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Re-inventing the federated wheel because you don't know that wheels exist


I keep seeing lots of people who are totally giddy about the #Fediverse, who are gushing over it, who want to promote it, who want it to spread.

And who want it to advance. To learn new abilities. To grow new features.

That's all fine and dandy.

But almost all of these people are still fully convinced that the Fediverse equals #Mastodon. And nothing else. At least not until Tumblr and P92 join the fray. Okay, maybe the #WordPress plug-in that's the talk of the town now that it has become official. Okay, maybe a few of them have also heard of #Pixelfed and/or #PeerTube because their makers are all over the Fediverse.

When these people are talking about the Fediverse, they mean Mastodon. And when they're thinking about the Fediverse, they're only thinking about Mastodon. Because that's all they know.

So these people want new cool features or even new cool use-cases in the Fediverse, stuff that Mastodon doesn't have. They want Mastodon to have it, or they want new projects to be launched that have these features.

If only they knew.

If only they knew that everything, literally everything they propose has already been done. Yes, in the Fediverse. In projects which are fully federated with Mastodon. Why don't they know? Because they've never heard of any of these projects, much less what they can do.


So they want "quote-tweets" in the Fediverse. Which means they want Mastodon to introduce them.

Tell you what: Mastodon is the only microblogging project in the Fediverse that doesn't have quotes. Not only will Eugen Rochko never introduce them, but all the other projects have them with Mastodon forks #GlitchSoc such as being the exception. #Pleroma has them. #Akkoma has them. #MissKey has them. #CalcKey has them. #FoundKey has them. #GoToSocial has them. The old heavyweights #Friendica and #Hubzilla have them, and so does Hubzilla's youngest decendant, the #Streams project. Et cetera.

You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".


Or text formatting in posts like bold type, italics, underline, strikethrough, code blocks etc. Would be great if Mastodon had that, in spite of other people saying they don't want it.

Again: Pleroma already has it. Akkoma already has it. MissKey already has it. CalcKey already has it. FoundKey already hasit. GoToSocial already has it. Friendica already has it. Hubzilla already has it (look at this post at its source in a Web browser and weep). (streams) already has it. And so forth. This time, even Mastodon forks have it.

It has been done. It has been done many times. It has actually been done before Mastodon.


Next, long-form blog posting. We need something like #Medium in the Fediverse that isn't Medium itself. Mastodon's 500 characters are too few, and Twitter-like threads are inconvenient.

Except we already have that, too. #Plume and #WriteFreely are about as close to Medium as Mastodon is to Twitter, including clean and distraction-less layouts. Oh, and Hubzilla can do that, too.

By the way: Again, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that can do microblogging that has a 500-character limit. Pleroma, Mastodon's oldest direct competitor, raised it to a default of 6,000. MissKey and its forks have 3,000 as a default. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have character limits of "go ahead, drop your short story in one post in its entirety," so virtually none at all. And yes, Hubzilla has long-form writing on top of that.


Speaking of Hubzilla: Most recently, there has been the idea to uncouple one's online identity from a specific instance. Your online self should no longer be firmly tied to any one server exclusively. Now, this sounds so ambitious, it might just as well be science-fiction.

What if I told you that just this very thing already exists as well?

No, really. No, I'm not making this up. But you should know by now that I'm not.

Better yet: It was conceived as early as 2011. By the guy who launched Friendica in 2010. He invented a new principle named #NomadicIdentity and a new protocol named #Zot. In its early stages already, even with no technical implementation yet, Zot was more powerful than ActivityPub is today.

In 2012, Zot became reality as the basis of a Friendica fork which later became known as #RedMatrix and, upon its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, which is still prior to Mastodon's initial release, Hubzilla. Hubzilla is still being developed and improved, and it has a fledgling but growing "successor of a successor" named (streams) which offers nomadic identity, too.

Now, what does this nomadic identity even look like? Well, not only does it let you move your channel(s) around from instance to instance with ease and, unlike on Mastodon, with absolutely everything on it. No, it also lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once. Identical clones, automagically kept in sync in real-time, all with the same identity, the same content, the same connections.

Your identity is no longer strapped down to one instance. Not only that, but your channel, your posts, your content is no longer hosted on only one server. This means that if one instance with one of your clones goes down, you still have spares.


Okay, so how about community groups/forums? That'd be cool.

Well, for one, there's #Guppe. It's basically bolted on Mastodon, and in practice, it's centralised because there's only one instance. But it's impractical to use.

Besides, this is becoming a running gag here, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have exactly this built-in and open for the rest of the Fediverse.

Better yet: There's also #Lemmy which amounts to a federated #Reddit or #HackerNews clone. So not only does Lemmy offer this, it specialises in it.

Hubzilla alone can provide Fediverse feature suggestions with "has been done" for years to come. Not to mention what else the Fediverse has to offer. Even if someone should want a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated #GoodReads clone in the Fediverse, it has been done: #BookWyrm.

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

Funny how, in spite of the rising number of likes, many people seem to misunderstand what I've written.

Here's a short explanation.

People: We want bold type and italics and stuff in the Fediverse! And quote-tweets! And more than 500 characters! Please, #Mastodon, include it!

