But, but, unlimited characters aren’t purist, old-skool, original-gangsta microblogging! And understanding threaded conversations isn’t purist, old-skool, original-gangsta microblogging either!
What do you want next, full HTML rendering support? Embedded in-line images? More than four options for polls?!
Go ahead. Try to force that upon Friendica that has called its instances “nodes” for almost 15 years now.
Or Hubzilla that not only calls them “hubs” but also resists any and all cultural or technological influences from anything that wasn’t created by Mike Macgirvin.
Also <insert Morpheus here> what if I told you that (streams) and Forte call them “communities”? You know, like Lemmy’s and PieFed’s “subreddits”?
Mostly Hubzilla. Also (streams), WriteFreely and Lemmy for special purposes.
Forte had its first official release just yesterday. It only uses ActivityPub for nomadic identity. It no longer supports any protocols that aren’t ActivityPub.
Mitra is working on nomadic identity via ActivityPub, too. Guess the hardest part is to make it nomadic in the first place.
Mike’s and silverpill’s plan is for people to be able to clone and sync the exact same Fediverse identity between Forte and Mitra and Mastodon and Lemmy and Pixelfed and PeerTube and everything else.
FEPs are in place already. Might not be long until cloning between Mitra and Forte works. Once that’s achieved, the technology is proven and therefore up for grabs for everyone.
At that point, the ball will be in the hands of the other Fediverse devs. Especially Gargron will have to swallow his pride and adopt technology from the guy who tried hard to argue him into implementing full HTML rendering support on Mastodon, something he rejected because text formatting (allegedly) has no place in purist, old-skool, original-gangsta microblogging.
It isn’t reinvention. It’s evolution.
In 2011, Mike invented the Zot protocol because he couldn’t implement nomadic identity in Friendika’s DFRN.
In 2012, Mike forked Friendica to Red (later Red Matrix) because he couldn’t replace DFRN with Zot on something that people relied upon as a stable daily driver.
In 2015, he turned the Red Matrix into Hubzilla because the Red Matrix was Friendica with nomadic identity. And nobody needed that because everyone and their dog hosted their own single-user Friendica nodes. So the target audience had to change, and thus, the software itself had to be expanded.
In 2018, he forked Hubzilla into Osada and Zap because he wanted to develop Zot6, and what he envisioned Zot6 to be like would mean a whole lot of breakage. Like, you couldn’t have both nomadic identity and non-nomadic protocols in the same software. That’s why he couldn’t develop Zot6 on something that, again, people relied upon as their stable daily driver. So he had to fork Osada (non-nomadic, but with support for ActivityPub) and Zap (nomadic, but only supporting Zot) off Hubzilla.
In 2019, it turned out that Zot6 does play along with non-nomadic protocols. So Mike discontinuned Osada, forked a new, nomadic Osada off Zap and added ActivityPub to it whereas Zap stayed Zot-only.
Over the course of 2019, Zap itself got ActivityPub support. Thus, Osada turned from “Zap, but with different branding and ActivityPub” to “Zap, but with different branding and ActivityPub on by default”. Otherwise, both had the same codebase. And so Osada was discontinued.
In 2020, Mike wanted to advance Zot even further. Zot6 was good enough to be backported to Hubzilla. But Zap, like now-defunct Osada, had been pronounced stable, so there was no tinkering with it. Something something people’s daily driver. Even though only Hubzilla users even knew that Zap existed, and only few of them were willing to switch because they saw Zap as “Hubzilla, but without diaspora* and without articles and without cards and without wikis and without webpages etc. etc. and with no clear advantages over the real deal”.
So Mike took Zap and created three more forks: another Osada, Mistpark 2020 (a.k.a. Misty), Redmatrix 2020. Don’t ask me what was forked from what.
Rumours had it that this was a case of different levels of stability vs bleeding edge. Allegedly, Zap was stable, Misty was testing, Osada was unstable with ActivityPub on by default so that its interaction/interference with Zot8 could be tested, Redmatrix was unstable with ActivityPub off by default so that it doesn’t stand in the way.
In reality, Osada, Misty and Redmatrix were identical in everything but branding. The reason why they were three was because Mike wanted to confuse the hell out of brand fetishists who used $FEDIVERSE_PROJECT out of nothing but brand worship with no regards for features. Like, people who refused to switch from Mastodon to clearly superior Zap because Mastodon was the cooler brand.
In early 2021, Roadhouse joined the fray because Mike wanted to go beyond Zot8, and people seemed to daily-drive Misty and Osada now. This time, all backwards compatibility was to be sacrificed. Thus, Zot11 wasn’t Zot11, but Nomad. Roadhouse had to have support for “Zot before Nomad” added, that’s how incompatible Nomad is with the old Zot.
At this point, Mike maintained five Fediverse projects:
Enough to really confuse the brand fetishists.
