Lmst

This is my first #Mastodon-powered fediverse server. _^

That means, https://aleph.land is one of the first and oldest Mastodon-based #Fediverse instance. _~

I occasionally log in here to keep it alive because this is historical and memorable for me. During this time, and before Mastodon was released, I was running my own Fediverse instance powered by #Hubzilla.

Back then, the protocol of the fediverse was #OpenMicroBlogging then #OStatus; #AcitivtyPub came years later.

Today, we have another federated protocol: #ATproto which is powering The #ATmosphere network (#Bluesky is just one instance).

(PS. Max chars in Aleph.Land is 1024; and using the #GlitchSoc fork since it came out.)

You can check out my first ever post using Mastodon here: https://aleph.land/@yahananxie/28062

@youronlyone

#MyFediverseJourney #SocialWeb #OpenSocialWeb #FederatedWeb #FederatedSocialWeb

@leadore @josephholsten It'll be interesting to see how it all pans out, but we do need to be careful.

If I would have one criticism of the Fediverse, it's that it blends many spaces together into one in a way that eliminates any real sense of place.

This becomes a problem when different spaces have different etiquette and social expectations - people can't abide by the expectations of where they are if they don't know where they are (or even, as is often the case with the fediverse, where they are effectively in multiple places at once)

Usenet is a separate world, with a very separate posting etiquette and set of social expectations. Connecting them is a cool technical achievement but I do worry that if the UX is handled badly it could create more problems than it solves.

#nntp #fediverse #FederatedSocialWeb

@_jayrope

"simple" social problems do not exist - this problems are real ;-)

Demands, priorities and even understanding can be quid different as we know, but I did some research recently about the discussed goals of the so called "Federated Social Web". It is interesting and obvious that there are today - after 15 years of coding - just two project which come close to this goals. Both of this project do not use ActivityPub only... All Fedi Devs should just be honest and admit that... than we will see what can be done...

#FederatedSocialWeb

That was all they knew. And nobody told them otherwise because nobody else knew either.

(...)

So StatusNet wasn't really part of the #FederatedSocialWeb in practice.

According to my sources the story goes a bit different here - sorry for that @Jupiter Rowland

The "Federated Social Web" was an term founded and an initiative started by Evan Prodromou, the head and CEO behind #StatusNet #Ostaus and #IdentiCa. In July 2010 he tried to get together all active groups developing code specific to federation of the web. This happen to be just around the days as @Mike Macgirvin came around the corner with #DFRN. He got even invited to this "Federated Social Web" summit but i guess the way form Australia to Portland Oregon was a bit to long, for this short-term invitation.

There where some more "Federated Social Web" meetings and one result form Evans initiative was also the "W3C Federated Social Web Incubator Group" started on 15 December 2010 and transitioned on 12 January 2012 to the "W3C Federated Social Web Community Group". This group did all the basic work for the Activitypub definitions published 2018 https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

It appears that in all this meetings Mikes projects were never present. In all this "Federated Social Web" summits and follower up meeting all kinds of protocols, networks, platforms were discussed - but i read never about #Mistpark, #Friendica, #Hubzilla, #DFRN or #ZOT . But Evan and the others DEVs know about Mikes work for sure. For very sure - but they were following their own projects and ideas.

The OStatus support side was hard-coded for only this one instance because the devs believed that identi.ca was a monolithic walled garden just like Twitter.

Evan had always also some kind of businesses modes in mind and he got in August 2010 even $2.3 million. Dollars of Venture capital for the platform #status.net So the whole setting for this #FederatedSocialWeb initiative has to be seen also in this light.

And.... Guess who the chairman of the W3C Social Web Working Community Group was - Evan.

Now ... also the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was also just focused on OStatus and StatusNet. By 2009 a decision of the GNU social steering committee was made to built on top of the OStatus protocol and the StatusNet codebase a project called "GNU social". It's main goal was to deployable with a minimal hosting configuration. So GNU social got on the way and was finally around 2012/13 the successor of Laconica/StatusNet software.

Now we can understand a bit better that DFRN/ZOT/NOMAD projects were never considered later e.g. by the FSF. Today they use of coure Masto, the successor of GNU social.

Somehow the line of projects started with Mistpark got ignored by powerful institutions because advocates and proponent were missing here. In two weeks from today here in Cologne we will have a summit about the chances of free social networks, also organized by the Free Software Foundation Europe

https://fsfe.org/news/2023/news-20230712-01.en.html

One of the speaks will be @Tobias. He has been a follower of Mikes projects since the very early days in 2011 and still is running a Friendica community hub and is working for the FSFE also as system administrator. He should know also a bit about #Hubzilla and #Streams and we can hope for sure that the word about Mike projects will be finally start to be spread :-)

I will report.

@Jupiter Rowland Ok there may be some fanboys who like to stick to what they just learned... but his does not explain the phenomenon for me why so many free Web/internet/IT activist stay on #Masto.

