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 (

https://akkoma.social/

Join an Akkoma instance today to start expressing yourself alongside a community of like-minded people.

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

https://pleroma.social/

【Misskeyプロジェクト公式】Misskey Hub: https://misskey.page/

【ノートでひろがるネットワーク】分散型SNS Misskeyの公式サイト。Misskeyのはじめかたやサーバー一覧など、Misskeyに関する情報が満載！

Codeberg.org: https://calckey.cloud/

MOVED REPO: https://firefish.dev/firefish/firefish

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

Akkoma - Magically Expressive Social Media

^{akkoma.social}

@Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; 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.

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

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

@Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; 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.

@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: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; 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.

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?

@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.

@Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; 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.

@Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; 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.

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?

@Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; 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.

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.

@jupiter_rowland

• click url
• unable to favorite tweet due to being permanently banned by the single twitter instance in existence.

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

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

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.)

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.

Musician.Social

MUSICIAN.SOCIAL is an instance focused on Musicians who create, play, or love #jazz, #rock, #pop, #indie, #classical and all other types of #music

^{Mastodon hosted on musician.social}

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?

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.

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

>> 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

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

Would "🧵‍>" be the proper way here?

@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.

@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

Mastodon hosted on mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social

The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

or in this case

go to mastodon its literally twitter without musk

Mastodon hosted on mas.to: https://mas.to

Hello! mas.to is a fast, up-to-date and fun Mastodon server.

Mastodon

^{Mastodon hosted on mastodon.social}

@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.

🧵‍> 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...

@Jorge Stolfi @eshep @Elena ``of Valhalla'' @𝗝𝗮𝗸𝗼𝗯 :𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮: 🇦🇹 ✅ @Charlie Stross For example, instead of pointing you straight at one instance, someone could have pointed you here (for Mastodon only):

https://joinmastodon.org/servers

Find where to sign up for the decentralized social network Mastodon.

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.

Servers

^{joinmastodon.org}

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.

Musician.Social

MUSICIAN.SOCIAL is an instance focused on Musicians who create, play, or love #jazz, #rock, #pop, #indie, #classical and all other types of #music

^{Mastodon hosted on musician.social}

@Jorge Stolfi @eshep @Elena ``of Valhalla'' @𝗝𝗮𝗸𝗼𝗯 :𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮: 🇦🇹 ✅ @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.

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.

🧵‍>

🧵‍> 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.. ☹️

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

@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.

https://fediverse.party

Let's make social media free, federated and fun! Fediverse.Party is your guide into the world of decentralized, autonomous networks running on free open software on a myriad of servers across the world. No ads and no algorithms.

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

- Fediverse.Party - explore federated networks

^{fediverse.party}

@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.

@𝗝𝗮𝗸𝗼𝗯 :𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮: 🇦🇹 ✅