Knud Puppetsen, is that you on the picture?

Knickerbockers

Could be wrong, or just more domain-specific, bu my experience is people don’t complain that the video is 15-30 minutes long, is that it’s a video (and that long) when the information could have been more succintly and practically displayed in a text tutorial or a blog format.

Which is kind of interesting, considering it wasn’t that long ago that people asked for tutorials and other information in the shape of videos because they couldn’t be bothered to read shit.

Defederation all by itself isn’t bad.

Immature and irresponsible instance admins who use it as a tool to act out their personal conflicts are.

Decentralisation could very well lead to specialised instances for niche interests or fringe groups. I mean, exactly this has popped up during the first two Twitter migration wave.

And still, you’ve got countless people who want mastodon.social to be exactly the way they want it to be, regardless of what anyone else may want, or what’s possible on such a big instance. Because that’s where they are, and they are not going to move elsewhere.

There are two kinds of people who claim that Mastodon is the best.

One, absolute fanbois and fangurls who, in addition, don’t even know that Pleroma, Misskey or any forks of either exist, much less what they’re like. Their point is always “biggest = most popular = best”, although they themselves, like almost everyone on Mastodon, were railroaded onto Mastodon without being told that there’s more to the Fediverse than Mastodon, even in terms of microblogging.

I’m not even kidding when I say the UX on the *keys is closer to Twitter than that on Mastodon. And at the same tiime, the *keys show what Fediverse projects something comes from whereas Mastodon tries hard to make everyone believe that the Fediverse is Mastodon.

Two, Mastodon devs. I’ve actually had a Mastodon developer who knew that I’m on Hubzilla comment into my face that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete Fediverse project. I could have inquired him about Mastodon support for one or two dozen Hubzilla features, ranging from full HTML rendering over nomadic identity and WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV connectivity to a built-in wiki engine. But I didn’t.

What really needs contributors are the streams repository and probably also Forte. They’re very powerful, they’re highly advanced, they’re secure and resilient, they’re basically what the whole Fediverse should be like, and they can blow not only Mastodon out of the water, but also Pleroma, Misskey and all their forks. But they only have half a maintainer at best because their creator has officially retired.

Allow me to elaborate:

These are the youngest offspring of a family of roughly Facebook-like Fediverse server applications created by Mike Macgirvin. They started in 2010 with Mistpark, later Friendika, now known as Friendica. The focus has never been on aping the UI/UX of something commercial and centralised, like Lemmy apes Reddit, but to create a replacement that’s actually better. Toss out stuff that sucks, add features that could be useful like full-blown blogging capability, including blogging-level text formatting, and a built-in file space with its own file manager.

The next in the family was a 2012 Friendica fork originally named Red that introduced the concept of nomadic identity. As of now, and outside developer instances, nomadic identity is a feature exclusive to Mike’s creations. Red became the Red Matrix, and in 2015, it was renamed and redesigned into Hubzilla, a “decentralised social CMS” and the Fediverse’s biggest feature monster.

What followed was a whole bunch of forks, mostly development forks, only one of which was officially declared stable. This led to the creation of the streams repository in October, 2021. It’s a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, but the first fork already lost many of Hubzilla’s extra features and a lot of Hubzilla’s connectivity.

The streams repository contains a Fediverse server application that is officially and intentionally nameless and brandless (“streams” is the name of the repository, not the name of the application), that is not a product, that is not a project, and that is just as intentionally released into the public domain, save for 3rd-party contributions inherited from Hubzilla that are under various free licenses.

While (streams), as it is colloquially called, may not have Hubzilla’s wealth of features, it has to be one of the two most advanced pieces of Fediverse software out there. With its permissions system that is even improved over Hubzilla’s, hardly anything can match it in safety, security and privacy. On top comes resilience through nomadic identity. Also, (streams) is more adapted to a Fediverse that’s driven by ActivityPub and dominated by Mastodon whereas Hubzilla seems stuck in the mid-2010s in some regards.

