@Tokyo Outsider (337ppm) The high risk is that people come straight from Mastodon, the only Fediverse project they're used to, to Hubzilla in expectation of something that works and handles like Mastodon plus whatever extra stuff on top Hubzilla has that attracted them. I mean, there are people who came to Hubzilla simply because they wanted more than 500 characters.

And then they end up tripping over things that make Hubzilla not more than Mastodon but unexpectedly different from Mastodon. The one-post-many-comments conversation model. The permissions settings that don't even default to the same behaviour as Mastodon which doesn't even really know such a thing as permissions. "Quote-toots" but no boosts. No content warning field until they find out that it's that thing labelled "Summary" for some reason. No alt-text field. Hopelessly outdated user documentation that also reads like a tech spec. No local timeline, no federated timeline. Everything being named differently. Generally, Hubzilla not mollycoddling its users, not even newbies. And so on.

I mean, some return to Mastodon with a "Hubzilla sucks" verdict because they failed to connect to even one of their old Mastodon acquaintances, because nothing and nobody told them right off the bat that they have to turn ActivityPub on first, much less how to do that.

If many more Mastodon users tried out Hubzilla and really tried, there would be more voices demanding Hubzilla be much more like Mastodon. Just like there are Twitter refugees on Mastodon who, after many months of using Mastodon, still can't get used to its differences from Twitter and demand things be just like on Twitter, including a secret-sauce algorithm that automagically fills their personal timeline with exactly what they want to read without themselves having to do anything (not that 𝕏 actually did that) and sends their post to the local timelines of everyone who's interested in that.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla