatting and "sanitised" all message texts down to plain text.
This also means that Mastodon users are used to only having plain text or mucking around with Unicode characters for bold type and italics.
Friendica users are used to being able to not only see, but also post all sorts of text formatting that HTML is capable of.
Mastodon users are often deadly afraid of quote-posts because they only know quote-posts as a means of harassment and dogpiling on Twitter.
Friendica users, their entire culture being entirely unfazed by whatever has ever happened on Twitter, are absolutely used to always having had quote-posts at hand and to using quote-posts as a means of forwarding content. They had what Mastodon calls "quotes" years before they had what Mastodon calls "boosts" (and what many Mastodon users refer to as "retoots").
Mastodon users are used to conversations being loosely tied together from toots and to having to visibly mention all those whom they want to receive a reply.
Friendica users are used to having enclosed threaded conversations with only one post and otherwise only comments. They're also used to everyone in the conversation, i.e. everyone who has received the original post, automatically receiving every single last comment. They're used to always seeing the entire thread immediately as opposed to single-message piecemeal.
Mastodon users are used to shouting into the void with hashtags attached if they want to talk about a certain topic. It's the only way for them to do so.
Friendica users are used to having groups. Oh, and full-text search.

The conflict

It should be obvious that these two types have a very high chance of not getting along, especially if the Mastodon user is fairly new and not used to there being stuff in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon.
Mastodon users keep demanding that everyone else in the Fediverse live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules and only by these.
Mastodon users who have joined in 2026 keep ordering Friendica veterans who have joined in the early 2010s (before there was any Mastodon) to act like they're on Mastodon.
They demand these Friendica veterans fully adopt Mastodon's culture (which isn't even geared towards Friendica's set of features).
They indirectly demand these Friendica veterans give up their own culture (because they cannot comprehend that there can be any other culture in the Fediverse than Mastodon's, as in, that what Friendica has is a culture, even though it's different from Mastodon's).
They directly demand these Friendica veterans give up some 40% of the features they've been using for a decade and a half and indirectly demand they give up another 40% of these features.
They demand these Friendica veterans stop posting more than 500 characters at once.
They demand these Friendica veterans put CWs into their abstract field. (Again, they think that Gargron has invented this field from scratch as a CW field,)
They demand these Friendica veterans use their abstract field only for CWs.
They demand these Friendica veterans stop "spamming" hashtags that clearly aren't there for content discovery. (They cannot comprehend that these hashtags are there to trigger automatic reader-side CWs because the entire concept is completely alien to them.)
And so forth.
These Friendica veterans have been in the Fediverse for about a decade and a half. And suddently, these Mastodon newbies appear and tell them how to use Friendica.
Of course, these Mastodon newbies don't know a thing about Friendica. They think the Friendica veterans are Mastodon users, and they're telling them how to use Mastodon.
So the Friendica users tell them, no, they aren't on Mastodon. They're on Friendica which has got absolutely nothing to do with Mastodon.
Then the Mastodon newbies will believe that someone has created this weird Friendica thing after Mastodon was made (it can't possibly be any other way, right9 and illegally hacked this Friendica thing into the Mastodon Fediverse. And whoever made Friendica omitted to make Friendica just like Mastodon.
Okay, now the Friendica users tell them that Friendica was launched in 2010, how long before Mastodon that was, and that they themselves have been around for much longer than Mastodon, too.
Now, either the Mastodon newbies will fail to comprehend that there can be anything in the Fediverse made before Mastodon if Gargron has invented the very technology. Or they think that the Fediverse was still created with Mastodon, and that Friendica still illegally intruded into the Mastodon Fediverse.
Either way, the Friendica veterans will have to adapt and act entirely by Mastodon's standards. This is the Mastodon Fediverse, Mastodon is the biggest software (if only by monthly active users, by the way), Mastodon has defined "the Fediverse culture", and thus it's the Mastodon users and only the Mastodon users who get to say how people have to act and behave in the Fediverse.
And then the Mastodon users wonder how there's so much Mastodon hatred on Friendica (and there actually is). How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users trying to force them to use Friendica like Mastodon. How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users chopping long posts into small bits. As if they had a choice. How Friendica users complain about CWs in whatever that abstract field is supposed to be. And so forth.
How dare the Friendica users complain The Mastodon users are the good guys! It's them and only them who have a culture, who have rules, who know how to use the Fediverse!
By the way: It gets even worse between Mastodon and Lemmy.
Mastodon's culture is an idealised version of pre-Musk Twitter's culture with bits of Tumblr's SFW culture mixed in. That's because just about everyone on Mastodon originally came from Twitter, and most of them escaped from Elon Musk. They want Mastodon (and the Fediverse) be a better Twitter. It helps that Mastodon is still trying hard to be a Twitter clone.
Lemmy's culture, on the other hand, is a carbon copy of Reddit's culture. Lemmy is a Reddit clone that shares next to no features at all with Mastodon except for ActivityPub support. Next to all Lemmy users are former Redditors who left Reddit when Reddit started charging $20,000,000 for its client API, effectively killing off all third-party Reddit apps. They saw no reason in changing their culture because it wasn't the culture that drove them away. Hardly any of them were on Twitter, and almost none of them have ever been on Mastodon. Many think the Fediverse is Lemmy. Of the rest, many think the Fediverse is Lemmy with a side of PieFed.
Mastodon lives on hashtags even more than Twitter. Lemmy has zero support for hashtags because Reddit doesn't have any either, and neither does Hacker News.
Mastodon requires mentions to get replies to their recipients. One visible mention per recipient. Lemmy doesn't need mentions for this at all. Mentions on Lemmy only serve to, well, mention someone. Just like on Reddit.
And so forth.
It's actually easy to spot threads on Lemmy that were started by Mastodon users: The title is in the post text, or there's no title at all because the Mastodon users did as they always do: mention in the first line, then a new line because that looks prettier. Of course, there's a mention in the post text. And there's a bunch of hashtags strewn across the post text even though they don't even work. If you're very lucky, the hashtags are at the bottom, but most Mastodon users don't waste any of their 500 characters on that.
I hope you get a rough idea how much headbutting there is between Mastodon users who think that the Mastodon users rule supreme over the whole Fediverse and Lemmy community owners who do rule over the Lemmy communities which these Mastodon users have just posted into.