Me: Join #Akkoma (

), and you've got your bold type and italics and quote-tweets and thousands of characters! And you can still talk to people on Mastodon! Easy as that.

Or if you don't like Akkoma, try #Pleroma (

).
Or #MissKey ().
Or #CalcKey ().
Or #GoToSocial ().
Or if you don't mind something bigger, #Friendica ().
Or if you don't mind a hard-to-handle feature monster, #Hubzilla (#^hubzilla.org/).
And all of them let you stay in contact with your friends on Mastodon.

#MastodonIsNotTheFediverse. Nor is Mastodon the best the #Fediverse has to offer.

in reply to f4grx Sebastien (OLD ACCOUNT)

same here, I just bookmarked the post so I can come back to it when I'm more used to all this. New universes take time to understand lol. I feel like a refugee that has also time traveled, it's so cool.
in reply to LittleRedCanary

Mastodon is like a gateway drug and the fediverse is like... All the other drugs? Idk where I was going with this...
Unknown parent

Jupiter Rowland

@Genders: โ™พ๏ธ, ๐ŸŸชโฌ›๐ŸŸฉ; Soni L. #ActivityPub. The language which (most of) the #Fediverse speaks.

It is how Mastodon instances talk to other Mastodon instances. And it is how, for example, Pleroma instances talk to Mastodon instances. Or to each other.

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

okay well, how many steps (and which) do you need to take to fav or boost this linked post? chaos.social/@SoniEx2/11002314โ€ฆ

and what if it were posted on something like IRC or email instead, how many/which steps would it take then?

Unknown parent

Jupiter Rowland

@Genders: โ™พ๏ธ, ๐ŸŸชโฌ›๐ŸŸฉ; Soni L. Since I don't have that post in my stream:

Step 1: Copy the URL.

Step 2: Click on the magnifying glass for search.

Step 3: Paste the URL into the search field.

Step 4: Hit Enter. The post should appear now.

Step 5: Do with it as I please. Share, like, reply, save in a folder, whatever.

Basically, interaction with any post is only one search away.

Unknown parent

yes, which steps you, personally, as a hubzilla user, would be forced to take by the various cross-interacting software (between the OS, the browser/desktop app, the window manager, the instance, and whatever else might be of relevance), to be able to interact with said post from your fedi account?
in reply to Genders: โ™พ๏ธ, ๐ŸŸชโฌ›๐ŸŸฉ; Soni L.

@DaywalkingRedhead I've never really seen #PeerTube as a #TikTok replacement. Maybe the devs could say something about it (@PeerTube).

@EamonnMR I'm not quite sure what exactly you mean with "app".

If you mean whether users of different mobile apps for the #Fediverse can stay in contact with users with the mobile app named "Mastodon" that you install from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, that's the wrong question. But the answer is yes.

If you mean whether users of different projects (platforms, server apps etc.) in the Fediverse that aren't Mastodon can stay in contact with Mastodon users, then: Yes, they can. Each project I've mentioned is federated with Mastodon, i.e. they all connect to Mastodon, and their users can interact with Mastodon users.

That's the magic of the Fediverse. And that's the actual idea behind the Fediverse. After all, the Fediverse is not only Mastodon.

@{mattl@social.mat.tl} They don't have to put up with all these features.

If they want cool new features, they may move to e.g. Akkoma or CalcKey or Friendica or whatever. If they don't, they can stay on good old Mastodon.

What they won't get, though, is a 100%, 1:1 Twitter clone, just without Elon Musk.

@Phoenix Thank you!

@Genders: โ™พ๏ธ, ๐ŸŸชโฌ›๐ŸŸฉ; Soni L. Do you mean me myself in my specific situation or "you" as in anyone with whichever app is the most popular on whichever hardware/OS platform is the most popular?

Do you mean which steps I personally would take using Hubzilla through Firefox on desktop GNU/Linux? Or which steps a beginner would have to take, e.g. using the official Mastodon app on an iPhone?

I could tell you the former, but it'd be of little use for most here. I can't tell you the latter because I don't have any practical experience with it.

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

okay, so from something like IRC or email you have:

1. copy the URL
2. manually switch to the browser, then to the instance
3. click search
4. paste URL
5. finally, hit enter

whereas something like twitter it's just

1. click URL

do you see the problem? do you see why fedi is bleeding users?

Unknown parent

Jupiter Rowland

@Kermode The different projects use different markup languages for formatting.

Some microblogging projects use Markdown, some HTML in addition. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) use an extended variant of BBcode.

ActivityPub turns everything into Rich Text afterwards.

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

I didn't know that! Thanks.
I use joplin for notes, so I know md to some extent. Joplin also has 'extended' the md, so... I don't really know how much I know is actually transferable. Like tables for example. No idea, but they're handy.
in reply to Genders: โ™พ๏ธ, ๐ŸŸชโฌ›๐ŸŸฉ; Soni L.

@Genders: โ™พ๏ธ, ๐ŸŸชโฌ›๐ŸŸฉ; Soni L. Well, if we were to put ease-of-use above everything else for everyone, we should shut down all projects that aren't Mastodon and then turn Mastodon into a 100%, 1:1 Twitter clone with the only exceptions being the name and the fact that Mastodon isn't owned by Elon Musk. Make mastodon.com both the project website and the only instance, make Mastodon one huge centralised monolithic silo owned by a Mastodon, Inc. in Palo Alto, CA (NASDAQ: MSDN).

