@silverpill In a hilarious twist of fate, this gives (streams) and Forte an unfair advantage. They're nearly identical, they have the same maintainer, but they're two separate implementations, also seeing as Forte uses ActivityPub for nomadic identity, and (streams) doesn't and still uses its own Nomad protocol for it.
Since Mitra appears to implement (streams)/Forte features one by one and cast them into FEPs, that's three implementations already. Two if nomadic identity via ActivityPub is involved. And if Hubzilla happens to have it, too, we've got up to four implementations.
Yes, ActivityPub is only an optional add-on on Hubzilla and (streams), but an implementation is an implementation. And whatever they do on Nomad that federates has to get out through ActivityPub one way or another.
It'd be even more hilariously skewed, hadn't Mike discontinued the five apps between Hubzilla and (streams) on New Year's Eve 2022.
For example, just about everyone on Mastodon is fully convinced that Eugen Rochko has brought quote-posts to the Fediverse this year. That's because next to nobody on Mastodon knows that Friendica has been able to quote-post practically everything in the Fediverse, including Mastodon toots, for 15 years now.
And if Friendica doesn't have it, chances are still that Hubzilla has it, and that Hubzilla has probably had it for longer than Mastodon has been around, too.
For example, private messages that are actually private. Mastodon doesn't have them because the "privacy" of Mastodon DMs is only "guaranteed" by limiting whom a DM is sent to. Hubzilla does have them and has had them since 2012, since it was still named Red. How? Because Hubzilla also limits who is permitted to see a DM.
Oh, and Hubzilla even offers optional encryption on top of that.
Or how about server-independent identity? Everyone still waiting for Bluesky to finally be the pioneer who invents this and implements it for the first time? LOL! Once again, Hubzilla has had this since 2012. Not a vague concept, not an unstable proof-of-concept, but daily-driven by production-grade channels on production-grade servers. (streams) has it, too, inherited from Hubzilla through a whole number of forks. Forte has it, too, and Forte is the first and, so far, only Fediverse server software that uses ActivityPub for nomadic identity.
Now I'm waiting for someone to announce that something will "bring" actual groups "to the Fediverse". A feature that was actually introduced to the Fediverse by StatusNet in 2008, and that's also available on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. Not to mention that the very principle of the Threadiverse (Lemmy, the remains of /kbin, Mbin, PieFed) is based on groups.
This is what happens when you think that the feature set of the whole Fediverse is the feature set of Mastodon and maybe Pixelfed because that's all you know.
Speaking of Mastodon: Just because it's being "brought to the Fediverse", doesn't mean it'll be adopted by Mastodon.
@Tokyo Outsider (337ppm) ...which, in turn, came to exist due to @silverpill's plan to implement nomadic identity à la Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte on something that a) only supports ActivityPub, b) is non-nomadic and c) ties the identity to the login.
I've got my doubts that whoever started the FEP draft, like the vast majority of Mastodon users, has ever really heard of silverpill, Mitra, Mike Macgirvin, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and/or nomadic identity. Nobody in the thread mentions either of these even only once.
Besides, even Mitra still has a long way to go until it's really as fully nomadic as Mike's creations, also because silverpill most likely doesn't want to implement anything that isn't covered by a FEP. And I can't see Mastodon itself ever going nomadic, seeing as the devs have already silently rejected client-side OpenWebAuth support.
@Decenta Lyzed @your purple friend AFAIK, Mitra has not rolled out full-blown nomadic identity yet (as in, no, you can't clone your Mitra identity between two Mitra servers). Even the development branch is only in a state in which it understands nomadic identity.
(streams) Fork of fork of three forks of fork (of fork?) of Hubzilla by the same creator 2021 Intentionally and officially no name, no brand, hence the parentheses around the unofficial name ("(streams)") No official website https://codeberg.org/streams/streams Open-registration server in North America (USA): https://rumbly.net/register Open-registration server in Europe (Hungary, German admin, speaks German and English): https://nomad.fedi-verse.hu/register No iOS apps No Android apps Can be installed as a Progressive Web App
Forte Fork of (streams) by the same creator 2024 No official website https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte No open-registration servers No iOS apps No Android apps Can be installed as a Progressive Web App
@Decenta Lyzed I haven't seen Mitra in action yet, so I can't say anything about it.
