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23 hours agoNOOOOOOOOOO WE MUST ALWAYS REPLACE $Product WITH “$Product BUT IT’S FEDERATED WITH MASTODON”!!!111
Jupiter Rowland
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 25th, 2023
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Also, Threads has introduced extremely strict rules for servers that want to federate.
Entire Fediverse server applications are incapable of following all these rules, either technologically or by concept.
For example, IIRC, Threads demanded a full public timeline. Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do have that feature in code. But it’s intentionally turned off server-wide by default, and there’s a very good reason for this and for just about no serious admins of public servers ever turning it on.
Lemmy is all about groups. It doesn’t have any way to connect to and interact with single users.
Mastodon, on the contrary, is all about single users following single users. It has no support for groups whatsoever. Mastodon users can follow Lemmy communities, yes. They can reply to posts, but in a very Mastodon way (automatic mentions, they’ll probably insert hashtags etc.). Seeing (almost) the entire conversation is the default on Lemmy and extremely tedious and anything but straight-forward on Mastodon. And starting a new thread in a Lemmy community from Mastodon is difficult, nobody knows how to do it right, and whoever tries it will clash with Lemmy’s culture.
Stuff like Friendica or Hubzilla is somewhat more general-purpose. It can do both. But I’ve yet to see a Lemmy user subscribe to a Friendica group or a Hubzilla forum (the opposite does work).
Pleroma.
Or, if you ask some Mastodon fundamentalists, everything that isn’t Mastodon or Pixelfed is inherently right-wing.
Or copy-paste GPL code, alter it and keep it closed.
And he wants to market it as his own, original, scratch-made, “nothing even close to this has ever only even been attempted before” creation.
And because almost nobody outside the Fediverse has ever heard about anything in the Fediverse, he’ll succeed. To the point where people will laugh about Mastodon being a Haven Social rip-off because they’ve heard of Haven Social first and Mastodon later.
These odds are still extremely slim. Even if there was one Pillowfort user who has heard of Wafrn, that one voice wouldn’t be loud enough to reach the whole crowd in time before they all move to something that’s nothing like Tumblr or Pillowfort (e.g. Mastodon, Bluesky). And I don’t think that there are that many more people on Pillowfort who have heard of Wafrn. Especially considering how few people on Mastodon, much less Lemmy, have heard of it.
Is the Pillowfort community discussing a collective move to the Fediverse, to someplace in the Fediverse that is not Mastodon, to someplace in the Fediverse that has largely got the same features as Tumblr?
My personal experience, and I’ve got a lot of personal experience in this, is that free, open-source, decentralised alternatives are vastly less well-known than those think who know them inside-out.
Most of the time, when people are forced to escape a centralised silo, they tend to move to another centralised silo instead. For it’s the centralised silos that are well-known because it’s them that tend to have advertisement budgets, it’s them that know best how to manipulate Google by SEO means, and it’s them that mass media and/or tech media prefer to talk and write about because they’re easier to understand.
The majority of Mastodon users don’t know anything about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. For them, the Fediverse is Mastodon. If they had any reason to move away from Mastodon, they’d be stuck between joining Bluesky, going back to X or staying on Mastodon because they don’t have the foggiest idea of what else the Fediverse itself has to offer that might suit them better.
Outside of the Fediverse, knowledge about the Fediverse is dominated by
- not even having heard of Mastodon, much less the Fediverse
- having heard of Mastodon, but not of the Fediverse
- having heard of Mastodon and thinking Mastodon is the Fediverse
Another example: Flashback to the early 2010s. People wanted to leave Facebook for greener pastures that didn’t snoop on them as egregiously. At first they went nowhere because “there was nowhere to go”. Then, when Google+ was launched, they went to Google+. Sure, it was a Google product that definitely would snoop on them. But hey, at least it wasn’t Facebook, and Google would probably snoop less than Facebook! Besides, “there was nowhere else to go”.
All regardless of diaspora* existing. All regardless of diaspora* shaking up mass media in summer 2010 when the four devs announced a free, non-commercial “Facebook killer” and asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding to develop it, and they got over $200,000. (This is also why the only people who know that Google+ was an all-out diaspora* rip-off are current or former diaspora* users.) All regardless of Friendica existing.
Considering all this, chances that the Pillowfort community has heard of Wafrn are next to nil.
Not likely enough, though.
I’ve watched Mastodon and its users for years now. From my experience, for more than 50% of all Mastodon users, the Fediverse equals Mastodon. That doesn’t mean that they don’t count Lemmy as part of the Fediverse. It rather means that they’ve literally never even heard about Lemmy. They haven’t heard of any Fediverse software other than Mastodon.
There are lots of ATmosphere users who haven’t even heard of Mastodon, much less the Fediverse.