In October, 2021, he really flipped them the bird when he forked Roadhouse again. This time, he fully intentionally removed any traces of a name, the branding, almost the entire nodeinfo code and its license. Unfortunately, while he could deprive the software of a name and a logo, he couldn’t do that with the code repository for which he chose the name “streams” and that logo with the three blue waves.
Now he still maintained the same five Fediverse projects plus that nameless thing that, according to him, isn’t a project. But that nameless thing was the only one out of the bunch that he actually developed. Everything else was in maintenance mode.
Came New Year’s Eve, 2022, and Mike put Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse on the chopping-block. They weren’t needed anymore. What people had started calling “(streams)” was now stable enough to replace all five.
From then on, Mike only worked on (streams) anymore.
In 2023, silverpill, the creator and developer of Mitra, was absolutely hell-bent on making Mitra nomadic. But he didn’t want to switch to Nomad. He wanted to do nomadic identity with ActivityPub. And so he hit Mike up, and the two started brainstorming about how to pull this off.
This time, Mike didn’t fork anything, even though, yes, people were daily-driving (streams) now. Instead, he created a “nomadic” branch of the streams repository to tinker around with implementing nomadic identity in nothing but ActivityPub.
Fast-forward to summer, 2024. Mike was so confident in the “nomadic” branch that he merged it into the “dev” branch. Soon afterwards, he merged the “dev” branch into the “release” branch. In doing so, he officially switched (streams) to decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61 “Portable Objects”.
It. Blew. Up. Big. Time.
It had worked just fine under lab conditions with only Mike’s instances and silverpill’s non-public development instance of Mitra as sparrings partners. Out in the wild, it blew up. (streams) no longer properly federated with anything.
The reason: (streams) had to deal with so many IDs now that it confused them.
The consequence: Mike had to work his butt off trying to fix that mess and figure it out first, even though it was only for a handful of users.
In mid-August, he forked Forte from the streams repository. One of the first things he must have done was rip out any and all support for Nomad and Zot6 to get rid of at least some IDs.
Also, he attributed the lack of success for (streams) to the Mastodon-centric Fediverse rejecting something that’s no project with with no name, no brand and no license that doesn’t submit stats. Thus, Forte was declared a project, it got a name, it got a brand identity, it got its nodeinfo code back, and it got its MIT license back.
August 31st. Mike was so burned out from all this that he officially quit and retired from developing software. Effective September 1st, the streams repository and Forte were up for grabs. As there was no-one there to grab them, Mike still went on working on both, including introducing new features to both. After all, new code for Forte could fairly easily be backported to (streams).
When asked, Mike said (streams) isn’t going to go anywhere, (streams) is the stable one (it is stable again now), and Forte is very experimental.
March 12th, 2025. Just yesterday. This was the day that Forte saw its very first official release. And this was the first time that Mike talked about Forte in public as opposed to only to his immediate connections.
The family tree:
It won’t replace anything. It’s just another alternative.
Friendica has its advantages. Hubzilla has its advantages. (streams) has its advantages. (streams) can’t replace either because both have features that (streams) will never implement.
Always the same.
“The Fediverse in its entirety is objectively unuseable and repulsive unless it invests $100M into corporate-level UIs and corporate-level branding/brand design. What do you mean, the Fediverse doesn’t have $100M?”
No idea. I’ve stopped using diaspora* eons ago.
Ironically, Google+ was an all-out diaspora* ripoff. And Google got away with it because they brazenly stole from something that nobody even knew existed.
Remember Google’s new UI style? The black bar at the top? Stolen from diaspora* for Google+.
Also, everyone claims that Google+ invented the concept of “circles”. Actually, Google just ripped off diaspora*'s aspects. (And Friendica had them several months before diaspora* even. So Friendica had them first. Not diaspora*. And Google even less.)
Won’t happen.
Around December 29th, multiple big diaspora* pods shut down. According to one source, diaspora* lost over half of its users within three days. On January 25th, diasp.org, one of the biggest pods, will meet its end.
Also, if anything, Friendica (plus Hubzilla plus Socialhome) will suck the rest of life out of diaspora*. diaspora* users will move there from their own dying pods to stay in contact both with their friends who still hold out on diaspora* and with their friends who have moved on to something that uses ActivityPub. And the former will become fewer and fewer as more and more pods shut down.
This is even fairly easy for (streams) which is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of a fork of Friendica by Friendica’s own creator, eleven years after Friendica. And I wouldn’t even feel bad about it.
That’s because (streams) has only got two public, open-registration instances. If you’re in North America, it’s Rumbly. If you’re in Europe, it’s Nomád (with a German veteran admin who also runs two Hubzilla hubs, who is savvy enough to single-handedly re-write Hubzilla’s entire help system from scratch in both German and English, and who plans to do the same for (streams)).
And it’s because (streams) intentionally keeps itself away from instance-listing websites like Fediverse Observer and FediDB, so being railroaded to any one specific instance is just about the only chance you have to get into (streams).
Granted, it has a learning curve that’s even steeper than Friendica’s. It doesn’t have a UI/UX that looks like $10M of VC. And there’s no way whatsoever to use (streams) with any kind of dedicated, native mobile Fediverse app, especially not its own official iPhone app named “Streams” that looks like $20M of VC.