Hubzilla creator and (streams) and Forte maintainer, that'd be @Mike Macgirvin ?️. By the way, the only one of the three that's actually ActivityPub-based is Forte. It just doesn't have any public, open-sign-up servers right now AFAIK.
Did I show you my Mastodon/Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte comparison tables yet? If not, here they are. But lastly, you have to lay your hands on at least one of them to see how the family differs from the microblogging side of the Fediverse.
They're those who either are commercial or looking for professional/commercial users or both. Flipboard. Automattic (WordPress). Ghost. These kinds.
They know themselves. They know each other. And they know Mastodon. And that's it.
None of them has ever heard of Pleroma or Akkoma.
None of them has ever heard of Misskey or the Forkeys.
None of them has ever heard of Mitra.
None of them has ever heard of GoToSocial.
None of them has ever heard of Hollo.
None of them has ever heard of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte, even though Friendica and Hubzilla are both older than Mastodon. And apparently, neither has @Helge. But then again, Friendica and its nomadic, security-enhanced descendants are being overlooked by almost everyone. That's why there's always on-going work for features to be "introduced to the Fediverse" which Friendica has had for a decade and a half.
Granted, the HTML support on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte can be summarised with "yes". But elaborate tables that show what either of them supports how would be very useful.
Also, granted, everything I've mentioned above (normally) uses something else than HTML for formatting in the frontend. For example, Misskey and all Forkeys use MFM ("Misskey-Flavoured Markdown"). Friendica uses extended BBcode with the option to use Markdown instead. Hubzilla uses even more extended BBcode. (streams) and Forte can use the same even more extended BBcode and Markdown and HTML at the same time within the same post, although not all markup languages support all features.
These standards, just like the various laws that triggered their creation, suppose that all social networks and social media are
commercial and corporate with loads of money behind them
centralised silos
staffed with thousands upon thousands upon thousands of employees in office blocks all around the world
For comparison, Hubzilla probably shows what's the best the Fediverse can do. It has an optional field for new registrations to confirm that they're over a certain age.
However, almost all Hubzilla hubs have a "staff" of exactly one. A hobbyist. Unlike Mastodon servers, Hubzilla hubs don't even have moderators because Hubzilla is all about self-empowerment and self-moderation.
Is that one admin honestly expected to verify the authenticity of the IDs and the birth certificates of newly-registrated users with the authorities in almost 200 different nations?
There used to be a time when such regulations only applied to services from a certain size upward or from a certain revenue upward. But now something that can only be done by big corporations becomes mandatory for tiny hobbyist projects.
Besides, how are these measures supposed to keep 13-year-olds from spinning up their own single-user Fediverse servers on machines at home? If this is supposed to be absolutely, 100% guaranteed to be absolutely, 100% water-tight, the two Hubzilla devs would have to check and verify the identity of everyone who wants set up their own hub before they allow the git-based installer to clone the repository from Framagit onto their servers.
@Ben Pate 🤘🏻 In the words of a diaspora* developer, if Mozilla and Vivaldi "implemented ActivityPub", they'd actually "implement Mastodon". That'd mean catching more users with less effort than implementing vanilla ActivityPub and implementing features that Mastodon doesn't have. Besides, both used to have or still have a Mastodon server, but they don't seem to be aware that there's a Fediverse beyond Mastodon, much less what it's like and how it works.
In fact, they wouldn't even implement the ActivityPub C2S API at all. They'd implement the Mastodon client API and only the Mastodon client API.
@Strypey The main reason devs haven't wanted to use the C2S API in the AP spec is network effect. Clients devs don't want to use it because Mastodon doesn't, and servers devs don't want to use it because their services wouldn't work with all the clients following the Mastodon API. It's actually tempting to imagine a vicious circle here: If almost everything has the Mastodon client API implemented, it isn't worth developing dedicated client apps that also cover other servers' extra features.
