@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
@Matthias Pfefferle Unless new and active official caretakers can be found for #ActivityPub, it'd almost be easily to migrate the whole #Fediverse to #Zot if the two protocols were directly compatible.
Only that they didn't invent the Metaverse. Either they believed they did, or they knew they didn't, but they had enough market power to bullshit everyone else into believing they did. For 99% of all people out there, #TheMetaverse refers to #HorizonWorlds.
As a matter of fact, however, the term #Metaverse has been used in conjunction with actually existing #VirtualWorlds at least as early as 2008, 15 years ago. That was the year when #OpenSimulator introduced the #Hypergrid, the first federation between independently-run virtual worlds, known as "grids" in #OpenSim lingo. The Hypergrid enabled you to visit grids with avatars registered on other grids. If anything deserved being called "metaverse," the Hypergrid became that.
Also, starting as early as 2008, single grids started using the term "metaverse" for themselves. In 2022, the oldest and once biggest German grid shut down after 14 years of operation: the #Metropolis Metaversum.
And guess what? OpenSim and the Hypergrid are still around. Not only still around, but growing. There are over 400 public grids and thousands upon thousands of small private grids, over 95% of which are connected to the Hypergrid. And there are still grids older than Zuck's Metaverse dreams which have "Metaverse" in their names such as the Alternate Metaverse which has gone by this name since late 2019.
Seriously, I could outfit an avatar in #OpenSimulator with only free and legal content made in and for #OpenSim, and it'd look better than that.
For comparison: This is what a 2023 Second Life avatar can look like without spending any money on it. Now imagine what a Second Life avatar can look like nowadays if you pump $50 into it.
Look through the #SecondLife hashtag, and you'll see even more in-world pictures that blow Zuck's stuff out of the water without even breaking a sweat. Granted, you won't get that quality at 60fps from stand-alone VR goggles, but still.
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 elsethe 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.
And Markdown composition will stay limited to test instances and projects outside Mastodon that use Markdown for text formatting. It won't be generally rolled out to all Mastodon instances.
In other words, you'll be able to see text formatting, but you won't be able to format text yourself.
Okay, turns out you can't start new threads in a #Friendica group from #Hubzilla currently.
It's amazing how these two projects have developed away from one another. I mean, Hubzilla started out by being forked off Friendica by Friendica's own inventor, but that was almost eleven years ago, and apparently, there was zero coordination between the two projects.
@Chris Trottier @Fediverse News The only advantage #Bluesky will have over 13-year-old federated jack-of-all-trades #Hubzilla that has had #NomadicIdentity since 2012 and even over younger and sleeker #Streams will be the availability of an iPhone app, especially one that bears the same name as the project itself. Hubzilla and Streams can only be used in Web browsers, and especially Hubzilla has a less-than-optimal UI for its overwhelming pile of features.
In all other regards, everything that Mike Macgirvin has made since #RedMatrix (that's seven project names) would mop the floor with Bluesky, not to mention that almost all of it has also supported #ActivityPub and therefore federated with Mastodon; Hubzilla (optionally) and Streams (by default) still do. Bluesky probably never will; it isn't meant to complement the Fediverse, it's meant to replace and destroy it.
Also, the reason why #BlueSky was developed makes me wonder, too. It's quite likely that Jack Dorsey has never heard of #Hubzilla and that it had introduced #NomadicIdentity as early as 2012. I mean, about 99% of all Mastodon users have never heard of Hubzilla, much less its nomadic identity, and I think even every other Friendica user hasn't heard of Hubzilla yet.
It may also be that he wants to replace the decentralised, federated, non-commercial, non-corporate #Fediverse with something decentralised, federated, but commercial and corporate-owned that he has full control over. In order to do this, he had to offer something that #ActivityPub can't do.
Ironically, nomadic identity and the #Zot protocol that uses it are older than ActivityPub as well.
In other words, this is nothing new. The #Zot protocol with its nomadic identity is older than ActivityPub and much older than #BlueSky.
