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   Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Monday, 04-Mar-2024 15:12:36 JST Jupiter Rowland
   Maybe I should start an irregular series of "What Hubzilla is like" posts for people in the Fediverse, Mastodon specifically, who don't know anything about it. Not for those who want to switch, but for those who assume that Hubzilla is just like whatever else they know. Like, for Mastodon users who blindly assume that Hubzilla is just like Mastodon with a different UI and then act accordingly. Thus, it'd mostly focus on how Hubzilla is different from Mastodon.
   
   The difficult part would be to limit these posts to only 500 characters. Minus what I'll need for the hashtags, namely #Hubzilla, #FediTips and #FediverseTips to increase discoverability for those who are interested and #FediMeta, #FediverseMeta, #CWFediMeta and #CWFediverseMeta so that these posts are automatically removed or hidden behind generated content warnings by already existing filters. Because I know for a fact that many Mastodon users won't touch anything that goes even a smidge over 500 characters. And I know that there are Mastodon users for whom any and all Fediverse meta is too nerve-gratingly techy.
   
   #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta
   • Embed this notice
     Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Monday, 04-Mar-2024 15:12:29 JST Jupiter Rowland

     in reply to

     • eshep
     @eshep There were another two threads about Bridgy Fed creating a bridge to Bluesky. And again, people loudly demanded the Fediverse be ActivityPub only.
     
     Thing is, the Fediverse has never been ActivityPub only. Mastodon started in 2016 with OStatus because, like Pleroma earlier the same year, it started as an alternative frontend for GNU social. So GNU social was based on OStatus, and both Friendica and Hubzilla already knew it, too. At that point, the term "Fediverse" was already some four years old.
     
     It was only in September of 2018 that Mastodon announced the introduction of ActivityPub as an additional protocol. Hubzilla had done so two months earlier, so Mastodon has never even been the only ActivityPub project.
     
     But the vast majority of Mastodon users seems to think that Eugen Rochko invented a) Mastodon, b) ActivityPub and c) the Fediverse and d) did so in 2022 as a reaction upon Musk's announcement to take over Twitter. And literally everything else in the Fediverse was made after Mastodon.
     
     Not only that, but the Bluesky bridge threads made it painfully obvious that a two-digit percentage of Mastodon users is still fully convinced that the Fediverse is actually nothing but Mastodon. Because they clearly want to fight for it remaining that way, unaware that is isn't that way.
     
     I think when Hubzilla and Friendica users joined the threads and started commenting, these folks either ended up deeply disturbed with their worldviews shattered to rubble upon the revelation that there's more in the Fediverse than Mastodon already now. Or they didn't even notice that these posts a) talked about non-Mastodon Fediverse projects which are reality now and b) came from outside of Mastodon, no matter how blatantly obvious it was that these posts could impossibly have been sent from Mastodon.
     
     The rest might be aware that there's more to the Fediverse than Mastodon. But this "more" is limited to Pixelfed and PeerTube and what they think must essentially be Mastodon with a different UI.
     
     It was just as painfully obvious that just about none of the Mastodon users who posted on these threads and railed loudly against bridges of any kind knows that stuff is bridged to Mastodon already now and has been bridged to Mastodon since Mastodon's own launch. This stuff currently is Hubzilla and (streams), none of which are based on ActivityPub.
     
     Granted, in these cases, we aren't talking about one big third-party bridge for everyone. The bridge in question is named "PubCrawl", it's a first-party add-on to both Hubzilla and (streams) that comes with the server application itself, so while not firmly baked into their cores, it's an official part of them, and there's one individual bridge for each channel. But yes, there are bridges.
     
     This is one thing I'd like to explain in such a "snippet". Other things would be, for example:
     

     • Mastodon was launched in 2016. Hubzilla was both launched and had its first stable point release in 2015, and it's a fork of the now-defunct Red Matrix from 2012 which is a fork of Friendica from 2010. Also, Mastodon announced ActivityPub integration in September, 2018; Hubzilla did so in July. In both cases, Hubzilla was there first. It is not an intruder. Deal with it.
       
     • Mastodon generally has a 500-character limit; its whole culture is built around this limit. Hubzilla doesn't have any character limit; its culture doesn't know any character limits.
       