Instead, the reason why all kinds of server applications have the Mastodon client API implemented is because they absolutely need some phone apps that work with them. Just look around the Fediverse. Almost everyone is exclusively on phones nowadays. And especially iPhone users wouldn't touch a Web browser with a 10-foot barge pole if they don't absolutely have to, so expecting them to use the Web UI means you're stuck in a bubble or a time where smartphones are still a gimmick.
That's why even Friendica has implemented the Mastodon client API. I mean, Mastodon and Friendica are very different, and the Mastodon client API only covers a small fraction of what Friendica can do. It actually doesn't cover some critical everyday features.
At the same time, there's little to no incentive for those who can develop mobile apps to make apps for anything that isn't Mastodon. Many start working on Fediverse apps at a point when they still believe the Fediverse is only Mastodon. Or if they don't, at least they've never heard of Pleroma and its family, Misskey and its family, Friendica and its family (where Hubzilla would require a wholly different app than Friendica, and (streams) and Forte would require a wholly different app than both) etc. Or they genuinely think that developing the umpteenth iPhone app for Mastodon is worth the effort more than developing the first stable dedicated iPhone app for Friendica. It's a miracle that stuff like Aria for the *key family exists.
It seems like of all the server apps that don't do *blogging (purist long-form blogging stuff like WriteFreely excluded), Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are the only ones that don't have the Mastodon client API implemented. And I can't see them do it. For one, their devs steer clear of all proprietary, non-standard Mastodon technology. But other than that, these three are even less like Mastodon than Friendica, and they work even less like Mastodon. Even using a Mastodon app for stuff like basic posting is out of question because it pretty much requires access to the per-post permission settings, something that Mastodon doesn't have implemented, and therefore, neither do the apps for it.
Now, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte can be installed as so-called Progressive Web Apps. But only Hubzilla veterans ever do that, and that's for three reasons: One, next to nobody has ever heard of the very concept of PWAs. Two, all that people know is installing apps from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. And three, people want native mobile interfaces in the style of whatever phone they use. It doesn't matter how well the Web UIs of these three adapt to mobile screens, especially since 90% of all phone users have totally forgotten that you can rotate a phone sideways.
Hubzilla actually has its own client API, and I think (streams) and forte have their own one, too. But nobody has ever even only tried to build a native mobile app for either of them. Hubzilla's devs even have to admit that they don't know how well Hubzilla's client API works because there has literally never been a sufficiently-featured counterpart to test it against. All there is is an extremely basic Android app built by one of them that's available as a download somewhere, and all it can do is send very basic posts, I think, even only at your default settings. It's just a proof of concept.
@craignicol Redundancy. Resilience against losing the server that you're on by being on another server simultaneously.
Also, just because you can spread your identity across multiple servers and even server types, doesn't mean you can only have one identity.
Look at me, for example:
I have @Jupiter Rowland on the Hubzilla hubs hub.netzgemeinde.eu and hub.hubzilla.de.
I have my "in-world sister's" channel @Juno Rowland on the same two Hubzilla hubs. It's still a separate and fully independent identity, and I could clone either of them to other Hubzilla hubs independently from one another. Like, I could clone @Jupiter Rowland to hub.hubzilla.hu and @Juno Rowland to klacker.org or whatever.
I have my in-world image-posting channel @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet on the (streams) servers streams.elsmussols.net and nomad.fedi-verse.hu.
I have my Fediverse meme channel @Jupiter's Fedi-Memes on (streams) on the (streams) server streams.elsmussols.net; I haven't cloned it yet.
That's six fully separate, fully independent Fediverse identities, even though Mastodon and most of the rest of the Fediverse (anything that doesn't understand nomadic identity) perceive them as nine identities. And as you can see, what you may have taken for utter science-fiction two minutes ago is being daily driven in the Fediverse right now. And it has been for well over a decade, for longer than Mastodon has been around.