At this point, it should be mentioned that while Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can communicate through ActivityPub, none of them is based on it. AFAIK, Friendica is still based on its own protocol, DFRN, which is used by nothing else. Hubzilla is based on an older version of the Nomad protocol known as Zot6. (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad and also understands Zot6 for the best possible connectivity with Hubzilla.

So one of the latest development goals for the streams repository was the introduction of nomadic identity via ActivityPub, a concept that first appeared in 2023. I’m not sure how far this has been developed. But Mike created a new (streams) fork named Forte in August this year which had all support for non-ActivityPub protocols removed, probably also to cut down the maze of ID for everything which blew up on (streams) when support for FEP-ef61 was pushed to the release branch in July. Also, Forte has a name, it has a brand, it has a license, it has fully functional nodeinfo, and it is a project. Otherwise, Forte is identical to (streams).

Currently, there is only one Forte instance with one user, and that’s Mike’s private channel which mostly only his friends know about. Forte can be considered very experimental at this point, at least until Mike declares it ready for prime-time. After all, Forte has to handle nomadic identity via ActivityPub which, so far, is only proven to work under developer lab conditions at best.

However, there isn’t much going on in terms of development. After the hassle that was getting malfunctioning (streams) back on track this summer, Mike officially retired from Fediverse development at the turn from August to September. He hasn’t quit entirely, but he only works on (streams) and Forte sparsely. At the same time, the (streams) community was and still is too small to have a willing and able developer amongst themselves, and Forte has no community.

According to Mike, Forte could (and should) be “the Fediverse of 2030”. It only needs more people working on it.

The EFF is too big and thus too unflexible to quickly realise that

• there’s more to the Fediverse than Mastodon
• in fact, Mastodon itself is more than mastodon.social
• what else there is in the Fediverse is federated with Mastodon
• which means that if you join something else than Mastodon, all the same people who follow you on Mastodon can follow you there as well
• many of Mastodon’s limitations don’t exist in the Fediverse outside Mastodon

I mean, it should give you to think that the official Fediverse representation of the EFF is on mastodon.social. Like they’re still total Fediverse newbies. Like they’ve only just gotten past the “not worth joining the Fediverse, there’s literally nobody there” phase.

I think such organisations should all have a total Fediverse whiz amongst their members who knows the Fediverse outside Mastodon inside-out, and who has significant influence because people in the organisation actually listen to them.

The EFF is in a perfect situation right now: They don’t have their own Fediverse instance. So if they wanted to set up something that isn’t Mastodon, like Friendica or Hubzilla which would be much better for organisations like these, they wouldn’t have to discard and shut down a Mastodon instance of their own, only give up an account on mastodon.social.

You mean as an end user or as a hub admin?

Hubzilla is my main daily driver in the Fediverse and has been since before the big Twitter migration of 2022. In fact, I’ve never used Twitter.

A few attributes that could describe Hubzilla are “powerful”, “complex”, but also “unusual”.

Hubzilla is basically Facebook on coke and 'roids (without what sucks on Facebook) meets a full-blown blogging engine meets Google Cloud or iCloud services meets Dropbox with a small Web hoster on top, a simple wiki engine etc. etc. plus federation into all kinds of directions (Twitter if your hub admin has the money, diaspora*, WordPress cross-poster etc.), and that still isn’t all that Hubzilla can do.

If Friendica is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, then Hubzilla is a full-blown Leatherman.

There’s little that you couldn’t possibly do with Hubzilla. You can use it for Facebook-style social networking, actually even better than Mastodon. You can run moderated forum/discussion groups on it. You can use it as a blog with all the shebang (except it sends Note-type objects rather than Article-type objects over ActivityPub, and text formatting is done in BBcode), and you don’t even have to worry about where to upload your images because Hubzilla has a built-in file space, complete with subdirectory support and file managers. You can use it as your personal WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV server. You can run simple websites on it (hubzilla.org, the official Hubzilla website, is built on a Hubzilla channel itself).