Countermeasures

Both sides are actually taking countermeasures. The non-Mastodon side is more effective at it, though.
On Mastodon's side, there are very few single users who block every single non-Mastodon server they come across.
Countermeasures on the non-Mastodon side vary. They start with single users who block each Mastodon user who doesn't behave like they want them to behave, e.g. they block everyone who chops a long post into a thread at first trike.
Then there's Hubzilla, reworked from a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator. Hubzilla has always been based on its own protocol, Zot6 (Friendica's creator calls it an older version of Nomad). ActivityPub support is optional, on by default on new servers and off by default on new channels. The current devs won't change anything about that. Not only doesn't Hubzilla's technology allow for moving it to ActivityPub as its base protocol, but ActivityPub being optional is seen as a last-resort "drawbridge" for those to whom Mastodon has become unbearable.
Nowadays, Friendica's creator is working on two other applications in the same family. (streams) is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork) of Hubzilla, and Forte is a fork of (streams). Both have an admin-side user agent filter. It can block entire Fediverse applications without having to hassle around with a URL list. It was mainly created and advertised as a means to permanently lock Threads out, even if Threads should change URLs. But it's also being advertised as being capable of blocking all of Mastodon, all present and future servers. Mastodon being intentially made barely compatible with the rest of the Fediverse is only one reason for this.
(streams) and Forte also have another admin-side filter which, when turned on, locks everything out that doesn't support enclosed threaded conversations. That's because server applications like Mastodon mess with the way that (streams), Forte and their ancestors handle conversations. Granted, when this is activated only to get rid of Mastodon, it causes quite a bit of collateral damage.
Generally, (streams) and Forte are very similar. The main difference is that Forte is entirely based on ActivityPub whereas (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad with ActivityPub still being optional. The reason why (streams) is kept around is for there to still be one of these applications with the same protocol-level "drawbridge" as Hubzilla. And in fact, the most important (streams) group used to have ActivityPub off with the intention to keep Mastodon out.
I guess there are still Mastodon users who absolutely defend and support Mastodon's way being forced upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, and who are irritated or upset about non-Mastodon users being very defensive of their own non-Mastodon ways and refusing to adopt Mastodon's (allegedly much superior) culture instead of embracing it.
And I guess there are Mastodon users who feel absolutely entitled to get to every last Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte user unhindered and force them to use Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte exactly like Mastodon in every way possible.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # I've just come across a toot from a Mastodon user who demanded that everyone who posts, quote, "on Mastodon," end quote, limit their posts to 500 characters.
This was far from being the first time I've read this very demand or similar demands. It just was the most recent time.
Where this comes from Well, it has two sides.