Why have I cloned my identities? For the very reason that nomadic identity was invented in the first place: redundancy. Safety. Always having a live backup. Resilience against servers shutting down or malfunctioning. It was invented because its inventor, the creator and then-still-maintainer of Friendica, kept seeing Friendica users lose everything whenever a Friendica node disappeared. And he understood that the only way to really make an identity resilient against server shutdown is for it to reside on at least two servers simultaneously.
If glasgow.social goes belly-up unexpectedly, you lose everything. Potentially forever. Good luck starting over from scratch.
If hub.netzgemeinde.eu goes belly-up, I lose nothing because I still have the identical clones, live, hot, bidirectional backups, on hub.hubzilla.de.
Tell you what: A while ago, hub.netzgemeinde.eu did go belly-up. The queue worker was so overloaded that the hub was bogged down. Nothing went in, nothing went out. Without a clone, I would have been fscked.
Luckily, I had my clone. I logged into hub.hubzilla.de and used my clone to a) do what I'd normally do on hub.netzgemeinde.eu and, especially, b) alert the admin who was on vacation. He and the Hubzilla lead developer ssh'd onto the server and fixed the issue. This might never have happened, hadn't I had that clone on another server.
So you could:
make a Crohn-related identity and clone it or not
make a Doctor Who fandom identity and clone it or not
make an activist identity and clone it or not
make a Web development-related identity and clone it or not
Oh, by the way: The aforementioned six identites may or may not be all of my Fediverse identities. I may or may not have more than these. You wouldn't be able to tell unless I told you.
@Ben Pate 🤘🏻 2) None of the solutions feel very approachable. Documentation is thin, and examples are hard to find. Beyond the text of FEP-ef61, where should I go if I want to start building support into my own apps? There isn't much documentation because everything is still very new and also due to the nature of what has already been made with nomadic identity via ActivityPub on which base and which level of stability.
Yes, there's Forte. Yes, it uses ActivityPub for nomadic identity. Yes, it has a stable release.
But: It has never been an ActivityPub project that went nomadic.
It evolved from the Red Matrix (2012)
based on Zot
channel system; identity independent of account/login
nomadic
some non-nomadic protocols available optionally, off by default
to Hubzilla (2015)
based on Zot, evolved to Zot6
channel system; identity independent of account/login
nomadic
some non-nomadic protocols available optionally, off by default
ActivityPub added long after the fact, again, optional and off by default
to some intermediate stuff (2018-2021)
based on Zot6, Zot8 or (would be Zot11, but it's incompatible with Zot6, so it's renamed) Nomad
channel system; identity independent of account/login
nomadic
fewer non-nomadic protocols available optionally, off by default, if any
ActivityPub added into the core eventually
to the streams repository (2021)
based on Nomad
channel system; identity independent of account/login
nomadic
ActivityPub in the core as a secondary protocol, optional, on by default
all other non-nomadic protocols removed
to Forte (2024)
based on ActivityPub, supports nothing else
channel system; identity independent of account/login
nomadic
So Forte looks back at 13 years of multiple identities per account and nomadic identity. When Hubzilla became the first Fediverse server application to adopt ActivityPub in 2017, the family had already had nomadic identity for over four years.
Implementing nomadic identity via ActivityPub meant switching the whole thing away from a protocol that was built around nomadic identity and over to ActivityPub while keeping nomadic identity.
What you seem interested in is what @silverpill is working on on Mitra. And that's to take a non-nomadic, ActivityPub-only, account-equals-identity server application and make it nomadic.
AFAIK, this is still highly experimental. It's done in a development branch of Mitra. I know that Mitra understands Forte's nomadic identity, but I can't even say whether that dev branch of Mitra is actually nomadic, as in whether you can clone an identity on one server running the dev branch to another such server and have them sync back and forth.
If anything, this would be what ActivityPub devs looking at nomadic identity should check out. "Would" because it's still in such an early and experimental state that I think there isn't anything worth looking at yet other than how to make your software recognise Forte's nomadic channels as nomadic.