     • Mastodon has a dedicated content warning field. But that content warning field is actually a re-appropriated summary field because nobody needs a summary for 500 characters. On Hubzilla, it still is a summary field. And Hubzilla does content warnings reader-side and automatically by detecting keywords in posts, and optionally so. Thus, writing Mastodon-style content warnings is not part of Hubzilla's culture. But giving summaries for long posts in what Mastodon perceives as a content warning is part of Hubzilla's culture.
       
     • An explanation why Hubzilla can't add Mastodon-style content warnings to replies which includes a description of Hubzilla's conversation model in comparison with Mastodon's.
       
     • Hubzilla has always had full-text search with no opt-out. This is, of course, limited to whatever any given hub knows, but it does never exclude Mastodon toots.
       
     • Hubzilla has always had text formatting. It has always been part of its culture. And large parts of its text formatting capabilities aren't even shown on Mastodon.
       
     • Hubzilla's weird-looking mentions and hashtags are hard-coded and have been since six years before Mastodon.
       
     • "Quote-tweets" have always been part of Hubzilla's culture because Hubzilla does that instead of "retweeting" or "boosting" because it can't boost (again yet). It always links to both the original post and the original poster. There will never be a way for anyone on Mastodon to opt out of it.
       
     • Hubzilla can quote anyone anywhere in the Fediverse with no resistance whatsoever. It has always been able to do that. There will never be a way for anyone on Mastodon to opt out of it.

     
     Now, this is not meant to be advertisement. It's more like a series of public service announcements to raise Hubzilla awareness.
     
     I'm well aware that it could also have the effect of triggering or increasing anti-Hubzilla campaigning on Mastodon. I mean, most Mastodon users probably don't even know that Hubzilla exists, and most of who do don't know what Hubzilla can do. And large parts of what it can do fall under "atrocities" and "breaking the Fediquette" from a Mastodon point of view. Mastodon doesn't riot against that stuff because it doesn't know about that stuff.
     
     But if such riots broke out because Hubzilla is so not like Mastodon and even refuses to be more like Mastodon, that'd tell a lot about Mastodon.
     
     #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla
   • Embed this notice
     eshep (eshep@social.trom.tf)'s status on Monday, 04-Mar-2024 15:12:30 JST eshep

     in reply to

     • Regezi

     @jupiter_rowland @Regez I don't get much ridiculousness on my feed(?), it's not too difficult to weed out, but I saw a rather disheartening thing show up recently that was encouraging people to "fight back"/"take a stand" against #Meta connecting to #Mastodon.

     No, that's not what #ActivityPub is for, the whole idea is to allow communication across different services. There seems to be quite a few people who do not want non-Mastodon things in the #fediverse. I'm not so sure that it's simply a matter of ignorance, although that probably has a bit to do with it.

     Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta 사요한🦣 repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Regezi (regez@troet.cafe)'s status on Monday, 04-Mar-2024 15:12:31 JST Regezi

     in reply to

     @jupiter_rowland
     When I look into my own timeline bubble, there are ~99% Mastodon interactions in here...
     I think it's a shame that there isn't more cross-network communication within the Fediverse - but I also wonder if "Mastodonys" don't enjoy such a high status in the rest of the network (I don't know, I can only guess)...actually, an exchange with as many other accounts on other networks as possible would be more than desirable (and not just felt by a few)...

     Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta 사요한🦣 repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Monday, 04-Mar-2024 15:12:33 JST Jupiter Rowland

     in reply to

     • Regezi
     @Regezi
     which perhaps other networks can do...
     ...and have to do.
     
     Next to nobody on Mastodon talks about anything that isn't Mastodon or whatever Mastodon doesn't want to federate with (Threads, Bluesky).
     
     The only exceptions are devs who advertise their Fedi projects. And even they only use Mastodon if a) their project isn't ready yet, and/or b) it's too much different from Mastodon to be used for advertising.
     
     Everyone else who talks about the non-Mastodon Fediverse isn't on Mastodon.
   • Embed this notice
     Regezi (regez@troet.cafe)'s status on Monday, 04-Mar-2024 15:12:34 JST Regezi

     in reply to

     @jupiter_rowland
     I had to smile about your last sentence 😁...and yes, "Mastodonia" does indeed get too little oxygen supply from "outside", which perhaps other networks can do...

   • Embed this notice
     Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta 사요한🦣 (youronlyone@c.im)'s status on Monday, 04-Mar-2024 15:29:05 JST Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta 사요한🦣

     in reply to

     @jupiter_rowland

     > Everyone else who talks about the non-Mastodon Fediverse isn't on Mastodon.