The Mastodon side

The non-Mastodon side

The conflict

Countermeasures

Both sides are actually taking countermeasures. The non-Mastodon side is more effective at it, though.
On Mastodon's side, there are very few single users who block every single non-Mastodon server they come across.
Countermeasures on the non-Mastodon side vary. They start with single users who block each Mastodon user who doesn't behave like they want them to behave, e.g. they block everyone who chops a long post into a thread at first trike.
Then there's Hubzilla, reworked from a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator. Hubzilla has always been based on its own protocol, Zot6 (Friendica's creator calls it an older version of Nomad). ActivityPub support is optional, on by default on new servers and off by default on new channels. The current devs won't change anything about that. Not only doesn't Hubzilla's technology allow for moving it to ActivityPub as its base protocol, but ActivityPub being optional is seen as a last-resort "drawbridge" for those to whom Mastodon has become unbearable.
Nowadays, Friendica's creator is working on two other applications in the same family. (streams) is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork) of Hubzilla, and Forte is a fork of (streams). Both have an admin-side user agent filter. It can block entire Fediverse applications without having to hassle around with a URL list. It was mainly created and advertised as a means to permanently lock Threads out, even if Threads should change URLs. But it's also being advertised as being capable of blocking all of Mastodon, all present and future servers. Mastodon being intentially made barely compatible with the rest of the Fediverse is only one reason for this.
(streams) and Forte also have another admin-side filter which, when turned on, locks everything out that doesn't support enclosed threaded conversations. That's because server applications like Mastodon mess with the way that (streams), Forte and their ancestors handle conversations. Granted, when this is activated only to get rid of Mastodon, it causes quite a bit of collateral damage.
Generally, (streams) and Forte are very similar. The main difference is that Forte is entirely based on ActivityPub whereas (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad with ActivityPub still being optional. The reason why (streams) is kept around is for there to still be one of these applications with the same protocol-level "drawbridge" as Hubzilla. And in fact, the most important (streams) group used to have ActivityPub off with the intention to keep Mastodon out.
I guess there are still Mastodon users who absolutely defend and support Mastodon's way being forced upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, and who are irritated or upset about non-Mastodon users being very defensive of their own non-Mastodon ways and refusing to adopt Mastodon's (allegedly much superior) culture instead of embracing it.
And I guess there are Mastodon users who feel absolutely entitled to get to every last Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte user unhindered and force them to use Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte exactly like Mastodon in every way possible.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #Yeah, I get it.
Mastodon and its users rule supreme over the Fediverse. After all, the Fediverse was invented by Gargron. It started when Mastodon started, and everything that isn't Mastodon just latched onto Mastodon and its Fediverse.
Mastodon users are the only civilised users in the Fediverse, the only ones with something like a culture. The Fediverse culture is Mastodon's culture as defined in the spring of 2022. All those who don't live by Mastodon's culture are uncivilised, uneducated, savage barbarians. And it isn't just the Mastodon users' right and privilege to educate them and shape them into good Mastodon users, it's their duty.
Even when it turns out that these barbarians aren't even on Mastodon, that they're on something that's very much not Mastodon, they can't possibly have a culture of their own. After all, they don't live by Mastodon's culture, and if it isn't Mastodon's culture, it isn't culture at all. Not even if it predates Mastodon's current culture by over a decade like Friendica's culture does.
Of course, this also means that when non-Mastodon users come and give Mastodon users unsolicited "advice" or recommend them to use Mastodon in a certain way that goes against Mastodon's culture, the Mastodon users are fully justified to silence them by any means available.