By the way, silverpill is publishing FEP after FEP in which Forte or Mitra, (streams) and Forte are mentioned as implementations at most. So he doesn't just code stuff together, he also tries hard to make it "official" by casting it into FEPs. So I guess he's still figuring out the basics and documenting them rather than getting actual nomadicity to work out of thin air.
You've basically got two options if you want to turn non-nomadic, ActivityPub-only, account-equals-identity software into something that's every bit as nomadic as Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte.
Either you wait until silverpill rolls out the first stable release of Mitra with full-blown nomadic identity of its own. And then there should be quite some documentation on how it was done.
Or you make an experimental nomadic branch of Bandwagon and join silverpill and @Mike Macgirvin ?️ in getting nomadic identity via ActivityPub going.
Oh, and by the way: Hubzilla is very much part of the Fediverse. It is very much (albeit optionally) connected to and federated with Mastodon. I am replying to you right now from a Hubzilla channel which simultaneously and identically resides on two independent servers.
Nomadic identity is reality now. It is being daily-driven right now, and it has been daily-driven since long before Solid was even announced.
Solid is nothing but Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte (both are descendants of Hubzilla by Hubzilla's creator) as ordered from wish.com. A cheap and shoddy knock-off.
@Joaquim Homrighausen @Kevin Beaumont To be fair, full data portability via ActivityPub has only been available in a stable release of anything for two weeks.
That was when @Mike Macgirvin 🖥️'s Forte, created in mid-August of 2024 as a fork of his own streams repository and the latest member of a family of software that started in 2010 with Friendica, had its very first official stable release.
And, in fact, Forte just uses ActivityPub to do something that (streams) and its predecessors all the way to the Red Matrix from 2012 (known as Hubzilla since 2015) have been doing using the Nomad protocol (formerly known as Zot). It's called nomadic identity. This is technology that's over a dozen years old on software that was built around this technology from the get-go, only that it was recently ported to ActivityPub.
Now, nomadic identity via ActivityPub was @silverpill's idea. He wanted to make his Mitra nomadic. He started working in 2023. The first conversion of existing non-nomadic server software to nomadic still isn't fully done, much less officially rolled out as a stable release.
If Mastodon actually wanted to implement nomadic identity, they would first have to wait until Mitra has a first stable nomadic release. Then they would have to wait until nomadic identity on Mitra (and between Mitra and Forte) has become stable and reliable under daily non-lab conditions. (Support for nomadic identity via ActivityPub on (streams) worked nicely under lab conditions. When it was rolled out to the release branch, and existing instances upgraded to it, it blew up in everyone's faces, and it took months for things to stabilise again.)
Then they would have to look at how silverpill has done it and how Mike has done it. Then they would have to swallow their pride and decide to adopt technology that they can't present as their own original invention because it clearly isn't. And they would have to swallow their pride again and decide against making it incompatible with Mitra, Forte and (streams) just to make these three look broken and inferior to Mastodon.
And only then they could actually start coding.
Now look at how long silverpill has been working on rebuilding Mitra into something nomadic. This takes a whole lot of modifications because the concept of identity itself has to be thrown overboard and redefined because your account will no longer be your identity and vice versa. Don't expect them to be done in a few months.
@VegOS Doch, aber @Martin Holland und @heise online sehen es auf Mastodon. Sei froß, daß sie fediverse-savvy genug sind, um sich nicht zum Verbinden mit Friendica ein Friendica-Konto, zum Verbinden mit Pixelfed ein Pixelfed-Konto usw. zulegen.
Hubzilla Hubzilla has a permission setting named "Can source/mirror my public posts in derived channels". It has been there since 2012 when Hubzilla was still a fledgling project named Red, that's 13 years now.
Whether someone may quote-post ("share") your public posts depends on the setting in the channel role. If your channel is set to "Public", I think everyone is allowed to share your public posts. If it's set to "Private", you can (and have to) grant that permission to your connections individually by contact role. Those whom you aren't connected to are not allowed to share any of your posts.