Lemmy users = Redditors = geeks.
OP is talking about people for whom the Internet is Facebook, Google, YouTube and Amazon, and who have always only ever used phones and never in their lives laid their hands upon an actual computer.
People who had their Gmail account registered and configured by whoever sold them their phone (or one of their past phones).
Anything that goes beyond “load an app with the same name as the thing you want to use from the App Store, user name, password, go” is too complex for them.
If you don’t mind a learning curve and having to use the Web interface (because there’s no native mobile app): (streams). From Friendica’s creator.
If (streams) sounds good, but you need a shit-ton of extra features on top (and be it diaspora* connectivity), and you don’t mind an even steeper learning curve: Hubzilla. Also made by the guy who made Friendica.
If you absolutely, absolutely, absolutely must have a dedicated native app on your phone, you’re on Android, and you can live without features such as nomadic identity, multiple channels per account and advanced, fine-grained permission control: Friendica.
If you absolutely, absolutely, absolutely must have a dedicated native app on your phone, but you’re on iOS: Wait for Relatica to have a stable release, then Friendica. (Caveats see above.)
Forget diaspora*. It’s fading out. Shortly before New Year’s Eve, a bunch of big diaspora* pods shut down, and at least according to one stats site, diaspora* lost more than haf its users.
And Pleroma is a Twitter replacement that, just like Mastodon, started out as an alternative UI for GNU social.
Imagine being able to post only to Alice, Bob and Carol and nobody else ever laying their eyes on the post. Not in the Fediverse, not outside the Fediverse.
Imagine only Alice, Bob and Carol being able to reply to your posts, but all three being able to see and reply to each other’s replies.
Imagine being able to define groups of connections with which you can do the above.
Sounds like utopian science-fiction. Is reality.
Hubzilla (official website), a Friendica fork by Friendica’s own creator, offers literally what I’ve described above. It has since 2012, almost four years longer than Mastodon has been around.
If you want something more lightweight with not quite such a steep learning curve, there’s also (streams) (code repository from 2021 from the same creator, the result of a whole series of forks. Similar advanced and fine-grained permissions system, but somewhat easier to use.
Why does the fediverse not have a privacy control to limit who can see and interact with your posts?
It does. The Fediverse is more than Mastodon and Lemmy.
Especially Hubzilla and (streams) with their advanced permissions systems provide what you’re looking for and more. Only downsides are the learning curves ((streams)’ learning curve is not exactly shall, Hubzilla’s is steeper), UIs that don’t look like they were made in 2024 from venture capital and a total lack of native mobile apps (you can install both as PWAs, though).
Common misconception by Fediverse newbies: “Fediverse” is an umbrella term for a bunch of decentralised walled gardens. Like, Lemmy only connects to Lemmy, Mastodon only connects to Mastodon, Pixelfed only connects to Pixelfed etc. And if you’re on Mastodon, and your Facebook friends join Friendica, you need a Friendica account to get back in touch with them.
In reality, just about everything is interconnected with everything. No matter what it is.
You can use your Mastodon account to follow people on Pixelfed, on Friendica, on Misskey, whatever.
That said, having a separate Lemmy account makes sense because Lemmy/the Threadiverse is somewhat special in operation. Also, it’s all about conversations and groups, and Mastodon doesn’t understand neither. And starting a thread on Lemmy from Mastodon is not as straight-forward as starting a thread on Mastodon from Mastodon.
OP wants something that looks like the Twitter app, that feels like the Twitter app, that handles like the Twitter app. But with Mastodon underneath.
Essentially the “literally Twitter without Musk” which millions of Twitter refugees have expected Mastodon to be since 2022.
Probably also hard-coded to mastodon.social to hide Mastodon’s decentrality from the dumb-dumbs.
The closest you’d get would be with Hubzilla or (streams). Or Forte if it wasn’t experimental with no public instances yet. They even have file spaces with WebDAV on which you can upload files and then define who is permitted to see/access these files or the folders they’re in.
However:
What you want isn’t their default M.O. You’ll have to get used to and think yourself into something with a learning curve that’s even steeper than Friendica’s. You’ll have to learn and understand the permissions system, including giving nobody permission to see your connections. Ideally, all your connections would have to be smart enough to know how to to hide being connected to you from the public and to actually do so.
Encryption is optional and “uninstalled” by default for everyone, and it isn’t even available on all server instances (it’s up to the admin to activate that add-on, and then the user has to activate it, too). Also, it uses passphrases and not automatically generated key pairs.
Finally, if you insist in using it with a mobile app, you’re completely out of luck. It’s browser or PWA for all of them.
Knud Puppetsen, is that you on the picture?
Don’t make it a scratch-built, stand-alone Fediverse server app.
Make it a third-party add-on for Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte that sources the profiles of channels that activate that add-on. I mean, you’ve gotta see the number of profile fields available on these three.