Hubzilla wasn't launched in 2022 in a reaction to the launch of Mastodon which in turn was a reaction upon Musk's Twitter takeover. Mastodon was launched in 2016 with no mobile app. And Hubzilla had its 1.0 release in 2015, development began in 2012, and the target audience wasn't the tech-illiterate iPhone user, it was the Linux geek.

Mastodon wasn't built to be mainstream. Hubzilla was even less built to be mainstream.

in reply to Genders: โ™พ๏ธ, ๐ŸŸชโฌ›๐ŸŸฉ; Soni L.

@Genders: โ™พ๏ธ, ๐ŸŸชโฌ›๐ŸŸฉ; Soni L. It's basically the same as "If #Linux wants to take over the desktop, it'll have to become identical to #Windows, just free-of-charge and without malware. No more distros, one Linux for everyone, one desktop environment, one graphical toolkit, only one of each, whatever it is."

Linux never wanted to take over the desktop.

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

so the linux geek should be forced to put up with that crap because demanding better of your tools is too much to ask for?

is it really made for the linux geek, or for the C89 evangelist? because even the modern linux geek uses rust nowadays, complete with borrow checker. but the C89 evangelist will claim turning on -Wall is against the spirit of C. why *not* demand better of mastodon and hubzilla, too?

in reply to Genders: โ™พ๏ธ, ๐ŸŸชโฌ›๐ŸŸฉ; Soni L.

@Genders: โ™พ๏ธ, ๐ŸŸชโฌ›๐ŸŸฉ; Soni L. The Linux geek has different priorities than the tech-illiterate iPhone user. It's all about security, data/privacy protection and efficiency and about definitely not being bullshat by anyone. The latter is one of the reasons why Linux geeks distrust non-free, closed-source software. Efficiency is why Linux geeks have drifted away from the 2000s' easier-to-use KDE and GNOME to nowadays' i3wm. Many only know GUIs from Firefox anymore. "The modern Linux geek" generally doesn't use mice, touchpads or other pointing devices anymore.

And the former two points are why Linux geeks distrust big, corporate centralised silos. Friendica was built to have a powerful social network platform like Facebook, but free-as-in-free-license, open-source, non-commercial, non-corporate, decentralised and federated. In fact, federated with everything and then some. Still, Friendica's target audience weren't those who used the Facebook app on their iPhones while neither knowing nor caring what happened in the background.

And Hubzilla was made because even Friendica didn't provide enough resilience with its decentralisation yet. Even more than in Friendica's case, the target audience did not include tech-illiterate Joe Average. Hubzilla has always been for people who either know what they're doing or are willing to learn.

The Fediverse was made by tech geeks for tech geeks. Mastodon was launched in 2016 when nobody could even expect Elon Musk to buy out Twitter. When nobody would have expected a mass-exodus of Joe Averages with neither knowledge nor interest in tech from Twitter to Mastodon. And when Friendica and Hubzilla adopted ActivityPub, nobody had in mind if and how these Joe Averages could understand that, although they're on Mastodon, they'd certainly interact with people on entirely different services. And it didn't matter. Other things mattered a whole lot more.

If tech geeks had always put the focus 100% on ease-of-use and neglected everything else, we literally wouldn't have any free, open-source software nowadays because all the commercial software is easier to use. Eugen Rochko wouldn't have created Mastodon because the Twitter mobile app was easier to use than Mastodon would have been in a Web browser. Mike Macgirvin wouldn't have created Friendica, Red Matrix/Hubzilla, Osada, Zap, Misty, Roadhouse and (streams) because the Facebook mobile app was easier to use than either of them in a Web browser.

Linux and XMPP should have taught the Linux geeks that average computer users can't handle having to choose. And yet, Laconica/StatusNet/GNU social became decentral. As did Friendica. As did Diaspora*. As did Mastodon and everything else that uses ActivityPub. As, by the way, did Matrix.

And why?

Because their creators wanted to create online services that don't end up entirely in one hand. A hand that could possibly misuse its own power. They actually wanted to encourage people to run their own private instances. They wanted people to own their own data. Of course, first and foremost, they had people in mind who were fully capable of setting up a LAMP stack on a headless server and maintaining it through ssh. Having to choose between a one-click solution for tech-illiterate dummies and security, they picked the latter.

Also, they, just like their target audience, like to get their hands dirty on techy stuff. They want control. Control over everything that happens. They want to know how stuff works, and they want control over how that stuff works. They want things to happen the way they want it, not the way some developer or even some corporation wants it.

They hate black boxes. They hate closed-source software. They hate it when they have to push a button, and then some magic that's none of their business happens somewhere in the background, well-hidden from them. They don't trust such crap.

They want to KNOW what happens. First-hand, if need be. And, if need be, they want to have an influence on what happens and why it happens. They want to be able to disrupt it if something bad happens. They want to be able to fix it if it's broken. They want to be able to manipulate it until it acts the way they need it to act.

This, by the way, is largely why Hubzilla's UX is as complicated as it is: It isn't made for people seeking the simplicity of WhatsApp. It's made for geeks who want to assume full control over everything their channel can do. People who distrust autopilots, assistants and obfuscated algorithms.