Another example: I’m an active user of a virtual world system named OpenSimulator. It’s extremely similar to Second Life, also because it uses the same viewers. It’s free-as-in-license as well as free-as-in-free-beer and free-as-in-most-grids-don’t-even-have-in-world-payment. It’s open-source. It’s decentralised to the point where your avatar can teleport to other grids (= worlds = server instances). And yet, the vast majority of OpenSim users have never heard of Mastodon either, much less the Fediverse.
I bet that next to nobody on Pillowfort has ever heard of the Fediverse, and that absolutely nobody has ever heard of anything else in the Fediverse than Mastodon.
FediDB seems to be opinionated as well. It seems like if Daniel doesn’t like a server app, he won’t add it. AFAIK, he has been notified about the existence of Forte, but he still hasn’t added it.
There’s also the FediIndex which, however, isn’t as convenient to use.
The issue isn’t instances.
The issue is that Lemmy isn’t designed for interaction with single actors, e.g. Mastodon users or PeerTube channels. Lemmy can only interact with groups, and that’s by design because it’s a purist Reddit/Hacker News clone.
If you have one account someplace that isn’t Lemmy or Mbin (or something similarly specialised), you can connect to and interact with just about everything everywhere.
Just because they know the Fediverse, doesn’t mean they know Lemmy.
For more than 50% of all Mastodon users (that’s more than 25% of all Fediverse users), the Fediverse equals Mastodon. For large parts of the rest, if it doesn’t behave like Mastodon, it’s disturbing.
Besides, how are they supposed to learn about Lemmy anyway? Yes, in theory, Mastodon and Lemmy are federated. In theory.
In fact, however, they’re almost completely incompatible. Lemmy is all about groups. It doesn’t support any interaction between users directly. Mastodon, on the other hand, is about users interacting with each other directly. It has no support for groups whatsoever. At all. Nada. Zilch.
One of many reasons why there’s almost no interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy that’d demonstrate to Mastodon users that Lemmy exists by confronting them with Lemmy content.
By the way, the latter won’t work anyway. Mastodon doesn’t show you what software a message came from. Thus, most Mastodon users assume that everything they see comes from Mastodon.
Mastodon. Hands down.
Mastodon has more monthly active users than the entire rest of the Fediverse combined. There are lots of people for whom the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Most of the time, when someone hears about the Fediverse for the first time, it’s explained to them as only Mastodon, allegedly because that’s easier to understand. And there are vastly more people who have heard of Mastodon, but not the Fediverse, than who have heard of any other Fediverse software, but not the Fediverse.
There are tons of phone apps made for Mastodon and only Mastodon. There are websites that have “Fedi” in their name, but that are built hard against only Mastodon, and if they’re compatible with anything else, it’s by chance. diaspora* (remember 2010 when those four kids announced a free, open-source, decentralised “Facebook killer”, asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding and got over $200,000) refuses to join the Fediverse because, according to one dev, Fediverse developers don’t “implement ActivityPub”, they “implement Mastodon”.
Lots of people say that claiming that Mastodon is the Fediverse is justified.
Here are the numbers from the FediIndex:
- Most active instances: Mastodon (36.98%; Lemmy is 9th with 1.11%)
- Most accounts: Mastodon (51.16%; Lemmy is 7th with 1.77%)
- Most monthly active accounts (not counting Misskey and GoToSocial whose stats are off): Mastodon (51.17%; Lemmy is 5th with 2.37%)
- Most posts: Mastodon (60.48%; Lemmy is 10th with 0.54%)
It’s the most powerful and feature-rich Fediverse server application ever, hands down. Also because it has features implemented that go vastly beyond what ActivityPub is capable of.
It was made by Friendica’s own creator by first forking Friendica twice over in 2011, then completely re-writing the second fork in 2012 and then expanding the re-written second fork in 2015.
While it was the first application to ever implement ActivityPub (July, 2017; two months before Mastodon), it has always been based on its own protocol, Zot, that was invented by Hubzilla’s own creator in 2011.
It’s Friendica, much more modular, with nomadic identity, with a staggering permissions system, expanded into a full-blown “social content management system” with all bells and whistles.
It’s basically Facebook meets WordPress meets Nextcloud meets a whole lot of other things.