Friendica, which Hubzilla was forked from back in 2012 (although it didn’t become Hubzilla before 2015), already has multiple profiles per account. You can assign profiles to contacts so that different people can see different sides of you. You can have a public profile with only basic informations. One profile for work and colleagues. One LinkedIn-style career profile. One profile for your family. One profile for your booze buddies or nerd friends or whatever. All with different information about you.

Hubzilla goes even further: Your identity is not tied to your account anymore. Your identity is containerised in what Hubzilla calls a “channel”. And you can have multiple channels on one account. Each channel is like a separate account mostly everywhere else, a fully separate Fediverse identity, but all on the same login. And each channel can have multiple profiles.

For example, you can run one channel as your personal daily-driver channel. Three channels as forums/discussion groups (think Lemmy communities/subreddits) for different topics. One channel with a webpage on it. Whatever. And nobody can tell that these channels are on the same account, save maybe for the hub admin if they’re eager to do some SQL-fu in the database. (Or everyone if all these channels are on a private, single-user hub.)

Or what if you need another Fediverse identity for special purposes? On Lemmy or Mastodon, you need another account. On Hubzilla, you create a new channel on your existing account. You don’t even have to log off and on again to switch between channels.

The channels system was basically introduced to make one of Hubzilla’s killer features possible: nomadic identity. What most Fediverse users consider utter science-fiction was actually already introduced in 2012. Granted, this is only possible because Hubzilla is based on its own protocol rather than ActivityPub, but still.

Nomadic identity makes it possible to have a channel, one and the same channel, on multiple hubs at the same time. Not with dumb copies, but with real-time, live, hot, bidirectional backups of just about everything. You can have as many clones as you want to/as you can find appropriate hubs to clone to.

Your channel always has one main instance which also defines its ID (at least from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla) and one or several clones (which, from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla, all have the same ID as the main instance). Whatever happens on your main instance is copied to the clones within seconds. You can also log onto your clones and use them. E.g. when the hub with your main instance is offline, you lose nothing. Whatever happens on one of the clones is copied to the other clones and to your main instance.

Oh, and if the hub with your main instance goes down for good, or if you want to move, you can define one of your clones your main instance, and your old main instance is demoted to clone. This means that if your channel is nomadic, one server going down won’t take your channel with it. You’ll still have the self-same channel elsewhere. Your home server gives up the ghost, you lose nothing.

But don’t expect Hubzilla to be easy to get into. It’s nothing like Reddit, it’s nothing like Twitter has ever been, and it’s nothing like most of the rest of the Fediverse. The closest would be (streams), a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork)? of Hubzilla itself, and everything in this chain is/was by the same creator. Followed by Friendica and Forte, still by the same creator, and Forte’s only instance is currently the private instance of said creator. But everything else in the Fediverse is nothing like Hubzilla.

First newbie obstacle: You can’t follow anyone on Mastodon. Or almost anywhere else in the Fediverse. That’s because ActivityPub is optional, and it’s off by default so that your new channel only supports that one nomadic protocol at first. Non-nomadic protocols kind of disturb nomadic identity, mostly because you have to re-connect non-nomadic contacts manually, one by one. And back when Hubzilla was made, it was actually a tempting idea to run a purely nomadic channel.

To add to the difficulty, there is no ActivityPub switch in the settings. ActivityPub is an “app” that needs to be “installed”. Hubzilla is very modular, and so are its channels where not all its features are enabled by default.

And then there’s the permissions system. Something like this exists nowhere in the Fediverse that isn’t made by the Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte creator Mike Macgirvin. Not even Friendica has it to such an extent. It’s extensive, it’s fine-grained, and it’s powerful.

But unlike everything in the Fediverse not created by Mike, it does not default to “everything is allowed to everyone unless muted or blocked”. Its default settings are still geared towards 2012 when it was still named Red (from spanish la red = the network), when the Federation, the precursor of the Fediverse, was still small, and four years before Mastodon was launched. In those days, the idea of a purely Red/Red Matrix/Hubzilla network that offers a maximum of privacy, safety and security was not too far-fetched.