The reason why Hubzilla is both decentralised and nomadic is because it was made by people who prefer security over maximum ease-of-use for people who prefer security over maximum ease-of-use. For people who have seen too much snake oil and security-through-obscurity bullshit in their lives. For people who want to know and be able to verify why exactly something is as secure as it's claimed to be.

However, this entire philosophy and everything that came from it clashes hard with the demands and expectations of 10,000,000 tech-illiterates who have come over from Twitter, initially expecting a 100% Twitter clone, and many of whom now demand their 100% Twitter clone at all costs. Also because they neither know nor care what the costs would be.

If you simplify the Fediverse by forcing everything that isn't Mastodon to shut down in order to no longer confuse tech-illiterates with people who claim they aren't on Mastodon although they seem to be, the Fediverse will lose a whole lot of power and versatility. Of course, the tech-illiterates won't care, they want the Fediverse to be an as-easy-as-possible Twitter clone.

If you simplify the Fediverse further by axing all mobile apps except for one official app that's non-free and closed-source in order not to break its own license by its mere presence in the Apple App Store, you subject all its users to not only potential spying, privacy breaches and all kinds of private data going where at least some of us don't want it to go. Again, tech-illiterates won't care as long as the app is easy to use.

If you simplify the Fediverse even further by turning it all into one big, centralised, monolithic data silo operated by the same company that also develops everything, just so that people don't have to put up with having to choose an instance (or learning what instances are), you take "somewhere else to go" away from people. And it'd become possible for one individual to take over the whole Fediverse. With nowhere else to go, people will have to leave the Fediverse as a whole, and their only alternatives would be other corporate silos.

Because developing resilient alternatives is out of question. Because they wouldn't be easy enough to use.

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

1100 words of mythology, misrepresentation and bullshit. congratulations, my dude, congratulations.
in reply to Jupiter Rowland

tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon
But what about all those people who came here because they wanted an alternative for Twitter, not an alternative for Facebook? Who chose self-limiting to short messages on purpose, who don't want various formatting styles, and so on?
in reply to basisbit ๐Ÿฆˆ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ

tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon
Luckily, all those people can still keep having the message limits, and at the same time interact with the others thanks to #ActivityPub ๐Ÿ˜.
People want something differently - well, it probably already exists, you just have to migrate to another corner of the #fediverse.
in reply to basisbit ๐Ÿฆˆ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ

@basisbit There may be a few who were given the choice between multiple projects (e.g. Mastodon vs Akkoma vs Friendica etc.) right away, also being told that they'd have the exact same people to connect to, regardless of what they choose, and who chose what appeared as the closest to Twitter.

But for each of them, you have thousands upon thousands who were only told about Mastodon, who were told that Mastodon is the Fediverse, either on Twitter or by mass-media. Including thousands to whom mastodon.social was sold as "Twitter without Musk" because nothing more fit into 280 characters.

It's them I'm talking about.

in reply to basisbit ๐Ÿฆˆ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ

@basisbit I've already seen it before replying. And I think my previous answer already covers it.

Yes, a few people were shown the whole Fediverse before joining. Out of all projects, they picked Mastodon because it seemed the most simple and the closest to Twitter to them.

Others were shown the whole Fediverse before joining, and they picked something that isn't Mastodon because they found Mastodon to be too lacking.

Most were only shown Mastodon, usually only one instance. They didn't get to choose because they didn't know they had a choice, much less what their choices would have been.

Some of the latter actually don't want there to be anything else than Mastodon. They want the Fediverse to be as simple as possible. Multiple Mastodon instances are already too complicated. Multiple different projects in the Fediverse, each with multiple instances, now, that really goes too far. Everything that isn't Mastodon has to go, also because everything that isn't Mastodon is too complicated all in itself.

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon
I have learned more about the #Fediverse from reading your posts this afternoon than I EVER found online doing web searches and reading articles and guides.
in reply to RockyC

@Rocky Carr Good to know it takes only one afternoon to read my stuff.

Also explains my number of followers...

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

Many of these sound very cool, but at least in the US and English I'm finding most instances (Pleroma, hubzilla) throwing errors and empty of users.

I come from a networking background. I've seen so many 'better' protocols fail while TCP and IPv4 just keep chugging along doing consistent adequate work. And I feel like I'm seeing this pattern yet again.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Slyphic

tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon
@Slyphic @Jupiter Rowland
After all, we are not talking here about having to change the protocol for a better one. What we are talking about is that the perception of the fediverse is skewed by one #dominant #platform and applications for it. This platform and its applications will never meet all the requirements of all users because this is against decentralisation and diversity, what is we need here.
in reply to Jupiter Rowland

re: tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

Yeah, the fediverse should be explored more, it gets quite tiring over the years to see even implementers wanting things that had prior art and so could benefit from at least being studied so you could make better designs or simply be compatible.

btw slight corrections:
- Pleroma currently doesn't really supports quotes except inline via blockquotes. And while we do want to support MissKey-style quotes, implementing it on our side has been enough of a mess to get abandoned, hopefully it will get revisited at some point.
- Pleroma's default character limit is 5 000 not 6 000, and that configurable limit is given to clients via reusing what glitch-soc added in MastodonAPI

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

But that is BAD, VERY BAD! So the Fediverse is split into a myriad platforms -- and hence communities -- with incompatible features.