     Not really. 🤪 I'm on a Mastodon-powered instance.

     I used to run a #Philippines #Friendica server. (It was the second #fediverse instance for the Philippines. The first was running Friendika managed by students.)

     Then I ran my own #Hubzilla (family & friends). And used to manage the community for an #ASEAN Hubzilla instance (sadly, the sponsor and admin disappeared).

     Today, I'm staying away from the backend management. I no longer have the resources to dedicate to it. So, I just search for instances with ***sane*** set up (like not abusing site-level blocks because someone told them to).

     "True Fediverse citizens" (for lack of a better label) do exist on Mastodon-powered platforms. There are plenty of others beside me. 😃

   • Embed this notice
     Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Monday, 04-Mar-2024 15:33:10 JST Jupiter Rowland

     in reply to

     • Scott M. Stolz
     @Scott M. Stolz It's a bit murky what exactly happened back then.
     
     Friendica started as Mistpark before a German told Mike what a German understands when reading that word, namely manure park. It was then renamed to Friendika because the desired Friendica domain was still blocked.
     
     Free Friendika was a fork of Friendika by someone who wasn't content with Friendika's license. Free Friendika was on GitHub right away while Friendika wasn't. The fork involved copying Friendika's whole repository to GitHub.
     
     Friendika was renamed Friendica in 2011 or 2012 when that name had become available.
     
     It was afterwards that Friendica's own code repository was migrated to GitHub. Due to a GitHub "quirk", Friendica was automatically declared a fork of Free Friendika which is technically false.
     
     What exactly happened license-wise is murky to me. Friendica can't have started under the AGPL because that'd exclude re-licensing a fork. But interestingly, Hubzilla is MIT-licensed.
     
     So whatever license Friendica started out under, it might have been the community which put it under the AGPL after taking over from Mike who was now tinkering with the Zot protocol.
     
     Looking at the licenses, it's very likely that Mike didn't fork Friendica Red off Friendica but off Free Friendika, itself a hard fork of Friendika. Thus, some improvements on Friendica never made it to Friendica Red.
     
     I also guess it was named Friendica Red first and then renamed Red (from spanish la red = "the net") after the whole backend had been re-written against Zot, and the whole thing had stopped being Friendica in the first place. The re-naming to Red Matrix must have been a kind of marketing decision.
     
     It's even unclear what exactly was the base for Osada later. Case in point: Well after the release of Hubzilla, Mike's own instances were still all branded "Red Matrix" although this project should have been abandoned in early 2015 when Hubzilla was created from it.
     
     So either the Red Matrix was renamed Hubzilla and reworked into what was Hubzilla 1.0 in July, but Mike kept the "Red Matrix" brand for his own instances. In this case, Osada was forked from Hubzilla, and most everything added from the Red Matrix to Hubzilla was removed again from Hubzilla to Osada.
     
     Or Hubzilla was forked from the Red Matrix, mostly soft-forked, the Red Matrix became Hubzilla's smaller and more experimental brother, and Mike's own instances all became testbeds for development that would have been more difficult with the extra Hubzilla cruft in the way. In this case, chances are bigger that Mike forked Osada from the Red Matrix which had never had all that extra Hubzilla stuff that Osada never had either.
     
     Either way, the path from Mistpark to Hubzilla is both very complicated and very murky, and so I guess it's kind of justified to simplify it a bit. At the same time, it's too short to simplify it the same the path from either the Red Matrix or Hubzilla to (streams) can be simplified because the latter has had many more forks in it ("a fork of a fork... of a fork of {Hubzilla|the Red Matrix}").
     
     #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Forks #Mistpark #Friendika #FreeFriendika #Friendica #RedMatrix #Hubzilla
   • Embed this notice
     Scott M. Stolz (scott@authorship.studio)'s status on Monday, 04-Mar-2024 15:33:11 JST Scott M. Stolz

     in reply to
     @Jupiter Rowland
     Mastodon was launched in 2016. Hubzilla was both launched and had its first stable point release in 2015, and it's a fork of the now-defunct Red Matrix from 2012 which is a fork of Friendica from 2010. Also, Mastodon announced ActivityPub integration in September, 2018; Hubzilla did so in July. In both cases, Hubzilla was there first. It is not an intruder. Deal with it.
     My understanding is that in 2010 and 2011, it was still Friendika and still MIT Licensed. Friendica came about when they forked Friendika and made it AGPL instead of MIT License.
     
