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1. Embed this notice
   Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Saturday, 18-Mar-2023 02:19:25 JST Jupiter Rowland
   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.
   • Embed this notice
     Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified: (mattl@social.mat.tl)'s status on Saturday, 18-Mar-2023 02:19:24 JST Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified:

     in reply to

     I’m not sure most people want a lot of that extra stuff though, and it’s super confusing for new people otherwise.

   • Embed this notice
     Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:13 JST Jupiter Rowland

     in reply to

     • Jorge Stolfi
     • 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 #^https://mastodon.social
     or in this case
     go to mastodon its literally twitter without musk #^https://mas.to
     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     eshep (eshep@social.trom.tf)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:18 JST eshep

     in reply to

     • jakob
     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross
     • Jorge Stolfi
     • eshep
     @valhalla @jakob @jupiter_rowland @cstross @JorgeStolfi, 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.
   • Embed this notice
     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:19 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • jakob
     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross
     • eshep
     • bitnik

     @jakob @valhalla @jupiter_rowland @cstross @bitnik @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.

   • Embed this notice
     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:20 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • jakob
     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross
     • bitnik

     @bitnik @jupiter_rowland @valhalla @jakob @cstross

     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?

   • Embed this notice
     jakob (jakob@soc.schuerz.at)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:20 JST jakob

     in reply to

     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross
     • Jorge Stolfi
     • bitnik

     @JorgeStolfi
     Use an instance with much more than 500 Chars...
     They are existing.

     There are forked Mastodons outside, which can and have configures max character-size up to 5000 or more chars.
     There are pleroma-Instances outside, which hast default 3000 or 5000 Chars i think. And many admins have set up the limit much higher.
     There are forks of pleroma, with more allowed characters.
     There is Friendica out in the Fediverse, which has NO limit.
     There is hubzilla, zot, misskey... they all have more or no limit for characters in postings...

     You can try them all. You are as connected to the fediverse, as with your actual mastodon-instance... don't be afraid to test other instances or even other software than mastodon...

     And if you find an instance or software, wich fits your needs better... just move your followers and followings to this new instance. There are Howtos and Scripts for exactly this: moving your account to another instance.
     @valhalla @jupiter_rowland @cstross @bitnik

   • Embed this notice
     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:21 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • jakob
     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross
     • bitnik

     @bitnik @jupiter_rowland @valhalla @jakob @cstross

     >> 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

   • Embed this notice
     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:22 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • jakob
     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross
     • bitnik

     @bitnik @jupiter_rowland @valhalla @jakob @cstross

     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

   • Embed this notice
     bitnik (bitnik@akko.unix.dog)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:27 JST bitnik

     in reply to

     • jakob
     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross
     • Jorge Stolfi
     @JorgeStolfi @jupiter_rowland @valhalla @jakob @cstross 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.
   • Embed this notice
     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:28 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • jakob
     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross
     • bitnik

     @bitnik @jupiter_rowland @valhalla @jakob @cstross
     Perusing the description in this link, https://www.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.? >>

   • Embed this notice
     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:28 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • jakob
     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross
     • bitnik

     @bitnik @jupiter_rowland @valhalla @jakob @cstross

     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?

   • Embed this notice
     bitnik (bitnik@akko.unix.dog)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:29 JST bitnik

     in reply to

     • jakob
     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross
     • Jorge Stolfi
     @jakob @jupiter_rowland @JorgeStolfi @valhalla @cstross
     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.
   • Embed this notice
     jakob (jakob@soc.schuerz.at)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:30 JST jakob

     in reply to

     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross
     • Jorge Stolfi

     @JorgeStolfi
     This is, what my friendica shows me, and your mastodon removes from raw activity-pub message.

     @valhalla @jupiter_rowland @cstross

   • Embed this notice
     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:31 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • valhalla
     • Charlie Stross

     @valhalla @jupiter_rowland @cstross

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

   • Embed this notice
     valhalla (valhalla@social.gl-como.it)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:33 JST valhalla

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross
     • Jorge Stolfi
     @JorgeStolfi @jupiter_rowland @cstross
     
     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)
   • Embed this notice
     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:34 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @cstross @jupiter_rowland

     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?

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:35 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • Jorge Stolfi

     @JorgeStolfi @jupiter_rowland 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 …? Graceful degradation of capabilities isn't an new requirement …)

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:36 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • Jorge Stolfi

     @JorgeStolfi @jupiter_rowland Nope, you got it wrong. Hint: count the number of characters in the toot you just replied to—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 fine—everyone else can see you just fine.

   • Embed this notice
     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:36 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @cstross @jupiter_rowland

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

   • Embed this notice
     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 07-Apr-2023 03:29:37 JST Jorge Stolfi

     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