Features:
- Can be used both like Mastodon (follow people/accounts) and like Lemmy (join groups), and that’s just the beginning
- Account and identity are not the same
- One account can contain multiple fully independent identities (kind of “accounts within an account”, only they’re called “channels”)
- Nomadic identity: A channel can exist on multiple fully independent servers simultaneously; the instances of the channel are mutual live and hot backups of each other; this also makes moving identities from one server to another vastly more complete than on most other Fediverse server applications
- OpenWebAuth magic sign-on: Hubzilla logins are recognised by (streams) and Forte and itself; Hubzilla itself recognises logins on Mitra, Friendica, (streams), Forte and itself
- ActivityPub connectivity is only optional; can be used as an “anti-Mastodon drawbridge”
- Optional connectivity to diaspora*
- Optional crossposters to WordPress, LiveJournal, Libertree and DreamWidth
- Can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds
- Each channel generates two Atom feeds itself, one for posts, one for comments
- Content from any contact can be automatically reposted (“channel sources”)
- Can be installed as a progressive Web app
- Multiple profiles per channel; one default public profile and any number of additional private profiles that can be assigned to certain contacts so that they can know things about you that the general public must not necessarily know
- Extensive profiles which can be made even more extensive (multiple dozen dedicated fields) optionally
- Channels can hide from directories
- Channels can be flagged NSFW
- The second-most advanced permissions system in the whole Fediverse; it works on three levels (for the whole channel, for each contact individually, for certain content)
- Discussion groups (called “community forums”) which are channels with a special channel type/with special channel settings
- Four channel types to choose from: public, private, community forum and a custom type in which 17 permission settings can be adjusted individually
- The custom channel type allows for various degrees of private and/or moderated groups
- The permissions system makes it possible to grant full administration permission for your channel to any contact with client-side OpenWebAuth support; this also makes it possible to appoint additional admins/moderators for community forums
- Channel-wide filter, consisting of one blocklist and one allowlist; optional individual filter with blocklist and allowlist per contact (as in, you can follow someone and then filter them and only them); the filter system has loads of options from regex to a special filter syntax with Boolean operators, making it one of the most advanced and powerful filter systems in the Fediverse
- Enclosed threaded conversations like on blogs/Facebook/Tumblr/Reddit/Hacker News/Slashdot/etc. with one post and otherwise comments; supports FEP-171b “Conversation Containers”
- Fully capable of long-form blogging
- Hashtag cloud
- Optional list or cloud of internal, non-federating keywords
- Can both render and generate the full gamut of HTML text formatting
- Supports both titles and summaries in separate fields (the summary field is the same field that Mastodon has been misusing as a CW field since 2017)
- No character limits worth mentioning (technically, the character limit for message texts is 16,777,215)
- Images can be embedded within the message text of any post or comment like in a blog post; no limit for how many images can be embedded
- No limit for poll options either
- Full support for forum-style quotes
- Full support for quote-tweet-style quote-posts; these are dumb copies of the original message
- Stream sorting options:
- Complete conversations, most recent comment first (default)
- Complete conversations, most recent post first
- Single-message piecemeal à la Mastodon
- Stream filtering options:
- DMs
- Messages/conversations from a certain privacy group
- Messages/conversations from a certain community forum
- Messages marked with a star (a kind of primitive bookmark)
- Your own messages
- Messages filed into a “folder” (a more advanced bookmarking system)
- Messages/conversations from a certain contact
- Built-in cloud file space with support for subfolders at any depth, WebDAV access and its own file manager; the file space is also used to store images and other media embedded in messages; permissions apply here as well, and guest read-access tokens can be granted
- Event calendar with support for Event-type ActivityStreams objects
- CalDAV calendar server which uses the event calendar frontend
- Optional CardDAV addressbook server
- Optional articles (non-federating written pieces of virtually unlimited length; can be used for blogging without throwing excessively long posts at Mastodon users)
- Optional planning cards (similar to articles, but with a few extra features)
- Optional wikis (any number of independent wikis per channel with any number of pages each)
- Optional static webpages that can include dynamic content from elsewhere on the channel; the feature can also be used to pimp up the channel itself
- Optional notes
- Optional OpenStreetMap support
- Optional QR code generator
- Extensive customisation options for what the channel looks like even with the default Redbasic theme, and that doesn’t even take third-party themes into account which basically give Hubzilla an entirely new Web UI
Friendica has only got four advantages over Hubzilla. One, it supports the Mastodon client API (although that’s half-useless because Mastodon apps don’t even cover 20% of Friendica’s features). Two, it has mobile apps of its own, although stable releases only exist for Android; on Hubzilla, there’s only the Web UI for everyone anywhere. Three, it has even more connection options like being able to integrate a Bluesky account and “remote-control” it. Four, it’s easier to use; this is also because Hubzilla is highly modular with tons of optional, off-by-default stuff whereas just about everything is hard-coded to permanently on on Friendica.
Otherwise, Friendica is no real match for Hubzilla, and Bonfire is even less of a match.
There’s using AI assistance for clean coding and following all the other guidelines of good software development otherwise.
And there’s giving Claude Code a simple prompt to generate a ready-to-run application and uploading the result to GitHub as-is because you want to be a coder, but you don’t know jack shit about coding or software development or licenses.