What this means:

When a Mastodon user uses "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" mutually synonymously, it's the right thing to do because that's part of Mastodon's culture. And it makes things easier to understand.
When a non-Mastodon user explains that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, and that "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" do not mean the same, it's evil and intrusive and deeply disturbing.
When a Mastodon user refers to any message in the Fediverse as a "toot", it's the right thing to do because that's part of Mastodon's culture.
When a Misskey or Forkey user talks about "notes", it's irritating. When a Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte user distinguishes between "posts" and "comments", it has even less of a place in the Mastodon Fediverse.
Features that only Mastodon has are actually mandatory for the whole Fediverse. Any Fediverse server software that hasn't got these features implemented in exactly the same way as Mastodon is broken.
Features in non-Mastodon Fediverse server software that Mastodon doesn't have are wrong and evil and not allowed to be used.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to limit their posts to no more than 500 characters. It especially disturbs those who refuse to move away from the official Mastodon phone app.
Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to tell Mastodon users to not cut their long posts into threads.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to put content warnings into their summary/abstract field.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to only use their summary/abstract field for content warnings. After all, that's what Gargron invented that field for.
Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to tell non-Mastodon users that it was Evan Prodromou who invented that field as early as 2008. That he invented it as a summary field. That it was actually a Mastodon user who repurposed that field for CWs in 2017, the year after Mastodon was launched. Gargron only let it pass.
Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to use that field for anything else than CWs.
Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to add hashtags instead of CWs so that reader-side CWs can automatically be generated by filters. Even though Mastodon itself has literally introduced this very feature with version 4.0 in October, 2022.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to not only write alt-texts for all the images they post, but to write them nicely long and detailed. After all, they've got 1,500 characters for alt-texts.
Misskey and Forkey users are not allowed to tell Mastodon users to limit their alt-texts to no more than 512 characters because that's the maximum that Misskey and the Forkeys accept, and on top of that, due to a bug, they delete all alt-texts longer than that. From a Misskey/Forkey point of view, writing long alt-texts is like not writing any alt-texts at all. But the Misskey/Forkey point of view is invalid in Mastodon's culture.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to toot to Lemmy any way they want, and that's the Mastodon way. If it doesn't work properly on Lemmy, then Lemmy is broken.
Lemmy users, even Lemmy moderators, and other users of Fediverse software that supports groups are not allowed to tell Mastodon users how to post to Lemmy in a way that Lemmy understands.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to even tell Lemmy users to limit their "toots" to no more than 500 characters and use hashtags, but not too many of them.
Lemmy users and even Lemmy moderators are not allowed to tell Mastodon users to stop spamming Lemmy with mentions and with hashtags that don't work on Lemmy anyway, also because both highly irritate the Lemmy users. Almost all of them came straight from Reddit after their third-party apps were killed, and almost none of them have ever been on Twitter or Mastodon.
Mastodon users and Mastodon admins are allowed and justified to block any and all non-Mastodon servers because they misbehave by Mastodon's standards.
(streams) and Forte admins are not allowed to block the entirety of Mastodon, all present and future servers, by user agent (which, by the way, they're totally capable of) because it misbehaves by their standards. Mastodon doesn't misbehave, and the Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte standards are all wrong if they differ from Mastodon's standards.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #Yeah, I get it.
Mastodon and its users rule supreme over the Fediverse. After all, the Fediverse was invented by Gargron. It started when Mastodon started, and everything that isn't Mastodon just latched onto Mastodon and its Fediverse.
Mastodon users are the only civilised users in the Fediverse, the only ones with something like a culture. The Fediverse culture is Mastodon's culture as defined in the spring of 2022. All those who don't live by Mastodon's culture are uncivilised, uneducated, savage barbarians. And it isn't just the Mastodon users' right and privilege to educate them and shape them into good Mastodon users, it's their duty.
Even when it turns out that these barbarians aren't even on Mastodon, that they're on something that's very much not Mastodon, they can't possibly have a culture of their own. After all, they don't live by Mastodon's culture, and if it isn't Mastodon's culture, it isn't culture at all. Not even if it predates Mastodon's current culture by over a decade like Friendica's culture does.
Of course, this also means that when non-Mastodon users come and give Mastodon users unsolicited "advice" or recommend them to use Mastodon in a certain way that goes against Mastodon's culture, the Mastodon users are fully justified to silence them by any means available.