The "Custom" channel role lets you choose between granting that permission, one out of 17 permissions, to:
everyone in the Fediverse
everyone on Hubzilla and (streams)
everyone on your home hub
unconfirmed and confirmed connections
confirmed connections
only those whom you individually grant that permission
nobody but you
(streams) (streams) goes even further. As far as I know, it doesn't give you the option to let everyone quote-post any of your posts in the first place. Not only are you always opted out to the point that only you yourself may quote-post your posts, but you can't even fully opt in.
No matter if your channel type is "Social - Public" or "Social - Restricted", the only ones who are allowed to quote-post even only your public posts are those of your connections who get the permission from you. Unlike on Hubzilla, however, you don't have to fumble around with permission roles, although you may do so to speed things up. You've also got a dedicated switch for this permission on each connection labelled "Grant permission to republish/mirror your posts".
The effect This permission has its strongest effect on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte: If one of their users is not allowed to share one of your posts, the Share button is missing altogether. And there's no real way around the Share button.
In fact, the Repeat button is missing, too. If you aren't allowed to quote-post it, you aren't allowed to boost it either. This permission is not about how you may forward someone's content, but whether you may forward it.
Unfortunately, Fediverse users probably everywhere else are not affected by this permission. Users of Pleroma, Misskey and their respective forks can still quote-post you to their heart's content. And I've got my doubts that Mastodon will understand this permission when it introduces quote-posts.
Then again, it's highly likely that Mastodon's quote-post opt-in or opt-out won't work outside of Mastodon either.
Privacy as an extra line of defence If you really want to be safe, you've additionally got the option to not post in public. Any post that isn't public can neither be repeated (boosted) nor shared (quote-posted).
Both Hubzilla and (streams) give you the option to send a post to the members of a privacy group/access list (think Mastodon list on coke and 'roids), to a specific group/forum or to any individual selection of connections of yours. (streams) also has Mastodon's option to send a post to all your connections; Hubzilla can emulate that with a privacy group with all your connections in it.
Okay, your post will lose a whole lot of reach. But this is a trick that even Mastodon understands in a certain way: If a post from Hubzilla or (streams) has a restricted audience, Mastodon takes it for a PM. And you can't boost PMs, can you?
@HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴 Truth be told, what we could need is a feature comparison between the various mobile apps and Friendica's Web frontend to see what covers what.
I'm not quite sure if any Friendica app actually covers exactly 100% of Friendica's functionality. What they should cover is what's needed for daily driving. But I'm not sure if all of them cover, for example, all features of the built-in file manager and every last one of Friendica's own optional add-ons.
An actually, absoutely fully-featured Friendica app would be voluminous. Not as huge as a (streams) app and not as massive as a Hubzilla app, but big.
In the cases of some features, I'm not even sure how much sense they make in a mobile app. Would a mobile app need all configuration controls for the Web interface? And does it make sense for an iPhone app to brandish the full set of Friendica admin controls if it detects the logged-in account to be an admin account?
Besides, in spite of its old age, Friendica is constantly changing and sometimes introducing new features. Third-party apps will have to keep up with core and add-on development.
And once the now-growing Friendica community has settled in and attracted a few devs, and they discover that Friendica is so modular that it can attach third-party add-ons server-side, and they start developing third-party add-ons, mobile apps won't cover 100% of Friendica anymore anyway.
An avatar roaming the decentralised and federated 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator, a free and open-source server-side re-implementation of Second Life. Mostly talking about OpenSim, sometimes about other virtual worlds, occasionally about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. No, the Fediverse is not only Mastodon.Even if you see me on Mastodon, I'm not on Mastodon myself. I'm on Hubzilla which is neither a Mastodon instance nor a Mastodon fork. In fact, it's older and much more powerful than Mastodon. And it has always been connected to Mastodon.I regularly write posts with way more than 500 characters. If that disturbs you, block me now, but don't complain. I'm not on Mastodon, I don't have a character limit here.I rather give too many content warnings than too few. But I have absolutely no means of blanking out pictures for Mastodon users.I always describe my images, no matter how long it takes. My posts with image descriptions tend to be my longest. Don't go looking for my image