That may be great for the computer nerds who will join a dozen platforms just to revel in the features. It is terrible for those who only want a platform to communicate with other people...

#Fediverse #FediverseFragmentation

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

Mark doesn't like this.

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

Nope, you got it wrong. Hint: count the number of characters in the toot you just replied toโ€”it's well over 500, because it didn't originate on a Mastodon server! It's a federated system, so every client can read stuff posted on any other server that supports ActivityPub. (Imagine you could read Twitter tweets on your Facebook page. Only more so.) If all you want to do is to toot, that's fineโ€”everyone else can see you just fine.
in reply to Charlie Stross

But what happens when a message with fancy formatting/threading/etc is read by someone from a server that does not support such features?
in reply to Jorge Stolfi

The message gets transmitted to the client, whose reader is then responsible for displaying/formatting that message (or not, if it lacks the capability). This isn't new. It's how the internet worked 20 years ago, before all these gigantic corporate silos took over. (I shouldn't need to explain this to you, should I โ€ฆ? Graceful degradation of capabilities isn't an new requirement โ€ฆ)
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Charlie Stross

But that is my point. Email and Usenet had a standard message format (ascii text, unfortunately, because that was before Unicode). Every valid server was supposed to issue only compliant messages and properly display any compliant message. This does not seem to be the case in the Fediverse, is it?
in reply to Jorge Stolfi

Think back to the early web, when a browser like Mosaic didn't support just http: but also ftp: gopher: nntp: and other protocols. The message formatting was implicit in the protocol used. And worse: different browsers implemented different versions of HTML.
in reply to Charlie Stross

Hm... IIRC, email and WWW were fairly standardized and interoperable until the internet was opened to the public, and Microsoft imposed its "enhancements" on both, ignoring the standards.

Ftp, nntp, gopher were not variants of http, but separate protocols with their own standards. This does not seem to be the case with all the variants of "Fediverse", is it?

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

Nope, it's the opposite way around: an interoperable protocol carrying different content types, as opposed to different protocols mostly carrying simple text with optional markup (at least in the early days).
in reply to Charlie Stross

FTP, NNTP, and Email were intended for very different types of contents and usage patterns.

Whereas the "different content types" of the Fediverse seem to be all fuzzily intended to carry the same high-level type of content, "mastodon-like posts/messages" -- but don't seem to have firm standards and don't seem to be fully interoperable. That is, the standardization of the protocol is only at the bit transfer level, not at the semantic/usage level. Isn't that so?

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

You missed out Gopher, WWW, and HyperG, all of which were more or less designed for the same content (hyperlinked text) but used radically different protocols and different/no markup.

The internet has never been standardized the way you seem to think the fediverse should be standardized.

in reply to Charlie Stross

I barely used gopher or hyperG before they died out, so I cannot comment on them. But HTTP, like FTP, was meant for a service very different from email. And it WAS well-standardized enough in the beginning.

Whereas - pardon for insisting -- the many variants of "Fediverse" described by the original poster seem to be creating a much worse situation, in which the (ostensibly) same high-level function is being implemented in dozens of *incompatible* formats. >>

in reply to Charlie Stross

It strikes me as weird that we're able to have this discussion on a number of different federated ActivityPub servers, using a growing variety of front-ends, and still there are people complaining that it's not working as well as it should, because reasons.

I still don't know what I'm supposed to make of fact that some people don't know the difference between Mastodon and Hubzilla. Well if it comes to that, they don't need to know. It all works just fine anyway, as long as you can grasp that users are identified by at username at instance instead of at username.

in reply to Flittermouse ๐Ÿ”ž๐Ÿฉ :ablobbass: :ablobdrum: :ablobkeyboard:

Are we indeed able to dicuss Fediverse-wide? Or just among those who use a particular prootcol (ActivityPub?)?

And even within the latter, there seem to be obvious problems. I don't see any markups in other people's messages (e.g. cant tell block quotes from the sender's own text). And I am limited to 500 byte posts, so I cannot quote 1000 chars from a post that someone else sent me.

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

@Jorge Stolfi @Jupiter Rowland @Charlie Stross

out of curiosity, what do you see if I use italic or bold text on my platform?

or even a block quote (which I'm sure is not supported by mastodon)
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

Does your message above have any such markups? I don't see any -- just plain text, with no italics or bold.
in reply to Jorge Stolfi

@Jorge Stolfi @Jupiter Rowland @Charlie Stross

that's what I expected: I don't know whether it's my platform (friendica) that sends stuff that knows that the target can read (plain unicode text) or mastodon that specifically ignores the bbcode (yeah, friendica uses bbcode for markup, for historical reasons I believe).

in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

ActivityPub supports markup and the Frendica BBCode gets translated and passed along. It's Mastodon that doesn't support it and throws it away on their end.
in reply to mnemonicoverload

Seems so. Unfortunately, I entered the Fediverse through the Mastodon door...
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

@Elena ``of Valhalla'' @Jorge Stolfi @Charlie Stross It's the latter. Mastodon strips out everything that isn't [url][/url].