And so, by default, certain things are disallowed unless explicitly allowed to certain contacts by means of contact role. By default, your posts all only go to a privacy group (think Mastodon lists on more coke and even more 'roids) instead of to everyone. Before you can really get going, you’ll have to install multiple apps of which you don’t know what they do and adjust things of which you don’t know that they exist, much less what they’re for. It takes months to become a halfway routined user, and it takes years to be come a power user who realises that setting everything to public is actually stupid, and who knows how to tone down the settings again while not keeping your existing contacts out.

Yeah, the UI/UX is far from top notch. But keep in mind that Hubzilla is a fork of Friendica. Which is from 2010. In 2010, social networks and social media were still mostly geared towards the desktop, and phone apps were gimmicks rather than bare necessities. Both Friendica and Hubzilla were created by only one person. And he’s a protocol designer and not a full-stack Web developer. Mike can make UIs work, but he can’t make them as pretty as what Apple whips up.

Hubzilla is very themeable, but it currently has only got one official theme. Its name “Redbasic” indicates its origin: Red. As in Hubzilla, three years before it was Hubzilla. 2012. It hasn’t changed much since then, except it became more configurable with Hubzilla 9 this year.

There used to be more themes, but even after the community took over from Mike in 2018, Hubzilla never had more than two core developers. And, again, it’s an utter monster. The devs invested most of their time into the vast backend, consisting of the core and the more essential apps. Over time, not only several apps fell to the wayside (including a chess game which was dropped in 2020 because of a big protocol upgrade), but so did all themes except Redbasic. The devs only had time to upgrade one theme to new or changed features, and so the other themes became incompatible and were eventually dropped.

Brand-new third-party themes are in the making, and a few will soon be rolled out. But I wouldn’t count on them being included into every new Hubzilla installation, much less all existing hubs.

Speaking of apps: There’s no official Hubzilla app, neither for iOS nor for Android. There’s one app for Android named Nomad. It’s only available on F-Droid. And it hasn’t been updated in a whopping five years. On more recent devices, it doesn’t even work anymore. And, in fact, it’s a Web app. It integrates Hubzilla’s Web interface instead of having everything on a dedicated, native mobile UI. In other words, there aren’t that many advantages of using Nomad over using a browser.

There’s also a very, very, very bare-bone Android app, I think it was made by Hubzilla’s main dev, that can only post to Hubzilla and nothing else. You can’t even use it to read anything. It isn’t available in any app store.

The best you can do if you want to use Hubzilla on a phone is install it as a Progressive Web App.

why the fuck are they so consistently BAD at naming things???

Because the guy who developed Mistpark within four months in 2010 in his spare time on a budget of exactly zero didn’t have millions for hired marketing experts to design a name for something that literally had never been done before.

Facebook alternative from 2010. Pre-dates diaspora* by a few months.

Remember diaspora*? In summer 2010, four young fellows asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding so they could spend the summer developing a free, open-source, decentralised Facebook alternative. Mind you, summer 2010 was when Cambridge Analytica was still a hot topic. So they got $320,000, and the mainstream media wrote about a “Facebook killer” in development.

They started in May, 2010. It was in late autumn when they delivered a first, very early alpha release that was very incomplete and only ran on Mac servers. It took years until even a first beta release, not to mention replacing the whole dev team.

Friendica (originally Mistpark) was developed by one man. In four months, from March to July, 2010. With zero budget. And Mistpark, as it was when it was first released in July, 2010, could have easily mopped the floor with today’s diaspora*, feature-wise, without even breaking a sweat.

Friendica does not try to be a Facebook clone. It tries to be “like Facebook, but way better”. With lots of unnecessary cruft not taken over, but with all-new features integrated. For example, Friendica can be used as a full-blown blog with all text formatting shebang you could possibly imagine a blog to have, all the way to an unlimited number of images that can be embedded within the text, like, with text above the image and more text below the image.

By the way, Friendica comes with a built-in file storage complete with a file manager where you can upload images or whatever. Unlike on Mastodon and Lemmy, your images don’t sink into some data nirvana.