It basically removes the fixed connection of your identity to the instance that you're on by allowing you to have your channel(s) on multiple instances at the same time, fully in-sync. I'm using this feature myself.
On Mastodon, your account is firmly tied to the instance that it's on. When you move to another instance, you can take your name and those whom you follow with you, but you'll create a new identity.
With nomadic identity, you could e.g. "move" to mstdn.social with your entire account with everything on it, but you could choose to keep your new account connected to your current one on emeraldsocial.org and either keep the one on emeraldsocial.org as your main account.
If you toot something, this toot will appear on your emeraldsocial.org account and your mstdn.social account. If you receive a post, it'll appear on both accounts, too. If you follow someone, you follow them from both accounts, but they'll only see the connection from whichever is your main account. If someone follows you, they'll always follow your main account, no matter which one they've decided to follow. If you switch your main account to mstdn.social, all your connections will be automatically updated.
Now, this is not limited to two instances. Theoretically, you can have your Hubzilla or Streams channel on as many instances as you want to.
(If you're wondering why I'm talking about "channels" rather than "accounts" in connection with nomadic entity: The projects that offer nomadic identity have this special feature that's basically "accounts within an account." You can have one account on an instance, but multiple channels, i.e. multiple separate identities, on the same account. And you can make each channel nomadic in different separate ways from one another.)
@Mikko Alasaarela :equel: @Fediverse News This very thing that @Chris Trottier has mentioned has been implemented in the #Zot protocol and has been in daily use on #Hubzilla since 2012. It's not utopic, it's not science-fiction, it's not someone's fever dream, it has been a real thing for longer than Mastodon and ActivityPub.
And Hubzilla is every bit as decentralised as Mastodon, if not more so. It has a lower user-to-instance ratio than Mastodon, and it doesn't have an "official lighthouse instance." Anyone could run it on a LAMP stack at home or on rented server space.
AFAIR, the early Fediverse crowd mostly used Linux. They didn't have a problem with choice. Then again, they generally didn't even have a problem with self-hosting.
But I think another issue with iOS in particular is that it's rather difficult to get Free Software into that ecosystem as long as the Apple App Store is the only way to get apps onto your device. It's an issue because Fediverse app developers seem to generally prefer to put their code under free licenses, especially the GPL.
@Stark If it did, then #Lemmy would be the only project in the #Fediverse whose posts #Mastodon rejects or truncates if they go over an instance's character limit.
Longer posts are known to get through from all other known projects, so I wouldn't worry about that.
And #Discourse won't federate entire threads with all posts into the Fediverse, nor will you be able to participate in a thread on Discourse from Mastodon. It'll only announce new threads, i.e. what you'll get is the thread title with a link to the thread. If you want to join the discussion, you'll have to visit the forum itself.
@flesh roots :debian: ? If that was the case, and if they kept their eyes on Lemmy and ported changes in Lemmy to Discourse, that'd mean much less trouble. We'd still have the limited functionality, but at least we'd be alerted on our timelines/streams about new threads to look up, all without unnecessary masses of compatibility hackery code. And the Discourse devs wouldn't have to develop everything from scratch.
ActivityPub introducing more specific common standards for groups/forums would help a great deal, too.
I expect Friendica forums to be more compatible with Hubzilla soon (this runs over ActivityPub, too), so the islands may actually be joining.
Mein "Geburtstag" ist natürlich nicht mein Geburtstag, sondern mein Rezztag. Seit dem Tag gibt es meinen ersten Avatar.Meine "Homepage" ist mein Blog zum selben Thema wie dieser Kanal, #OpenSim und virtuelle Welten im allgemeinen. Es ist im Fediverse und sollte föderieren mit Mastodon, Pleroma und Friendica, hat aber auch einen Atom-Feed.#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #VirtualWorlds #VirtuelleWelten #Metaverse #Metaversum #SocialVR #fedi22