That is, technically speaking, Mastodon strips out the Rich Text formatting which Friendica's ActivityPub connector generates out of Friendica's BBcode.

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

#Email has supported different content-types since at least 1992 (rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1341) with no guarantee any given client supports any given content-type, none of this is new.

#Usenet & #Fidonet also had ways prior to #MIME, such as via extension headers (with flaws that MIME addressed).

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to LisPi

I was referring to email before the internet went public (first used it in 1979). But even after that, the basic message format and the MIME extensions were tightly defined by half a dozen RFC documents published between 1992 and 2008. >>

#Fediverse #FediverseFragmentation

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

Before MIME there were other more haphazard & often non-standard solutions that also had partial support in various clients.

Even with a good standard, there's no guarantee anyone implements all of it (nevermind when there's no standard and just a few informal agreements between specific projects).

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to LisPi

But MIME and its earlier hacks (uuencode etc) were not really the same kind of problem. Those solutions were providing an additional service (file exchange) by protocols that ran on top of standard email protocol, rather than as alternatives or variants of it.
in reply to Jorge Stolfi

I think that multi-part content-types as embedded protocols rather than built-ins is more the consequence of a technical implementation choice (in the standards) than something fundamentally different in a logical sense.

The normative spec also explicitly acknowledges the lack of an expectation for full support of everything other instances might support (w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocaโ€ฆ).

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

ActivityPub is that standard. Just because the client you're using doesn't bother to make use of some of that standard, doesn't mean there's not one. If the email client you choose to use only displays in plain text with no formatting, does that mean there is something wrong with the standards for email message formatting? NO, you're just choosing to not use all the features you prefer.
in reply to Jupiter Rowland

tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

from a user perspective, not only do I then have to find an instance of something that supports those features and move to it, I also may need different client software.

Which I think IS confusing (echoing the complaint that mastodon is more confusing than twitter, for example.)

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon
@beerriot Thereโ€™s a lot of good points here and I too wish people would more regularly recognize the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. But this still misses something important. In a multi-system network like this, the capabilities *everyone else* has matter, too. Letโ€™s take what I consider the most obvious example:
in reply to Anthony Sorace

tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon

> You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".

Proper Quotes isnโ€™t just something to make my timeline look better, itโ€™s an entirely different avenue of conversation. Think about one of the commonly suggested work-arounds: reply and boost your reply. Thatโ€™s a *terrible* idea.

Unknown parent

I get the italics, bold, and block quotes, too. If somebody isn't getting that, and it's important enough to them, they can easily migrate to an instance that will provide the markup. I actually did that myself a couple of weeks ago, but for reasons unrelated to the capabilities of the social media server. My old account was on a Mastodon instance called musician.social, and my new account is running Akkoma, a hard fork of Pleroma.

Despite running a completely different implementation, Akkoma was capable of migrating my Mastodon followers, followed, and other settings over. My old posts couldn't be migrated, but I find this limitation acceptable. I can understand why some may be wary of migrating.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Flittermouse ๐Ÿ”ž๐Ÿฉ :ablobbass: :ablobdrum: :ablobkeyboard:

Perusing the description in this link, w3.org/TR/activitypub/ it seems to me that ActivityPub is a standard protocol for the exchange of FILES, leaving their interpretation entirely to users; rather than a protocol for exchange of MESSAGES (including blogposts, articles, etc) -- that is, textual/visual/auditory artifacts, possibly with embedded or attached files. Is this correct.? >>
in reply to Jorge Stolfi

In this regard (apart from interaction model), ActivityPub is more like old FTP, rather than SMTP+MIME, NNTP, the WWW, and the "social networks".

That is, AP does not try to ensure that a message sent by a user from a compliant server can be read faithfully (apart from non-semantic layout and looks) by recipients in every other server. Because the sender may use a message format that the receiver can't properly handle.

Is this correct?

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

I'm not an implementer, but it's my understanding that the recipient can tell the sender what it can handle, while the sender may include a source attribute containing the original content, as well as the transformed content that complies with the recipient's stated requirements.

I think somebody above referred to the notion of degrading gracefully, and that's certainly possible using such mechanisms.

Unknown parent

huh? I thought boosting didn't transmit the content, but sent a reference to the content, and an identifyer of who posted the reference.
People on platforms capable of displaying the original content, should not be effected by your platforms ability to interpret that content.
in reply to Flittermouse ๐Ÿ”ž๐Ÿฉ :ablobbass: :ablobdrum: :ablobkeyboard:

Yes, but that is still not good. Within ActivityPub, one cannot write a *message* that, a priori, is known to be correctly readable by any of the intended recipients -- unless it is a short (< 500 bytes) text in plain ascii, with no italics, boldface, or other markup, and no embedded images... >>

#Fediverse #ActivityPub #FediverseFragmentation

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

>> For the ActivityPub network to be a better alternative to social networks, or even to WWW, the ActivityPub standard should specify a *message* format -- such as HTML 3.0 -- that is rich enough for modern expectations (embedded images and hyperlinks, tables, etc.), but that every compliant implementation is required to handle and display properly, on any minimally powerful platform.

#Fediverse #ActivityPub
#FediverseFragmentation

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

Sorry. I have been using ">>" to indicate continuation in threads. A habit I carried over from the birdโŒซโŒซโŒซโŒซdogecoin site. My mastodon instance limits posts to 500 bytes.