     Free Friendika - MIT License
     #^https://github.com/duthied/Free-Friendika
     
     Friendica - AGPL License
     #^https://github.com/friendica/friendica
     
     (Even their GitHub account says it is a fork of Free Friendika.)
     
     I am guessing that Red Matrix was a fork of Free Friendika as well.
     Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta 사요한🦣 repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Monday, 04-Mar-2024 15:35:25 JST Jupiter Rowland

     in reply to

     • Regezi
     @Regezi This could have one or several out of many reasons.
     
     One, people on certain projects prefer to interact with people on the same or similar projects anyway, also due to overarching cultures. For example Misskey and Sharkey which have "UwU kawaii desu" written all over them while Mastodon doesn't.
     
     Two, similarly, a refusal to let Mastodon users connect because this increases Mastodon's pressure on non-Mastodon projects to abandon their own culture in favour of Mastodon's.
     
     Three, vice versa, Mastodon and its users rejecting the culture of non-Mastodon projects whenever it differs from Mastodon's. Many Mastodon users want everything that is "un-Mastodon-like" banned all across the whole Fediverse because it disturbs them, be it posts over 500 characters, be it quotes, be it "quote-tweets", be it text formatting in any way. However, all this stuff is perfectly normal and absolutely part of the culture everywhere outside of Mastodon.
     
     So on the one hand, you have Mastodon users blocking everyone who does stuff that's alien to Mastodon upon first strike, depriving them of exposure and range on Mastodon. Plus everyone who ever talks about the Fediverse without only talking about Mastodon. On the other hand, you have non-Mastodon users who refuse to post to Mastodon users in the first place in order to avoid this kind of drama. And at least some projects actually allow you to select whom to post to, and yes, including Hubzilla.
     
     Four, for the reasons mentioned above, some non-Mastodon users never even expose their accounts/channels to Mastodon, so nobody on Mastodon knows them. Some Hubzilla and (streams) users go another step further: If they're on (streams), they turn ActivityPub off altogether to keep themselves away from all the drama on Mastodon, and if they're on Hubzilla, they intentionally don't turn it on in the first place. This shields them from Mastodon practically entirely.
     
     #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta
   • Embed this notice
     Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta 사요한🦣 (youronlyone@c.im)'s status on Monday, 04-Mar-2024 15:50:23 JST Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta 사요한🦣

     in reply to

     @jupiter_rowland

     > Three, vice versa, Mastodon and its users rejecting the culture of non-Mastodon projects whenever it differs from Mastodon's. Many Mastodon users want everything that is "un-Mastodon-like" banned all across the whole Fediverse because it disturbs them, be it posts over 500 characters, be it quotes, be it "quote-tweets", be it text formatting in any way. However, all this stuff is perfectly normal and absolutely part of the culture everywhere outside of Mastodon.

     1. Character limitation. It's funny that it is a reason because three are Mastodon-powered instances (a lot in fact) with more than 500.

     2. What the "purists" did not realise is that the customizable number of characters has been part of the Fediverse since the first Fediverse managed service launched: StatusNet "hosting", in 2008. @-lnxwalt was very active in posting different content on the different length instances back then.

     3. To add to what you mentioned, another reason they hate #Threads is because they supposedly introduced something that isn't part of #Mastodon and #ActivityPub, dots in username.

     But it has been around years before Instagram even thought about Threads (assuming they came up with the project during the #TwitterMigration ). You'll often see it from website-based AP implementations. @example.com@example.com

     Also, the reasoning "not in ActivityPub" is well, Mastodon is as guilty of that since the discussions of AP started. Since Mastodon was successful in positioning itself at the proper place, everyone ended up / was forced to implement Mastodon-only stuff just so their software will be interoperable with it, even though it isn't part of ActivityPub.

     Most "Mastodon purists", as well as, "ActivityPub gatekeepers" use reasons that can't stand; and their solution is fragmentation or contrary to what the Fediverse is, and what AP was made for. Basically, they want to go back to the way things are: "siloed networks" or "walled-gardens".

     #BringDownTheWalls has been the goal of the Fediverse since 2008, and even before that when #SocialWeb discussions started (even in related conferences).