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- cross-posted to:
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I found Firefish which is a better alternative to the standard Mastodon application. It’s compatible with Mastodon and has better features. It allows users to create web pages and the character limit is 3,000 instead of the 500 on Mastodon. It feels like a good limit for the type of site that it is. Plus this means that it can handle long posts from users on customized Mastodon instances.
Okay, I’m gonna bite. Why would they create a new one instead of working toward improving Mastodon?
This is part of the overall concept of the fediverse and the activitypub protocol.
Think of it this way - what is the difference between Twitter and Instagram? They’re very similar. The one key difference being that Instagram requires you to include a picture. But you can include pictures in Twitter too. So wouldn’t it be nice to be able to see Instagram accounts from your Twitter account? Speaking only of the technology and not the content or corporate shenanigans that is. (by the way, Pixelfed is an activitypub clone of Instagram, and it can interact with Mastodon)
What if you have an idea for a microblogging platform, but it’s a little bit different from the vision that the developers of Mastodon have? You can try to submit code to Mastodon’s code base but there’s no guarantee they’ll accept it. You can fork Mastodon, but then you have to work within the framework that they’ve laid.
Or you can create your own platform. The benefit is, you can implement the same set of interoperability standards that the community has agreed upon. You don’t have to attract all the users to your service to the exclusion of other services.
So why is all of this a good thing? There are a few reasons. If Mastodon starts heading in a direction that users dislike, they aren’t stuck with Mastodon. For example, if they started behaving like Twitter, users could just jump to a different platform, but they would be able to continue to interact with Mastodon users who choose to stay.
If someone has a much better idea for a platform and puts the time and effort in to make it truly great, there’s no reason for users to be stuck on a now inferior platform.
And if one software package tries a cool new feature that Mastodon doesn’t presently have, and that feature catches on, Mastodon and other services can choose to also implement the feature. It increases competition, but also increases potential for collaborative development.
I’m not sure you fully understand the overall concept behind the Fediverse. Fragmentation is literally part of the overall design. That is, the concept being a diverse set of apps across distributed instances. They are all united by a single baseline protocol. It isn’t all that different from email.
You sort of contradicted your second point with your third. If all the users just congregate in one place, it doesn’t really matter whether other developers agree with the decisions being made by the big guys. It’s either adopt the standards that the big guys implement or lose feature parity - features that users come to expect at a certain point.
That’s already happening to some extent, but there’s also a strong element of collaborative design. I don’t think that collaboration would exist if the mega corporations get involved. What the trajectory is at this point, I don’t know. To what extent will the giant corporations exert control over this fledgling ecosystem, and to what extent will their efforts be resisted if they start heading in a bad direction. The important part right now is that users have a choice.
Competition wasn’t necessarily the right word choice on my part based on how you seem to be interpreting it. It’s not so much trying to one-up another project as it is to create diversity of ideas in the ecosystem. Instead of everything being controlled by one group of developers, there are hundreds of developers across dozens of projects, all creating something based on their own vision. That diversity can give rise to new ideas much more rapidly than the alternative.
The creator of Mastodon said that he isn’t going to add an option to set post length limits. I briefly tried to change it and wasn’t able to make it work.
It’s not configurable through the UI, but if you’re the admin of an instance you can change the character limit with some fairly simple source code tweaks.
Firefish is a fork of Misskey which predates Mastodon by 2 years. As for why one would fork Misskey into Firefish or make Mastodon, some of the rationale for that is explained in the Fork a repo page by GitHub.
You can ask the developer of Mastodon personally why he didn’t just make Misskey better, or the lead developer of Firefish why they didn’t just contribute to Misskey or Mastodon, but fundamentally the platforms are very different even if they’re inter-operable, and this comes down to the actual design of the platforms.
I think that’s good to be aware of. The Wikipedia article mentioned that the APIs are not compatible. As long is the interoperability is good I think it works well enough.