Would "๐Ÿงตโ€>" be the proper way here?

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

@Jorge Stolfi, why do you continue to use Mastadon when it clearly doesn't meet your requirements? As everyone has been pointing out, there are many other ways to interact with the Fediverse that have the features you seem to want. Stop torturing yourself with Mastadon; investigate your options and move to an instance which has similar ideals to your own. Then you can be happy with the Fediverse and help to educate others on what you've experienced.
Unknown parent

Jorge Stolfi

@eshep

I wish someone had warned me of that 4 months ago, when I joined through mas.to. Oh well.

But the problem is not what kind of text **I** can read and write. It is **lack of interoperability**. It is the fact that, no matter in which server I am hosted, I cannot be sure that everyone who gets my posts will be able to read them correctly -- unless I write only 500 chars of plain ascii.

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

@Jorge Stolfi, did you not look into any other instances before choosing mast.to? What made you decide that it was the right place for you? Maybe using the most limiting implementation is the correct choice for that goal. Public audience webpages should probably only be written in plaintext without images as well ensuring everyone is able to read them.
in reply to Jupiter Rowland

I encourage you to leave the Fediverse filter bubble every now and then. IMHO it can be useful to look further outside the box: Remember - the conventional media - newspapers, letters on paper, radio, TV, ah yes - and personal communication - they still exist. Maybe it makes sense in some communication scenarios to simply fall back on the old proven means of communication instead of encapsulating yourself in the Fediverse bubble? Instead of burning time and programming capacities in attempts to teach the many platforms certain features, e.g. "quote-tweets".
in reply to eshep

@eshep I guess that @Jorge Stolfi was a) told that #Mastodon is the #Fediverse and b) given mas.to as the URL to go to instead of joinmastodon.org.

So whoever guided him to Mastodon either didn't know better themselves or wanted to make it as easy for newcomers as possible, short-cutting the instance selection process by directing them immediately to one instance and not even telling them that such a thing as instances exist.

It happened on Twitter all the time, also because there's only so much you can explain in 280 characters. That's why you have people who joined in November during the #TwitterMigration, who didn't find out about instances and Mastodon's decentral nature until February, and who didn't find out that there's more to the Fediverse than only Mastodon until March.

They were guided by tweets such as

go to mastodon its literally twitter without musk


or in this case

go to mastodon its literally twitter without musk
in reply to Jupiter Rowland

@Jupiter Rowland, to be fair, Mastadon is about as twitter as AP gets. :D It almost feels like the twitteriness of mastodon is there intentionally to give people who've been directed to it as an alternative a bad taste for it so they either head back or persist in their dislike of that system.

It really burns my ass when I see posts like those. People pushing things they know nothing about. It's really quite sad how few people understand the "federation" part of FediVerse.

in reply to eshep

Indeed I had never heard of the Fediverse or Mastodon when I decided to leave Twitter. Some contacts who did that suggested I move to mastodon. How could I choose between instances before joining them? ๐Ÿงตโ€>
in reply to Jorge Stolfi

๐Ÿงตโ€> Wepages HAVE a basic standard (HTML 3.0, or the equivalent subset of HTML 5.0) that includes bold, italic, images, section headers, tables, lists, etc. By writing my web posts using that subset, I am sure that they can be read in practically every graphics browser, on mostly any platform. The looks may be different, but the semantic contents will get through. ๐Ÿงตโ€>
in reply to Jorge Stolfi

๐Ÿงตโ€> It seems that for the Fediverse, maybe even for Mastodon, the only message format that can be read by everybody is 500 chars plain Unicode without any markup. Plus maybe one poll and a few images -- but only at the end of the post and with fixed size.

I will probably move to some other instance soon. However, the above constraint applies *no matter where I have my account.* That is the problem...

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

Say you do move to an instance where you're able to read/write >5000 char/post yet you choose to restrict your posts to a size compatible with instances that have made a choice to not be able to read more than say 500 char/post. Are you not then encouraging that restriction to remain as it is? Why not create your posts in full and educate your readers who have that issue as to why they're not able to read it? That would at least be an active effort in promoting a correction to the problem. Simply complaining that others have what you want does nothing to help anyone.
in reply to Jorge Stolfi

@Jorge Stolfi @eshep @Elena ``of Valhalla'' @๐—๐—ฎ๐—ธ๐—ผ๐—ฏ :๐—ณ๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐—ฒ๐—ป๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ: ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡น โœ… @Charlie Stross For example, instead of pointing you straight at one instance, someone could have pointed you here (for Mastodon only):

Now, choosing a project rather than an instance of one set project is more difficult without knowing anything about any of them other that they're probably not owned by Elon Musk.

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

I'm no longer on Mastodon, but when I used musician.social sometimes a longer post would show up. I think it was split up into 500-character chunks somehow. You're right about the interoperability problem.

But the upside is that we can just move to a different server and take our followers with us. I'm sorry if people think that's irrelevant, but it's a really good selling point for me. The degree to which I can communicate with people is in my own hands.