Unlike all the microblogging stuff in the Fediverse, Friendica does not have any arbitrary character limit.

Remember Google+? It was a full-on diaspora* rip-off. Everyone things Google+ had invented circles. Google+ had actually stolen diaspora*'s aspects. But Friendica had them first, even before diaspora*, and calls them lists.

Also, Friendica has been supporting moderated discussion groups at various levels of privacy from the get-go.

But Friendica’s biggest killer feature is and has always been that it can connect to a whole lot of stuff. It can connect to the entire ActivityPub-using Fediverse, it can connect to diaspora*, it can connect to anything that uses OStatus, it can cross-post to WordPress and compatible blogs, it can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds while generating its own Atom feeds, it can “federate” via e-mail, its built-in chat is XMPP-compatible. You can also integrate a Bluesky account, you can integrate a Tumblr account, you can integrate an 𝕏 account (but the node admin still has to shell out a couple million dollars for a full API key to be able to make full use of it), and for a few months around 2012, you could even integrate a Facebook account into Friendica until Facebook made extracting content to third parties illegal.

The idea was that your friends are all over the place, you’re on Friendica, and you can stay in touch with all your friends without having to use all the stuff that your friends use. You can stay in touch with them on Friendica even though they’re all over the place.

Good luck going around, putting the proverbial gun against the devs of way over 100 Fediverse projects that are fully independent from another (no, there is no central Fediverse branding department) and forcing them to rename their stuff NOW OR ELSE!!!

A few exceptions that are trochees right now:

• Forte (which may pretty well be the Fediverse of 2030 by this logic)
• Iceshrimp
• Sharkey
• Mitra
• Lemmy
• Mbin
• PieFed
• PeerTube
• Funkwhale
• Owncast
• BookWyrm

When Friendica was launched in 2010 (yes, it’s way older than both Mastodon and Lemmy, go figure), it was named Mistpark.

Which, to a German like me, sounds like “dung park” or “manure park”. Which, by the way, is the reason why Mike Macgirvin renamed it.

Friendica user: “You say you want the Fediverse to have this feature? The Fediverse has this feature. Mastodon doesn’t, but the Fediverse has. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. Friendica has it. Friendica has had it since its inception in 2010, over five years before Mastodon was launched. And Friendica has always been part of the Fediverse. And since Mastodon was launched, it has been federated with Friendica. So there.”

misskey.io is a Japanese instance under Japanese law. With pretty lax rules, and only under Japanese law. Which means that just about everything in the West blocks misskey.io, and I think misskey.io doesn’t let Westerners join.

Why?

Because lolicon is allowed on misskey.io.

Thing is, lolicon may or may not count as CSAM by Western standards. Western lawmakers haven’t decided about it yet, hence “may or may not”. But “may or may not” may mean “yes, it is”.

And so, to be safe, Western instances block the hell out of misskey.io to keep what may or may not be CSAM from coming in. Remember that Mastodon caches any and all media. One lolicon post being washed up on Mastodon.social may be enough for Gargron to end up behind bars for “having child pr0n on his Web server”.

In Japan, on the other hand, lawmakers have decided. Lolicon is not CSAM, and it’s legal.

Thus, misskey.io, being hosted in Japan under Japanese law and only Japanese law, allows lolicon all over the place.

If you want some search that covers as much of the Fediverse as possible, you’ll have to make it centralised in some way.

If you want some search that actually always covers all of the Fediverse all the way to instances that have only just been launched for the first time, you’ll have to make it fully centralised and hard-code that search into all Fediverse server apps. That way, when you first start your new private instance of whatever, it can immediately connect itself to that search engine and push any and all content on your instance to that search engine.

I don’t know how well you know the Fediverse outside Lemmy. But at least on Mastodon, but probably not only there, many of those who have been around for long enough would rebel against centralised search because they don’t want the Fediverse to rely on anything centralised.