What this means:

When a Mastodon user uses "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" mutually synonymously, it's the right thing to do because that's part of Mastodon's culture. And it makes things easier to understand.
When a non-Mastodon user explains that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, and that "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" do not mean the same, it's evil and intrusive and deeply disturbing.
When a Mastodon user refers to any message in the Fediverse as a "toot", it's the right thing to do because that's part of Mastodon's culture.
When a Misskey or Forkey user talks about "notes", it's irritating. When a Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte user distinguishes between "posts" and "comments", it has even less of a place in the Mastodon Fediverse.
Features that only Mastodon has are actually mandatory for the whole Fediverse. Any Fediverse server software that hasn't got these features implemented in exactly the same way as Mastodon is broken.
Features in non-Mastodon Fediverse server software that Mastodon doesn't have are wrong and evil and not allowed to be used.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to limit their posts to no more than 500 characters. It especially disturbs those who refuse to move away from the official Mastodon phone app.
Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to tell Mastodon users to not cut their long posts into threads.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to put content warnings into their summary/abstract field.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to only use their summary/abstract field for content warnings. After all, that's what Gargron invented that field for.
Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to tell non-Mastodon users that it was Evan Prodromou who invented that field as early as 2008. That he invented it as a summary field. That it was actually a Mastodon user who repurposed that field for CWs in 2017, the year after Mastodon was launched. Gargron only let it pass.
Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to use that field for anything else than CWs.
Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to add hashtags instead of CWs so that reader-side CWs can automatically be generated by filters. Even though Mastodon itself has literally introduced this very feature with version 4.0 in October, 2022.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to not only write alt-texts for all the images they post, but to write them nicely long and detailed. After all, they've got 1,500 characters for alt-texts.
Misskey and Forkey users are not allowed to tell Mastodon users to limit their alt-texts to no more than 512 characters because that's the maximum that Misskey and the Forkeys accept, and on top of that, due to a bug, they delete all alt-texts longer than that. From a Misskey/Forkey point of view, writing long alt-texts is like not writing any alt-texts at all. But the Misskey/Forkey point of view is invalid in Mastodon's culture.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to toot to Lemmy any way they want, and that's the Mastodon way. If it doesn't work properly on Lemmy, then Lemmy is broken.
Lemmy users, even Lemmy moderators, and other users of Fediverse software that supports groups are not allowed to tell Mastodon users how to post to Lemmy in a way that Lemmy understands.
Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to even tell Lemmy users to limit their "toots" to no more than 500 characters and use hashtags, but not too many of them.
Lemmy users and even Lemmy moderators are not allowed to tell Mastodon users to stop spamming Lemmy with mentions and with hashtags that don't work on Lemmy anyway, also because both highly irritate the Lemmy users. Almost all of them came straight from Reddit after their third-party apps were killed, and almost none of them have ever been on Twitter or Mastodon.
Mastodon users and Mastodon admins are allowed and justified to block any and all non-Mastodon servers because they misbehave by Mastodon's standards.
(streams) and Forte admins are not allowed to block the entirety of Mastodon, all present and future servers, by user agent (which, by the way, they're totally capable of) because it misbehaves by their standards. Mastodon doesn't misbehave, and the Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte standards are all wrong if they differ from Mastodon's standards.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Well, then you must live with long posts being long in your timeline. Users of non-Mastodon Fediverse server software will not stop using it as intended and start using it like Mastodon just because long posts disturb the users of the official Mastodon app.
Someone who has been on Friendica since 2011, and who is absolutely using Friendica like Friendica is intended to be used, will not use Friendica like Mastodon suddenly just because Mastodon users prefer that.
I mean, what if non-Mastodon users came and told Mastodon users to stop cutting their long posts into threads What if non-Mastodon users came and told Mastodon users to use the CW field for summaries instead of CWs because that's what that field is actually for What if Friendica and Hubzilla users came and told Mastodon users to replace their CWs with hashtags so that they can have their own individual CWs automatically generated reader-side, as has been their tradition since before Mastodon was even made
I keep seeing this again and again. At first, Mastodon users perceive non-Mastodon users as users on "hacked" Mastodon servers with increased character limits who simply don't know about Mastodon's culture which includes limiting all your "toots" to no more than 500 characters. And they try to educate them how to use Mastodon properly.
Once they learn that these people are, in fact, on something else, something entirely different from Mastodon, they perceive them as barbarian, culture-less intruders into their precious Mastodon Fediverse who need to be educated about proper Mastodon behaviour nonetheless.
They think Mastodon is the one supreme ruler over the Fediverse. They think they are the ones who have the exclusive saying over how anything in the Fediverse must be used. They think they have the Gargron-given right to tell e.g. Friendica users whose culture is over a decade older than Mastodon's current culture to completely abandon their own culture and 80% of Friendica's features along with it and only live by Mastodon's culture.
At the same time, they consider requests from outside of Mastodon to change their own behaviour aggressive and intrusive and against "the Fediverse culture", read, Mastodon's culture. And then they completely fail to understand why there's so much Mastodon hatred especially on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. They're the good guys, the cultured and well-behaving ones, aren't they
To cut a long story short: If you don't like how people on Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Iceshrimp-JS, Iceshrimp.NET, Sharkey, CherryPick, micro.blog, GoToSocial, snac, Hollo, Mitra, Socialhome, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte, Lemmy, /kbin, Mbin, PieFed etc. behave, how they refuse to use their software like Mastodon and only like Mastodon, then go block their servers. I hope that option is built into the official Mastodon app.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # Also, it seems like you're using Mastodon on a phone with the official Mastodon app.
However, unlike on commercial services, Mastodon's official app is not the one fully featured reference app. It's actually just about the worst Mastodon app. It only exists so that Mastodon newbies can start by loading an app named "Mastodon" from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.
It's also the only Mastodon app that can only show long posts at their full length. All third-party apps roll long posts in.
If you're on an iPhone, check , or .
If you're on Android, check or .
You'll probably discover all-new features of which you didn't know that Mastodon has them.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # If you really want to go for quality, what's needed is some automated system that checks each image post for