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

@Jorge Stolfi @eshep @Elena ``of Valhalla'' @๐—๐—ฎ๐—ธ๐—ผ๐—ฏ :๐—ณ๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐—ฒ๐—ป๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ: ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡น โœ… @Charlie Stross Nope.

People on mastodon.social which may be the most vanilla of Mastodon instances can read 6,000-character rants written by me with no problems, with nothing cut off.

And everyone on Pleroma, Akkoma, MissKey, CalcKey, FoundKey, GoToSocial, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), certain Mastodon forks, the last remaining Redmatrix/Osada/Zap/Misty/Roadhouse instance etc. etc., pretty much everywhere that isn't vanilla Mastodon, can see each other's posts with rich-text formatting all right. It's just vanilla Mastodon that's left out.

The compatibility issues we have mostly come from Mastodon flat-out refusing to cooperate with other projects and, as it seems, deliberately staying incompatible to make everything that isn't Mastodon look bad to Mastodon users. How good can e.g. Friendica be if posts coming from there look so weird on Mastodon?

Mastodon can get away with it for two reasons. One, 99.99% of all new arrivals in the Fediverse land on Mastodon and "know" that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. Once they learn about other Fediverse projects, they believe that these were all created after Mastodon, after the Twitter Migration even, and that they're Mastodon add-ons.

Two, the ActivityPub standard can be stretched to kingdom come. It leaves a lot of things undefined. And this is unlikely to change because nobody is there to maintain and develop ActivityPub anymore. Nothing that Mastodon does goes against the ActivityPub standard.

Thus, everything that isn't Mastodon has to put up with Mastodon's shenanigans and build itself against them, even if it's older than Mastodon and requires a plug-in to understand ActivityPub like Friendica and Hubzilla, or become fully incompatible in the long run. Or at the very least, its instances will be Fediblocked by Mastodon instances because "some weird shit" is coming from them due to increasing incompatibility.

Unknown parent

Jorge Stolfi

Thanks for the patient advice!

Here on mas.to I cannot read your long messages directly on the timeline. Only the first 500 chars show. I must click on the post and then it is displayed whole in a separate sub-window. Still without markup etc.

๐Ÿงตโ€>

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

๐Ÿงตโ€> But I must dispute "They all can interact together as you are used to interact only from twitter to twiter..." Again, even if I move to friendica, but want my posts to be correctly readable by anyone on the Fediverse, I must still stick to the small Mastodon format...

That is worse than what I had on Usenet or email, 35 years ago.. โ˜น๏ธ

Any chance that Mastodon and the other instances can agree to support a common HTML-3 like message format?

in reply to eshep

@eshep That's what I do. And it's always the same.

"How can you possibly write more than 500 characters in a toot?"

I'm on Hubzilla.

"Oh, is that a special Mastodon instance with a higher character limit?"

No, it's a different, fully separate Fediverse project that not only is not Mastodon, but that's four years older than Mastodon with next to no character limit and features that exceed your wildest dreams. #^hubzilla.org

[beat] "You're not on Mastodon?"

No.

"But how can I read your posts then if you aren't on Mastodon?"

Because Hubzilla, like many other projects that aren't Mastodon, connects to Mastodon. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. There are many many other projects out there. All of them can talk to Mastodon, and Mastodon can talk to all of them.

[Worldview-shattering noises] "HOLY SWEET JOHN MASTODON ON A POGO STICK, BATMAN! WHAT THE EVER-LOVING FUCK?!?!?!"

in reply to Jorge Stolfi

@Jorge Stolfi
I can't tell you exactly how it works as I'm relatively new here, documentation seems sparse, and I'm unwilling to dig through source code to find out, but my understanding is ActivityPub absolutely supports passing along whatever kind of markup you could possibly want.

The common practice implemented for most of the Fediverse seems to be to translate whatever local markup is being used (eg BBCode on Frendica) into Markdown (I think?) to pass formatting along to other parts of the Fediverse which seems to be well supported by basically everything except Mastodon. It's a choice by the Mastodon devs alone not to adhere to the established convention and turn that back into whatever markup format is needed on their end.

@๐—๐—ฎ๐—ธ๐—ผ๐—ฏ :๐—ณ๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐—ฒ๐—ป๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ: ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡น โœ…

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

I suggest, instead of presuming, and fellow humans who develop Mastodon, to assume

The compatibility issues we have mostly come from Mastodon flat-out refusing to cooperate with other projects and, as it seems, deliberately staying incompatible to make everything that isn't Mastodon look bad to Mastodon users.


Then, in the next step, to waste infinite time in discussions about technical details, simply to try to reach through some channel the people who develop Mastodon and try to clarify whether the thesis, whether the assumption

... as it seems, deliberately staying incompatible to make everything that isn't Mastodon look bad to Mastodon users.


is correct.

Do we agree - the compatibility problems are not caused by technical issues, but by human ones? It does suggest that there is a better chance of solving these compatibility problems on a human level, rather than spending time in discussions that go round and round in circles of "Which technical features of a particular platform are better".

Once they learn about other Fediverse projects, they believe that these were all created after Mastodon, after the Twitter Migration even, and that they're Mastodon add-ons.


Do we agree - the age of a protocol, a platform, a standard - whether this is ActivityPub, Hubzilla or any other platform, is no proof that this platform is better than a younger platform - e.g. Mastodon?

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