Also, especially on Mastodon, you have those who strongly opposed the introduction of full-text search on Mastodon itself on the ground of full-text search being used in the Birdcage to find and then harass BIPoC and members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, many of whom have escaped to Mastodon because it did not have full-text search! There may actually still be Mastodon instances that run Mastodon 3.x in order to avoid the full-text search that was introduced with Mastodon 4.0.

Thus, covering exactly 100% of the Fediverse (the public Fediverse at least) would even be impossible with a centralised search engine. That is, unless that search engine managed to circumvent instance-wide blocks (you can be sure that places such as tech.lgbt or transfem.social would block the hell out of such a search engine) and ignore any and all kinds of search opt-outs.

(streams) and Forte have very nice user discovery: On your stream page which is always the landing page when you open your channel, there’s an area to the left which suggests two new contacts to you. The same thing is on your contacts page. Below the two suggestions, there is a button to a suggestions page which is basically a special, filtered version of the directory. There you get even more contact suggestions. The two suggestions are randomly picked from the two on your suggestions page.

If you fill out your profile, especially the keyword field, the suggestions will improve. Also, the suggestions may include not only users, but also whatever qualifies as a group, because the directory certainly does.

It’s basically like Facebook, but more convenient than Facebook has ever been AFAIR. Friendica has had this kind of suggestions since its inception in 2010, and (streams) is an indirect fork, so-to-speak. I don’t know if Friendica has a suggestion field up front nowadays, though; I know that Hubzilla doesn’t have one unless you add it using the PDL editor (and, please, which newbies dives into Hubzilla that deeply), and (streams) and Forte do have one.

Programmers either don’t understand that “nice to look at and use” is actually a really important aspect of an app/program, or it’s a lot harder to do that well than it seems from the outside. I really don’t know. When it’s just one person making the whole thing, it makes sense that they split their work where they can.

It could be both. I guess the former is widespread amongst Linux-based hobby coders who use a minimalist window manager or even a terminal multiplexer instead of a full-blown desktop environment. They don’t see the appeal in good UIs.

But they may also fall victim to the latter because they see good UIs so rarely that they simply don’t know what good UIs look like. That, and most hobby FLOSS coders are backend devs above all. Even if you assemble 20 hobby coders for a project, you may have to appoint one who’ll begrudgingly have to make a UI without actually knowing how.

At least, some Fediverse server applications can not only be themed, but you can replace the entire Web UI. And there are capable UI designers in the Fediverse, just not so many as capable full-stack devs. Granted, they may not be on the same level as frontend devs with Apple paychecks, but still.

For example, Pleroma and Akkoma have gotten to a point where, I guess, Pleroma-FE and Akkoma-FE only see so much use because not everybody has heard of stuff like Mangane yet. But people who have gotten a taste of Mangane usually don’t want to go back.

Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are so extensively themeable that a user-selectable theme is very close to an all-new frontend. In practice, Hubzilla’s themeability fell victim to the effort of keeping Hubzilla’s monstrous backend maintained, and so it’s down to one theme whose name is not the only hint at it being stuck in 2012. Well, enter people who make new third-party themes to stop Hubzilla being as unuseable as it’s being made out to be.

No. You can’t crosspost to two or more Lemmy communities at once. AFAICS, that’s fully deliberate and intentional by design to keep people from spamming Lemmy with mass-crossposts.

What it fixes is trouble with crossposting to Lemmy, Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) and Guppe groups. You can’t mention these in any order you like. You always have to begin with one Lemmy community. If a Lemmy community is not mentioned first, it will be ignored, no matter what is mentioned first.

Also, apparently, mentioning Guppe groups before a Friendica group, a Hubzilla forum or a (streams) group doesn’t work either.

Reason #1: It overloads them mentally. It was hard enough to wrap their minds around Mastodon not being the one website they thought it is.

Reason #2: They got so used to their nice and cosy and fluffy and friendly woolly mammoth being the entire Fediverse, and everything they ever interact with being Mastodon, that everything they (might) have to interact with that is not Mastodon is too much of a disturbance. There being something else in the Fediverse other than Mastodon simply feels too wrong.