the image description's absolute accuracy, no matter how obscure whatever the image shows is
whether all details which matter according to quite a number of criteria are described appropriately and with enough details
whether the alt-text, after having been transcoded to a CJK character set, has 512 characters or fewer
whether the image has an additional, more detailed and more informative description in the message text when necessary
whether any image description, especially in the alt-text, does not start with "Image", "Graphic", "Picture" or "Photo"
whether each image description does mention any medium that is not a digital photograph
whether each image description is written in plain, everyday language without (unexplained) technical language and/or jargon
whether each image description avoids things like "shows" or "can be seen" or "is visible"
whether the alt-text does not contain any explanations (except maybe for when the alt-text itself needs explanations)
whether the alt-text does not contain copyright or license information
whether the alt-text does not contain author credits
whether the alt-text generally does not contain any information that is neither present in the message text nor available to sighted users in the image
whether the alt-text is not used to write around Mastodon's 500-character limit
whether the text bits in the image are transcribed verbatim
whether text in foreign languages is transcribed appropriately, considering that screen readers cannot switch to different languages mid-sentence or in the middle of reading out an alt-text (I have to find out myself what the officially appropriate way is as every last image description guideline out there assumes that there are no other languages than English)
whether the image descriptions in general and text transcripts in particular avoid all caps
whether all acronyms are transcribed in a way that's the most appropriate for screen readers
whether the alt-text does not contain any hashtags except if they're part of a text transcript
whether the alt-text does not contain any emoji except if they're part of a text transcript
whether the alt-text does not contain links (URLs are allowed if they're part of a text transcript)
whether the alt-text does not contain line breaks
whether the alt-text does not contain the double quotation marks found on keyboards
whether the location shown in the image is mentioned if appropriate and not mentioned if mentioning it wouldn't be appropriate
whether positions are described the right way
whether shapes are described the right way
whether sizes and dimensions are described the right way
whether colours are described the right way
whether people that mustn't or shouldn't be publicly identified are not identified
whether people and their outfits are described appropriately, taking into consideration what the target audience knows or doesn't know
whether the body shape of a person is only described when it matters within the context, or the level of detail required by the context makes it necessary
whether people's race is not mentioned, and they're described with one of the five skin tones available as emoji (light, medium light, medium, medium dark, dark) instead
whether people's gender is only mentioned either if they themselves have declared it openly, and this declaration can be sourced, or if they act out a certain gender in the image in other words, whether people's gender is not assumed in the image description

Any image post that breaks any of these mustn't count into the statistics as properly described.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #

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Last updated: 2026-08-03