Well, there are few on #Friendica - but very very few on #Hubzilla or #streams.

Again.. not talking about the crowd here but about activist groups like #eff #fsfe #digitalcourage and individuals who fighting for freedom in the digital world. There must be an other reason. I assume they are all some how cough up in patterns which keeps same from moving... patterns you believe in can be quid strong... if you believe social media is by definition a public thing than you will like the app which gives you the most follower and spreads your word as fare as possible.

__

Thanks for your inside view on #StatusNet. I will do some more research. From that what i know so fare Evan Prodromou was very well involved in this #FederatedSocialWeb movement. According to this source #StatusNet and #Ostaus was subject for sure. Will try to dig deeper

@Jupiter Rowland

and what role did play Status.net in your #FederatedSocialWeb ?

@𝓒𝓱𝓻𝓲𝓼

So you are saying all the talk and efforts about UX/UI brings us not closer to the essential points and is actually distracting us...

No, I'm saying that people come from #Mastodon straight to #Hubzilla in expectation of "Mastodon with #RichText and a 50,000-character limit". Just like they came from Twitter to Mastodon because they were promised "literally Twitter without Elon Musk".

Then they land flat on their faces. Hubzilla turns out to be nothing like Mastodon. It handles vastly differently. Nothing is where they'd expect it. No content warnings (because Hubzilla calls them summaries). No UI element for alt-text. It doesn't have an app. Mastodon apps don't work. And so forth. Hell, 95% of them even fail to connect to other Mastodon users because nobody tells them that they have to turn #Pubcrawl on first!

Verdict: Hubzilla sucks. And they're back to their cosy little Mastodon which was hard enough to get used to already. No ambitions to learn something wholly new yet again.

I still remember when #Friendica mimicked the UIs of Facebook and #Diaspora*. Maybe Hubzilla needs to adopt this again with UIs that mimic Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Threads and the most popular Mastodon Web interfaces. Not only in looks, but even in handling as far as that's possible.

just did some studies about the term #FederatedSocialWeb and will post it in a new thread

The #FederatedSocialWeb was:

Diaspora* for the clueless hipsters who had never heard of Friendica, and who were absolutely convinced that those four guys were the first to develop a decentralised social network
Friendica for the geeks, the cool kids and alternative left-wing activists who had to use something obscure so that the authorities wouldn't discover their posts too easily
the #RedMatrix for those few daredevils who a) knew about it, b) were willing to try it and c) actually had access to a Red Matrix instance

@Jupiter Rowland Thanks

So you are saying all the talk and efforts about UX/UI brings us not closer to the essential points and is actually distracting us...

UX/UI is a wrap up for raw functions - a surface - It can enable us to do things more easy - it can also nudge us to certain actions and also hide things way.

If UX/UI is keeping you from understanding and trying to do things by your self i would say there is something really wrong with the used UX/UI

I like Hubzilla so much because it actually enables us to do so many things...and we can also easy brake up the surface and tweak things... well not everybody can do this but the tools to try are implemented - and that is essential

Open Source project will never have the resources like the IT Industry has to invest in a really good UX/UI

In a world where iPhone are still an object of desire a project like streams can't be expected to find the crowd - but more free Web activists should us it instead of Masto.

just did some studies about the term #FederatedSocialWeb and will post it in a new thread

@𝓒𝓱𝓻𝓲𝓼 Well, first they had a problem with #Mastodon not having the exact same UX as X. Then they had one with #Hubzilla not having the exact same UX as Mastodon.

Also, sure, today's #Fediverse is nothing like the old #FederatedSocialWeb.

10 years ago, the Federated Social Web was for geeks plus left-wing activists. #Friendica was the centre of the world. We didn't know whether we should pity or laugh at #Diaspora. And everyone was on desktop #Linux, and #Apple was evil incarnate.

Today, the Fediverse is for just about everyone. Mastodon is not only the centre of the world to the point that many spend up to half a year believing it is the Fediverse proper. People are pining for #Bluesky invites. And everyone's on an #iPhone and gushing over the #VisionPro.

There's no denying that #Mastodon is far from perfect. Not only from the point of view of people who have only just arrived from #𝕏, believing that Mastodon is "𝕏 without Musk", but especially from the point of view of the users of the old #FederatedSocialWeb projects.

This applies even more if Mastodon's shortcomings actually have an impact on #Friendica or #Hubzilla users.

Now, I could go to my Hubzilla channel and post about how Mastodon sucks, how it does so even all the way across the #Fediverse.

But I don't have to. For I have a GitHub account. In fact, I don't use it to upload any code. It's purpose-made for reporting issues only.

So if Mastodon's use of summaries as content warnings doesn't blur images under posts that come from outside, what do I do? I check GitHub if a bug report has been filed already. Turned out there is one, filed just last month. So I added a comment and explained it a bit further as far as I can judge it.

Then I thought it'd be nice if Mastodon had something like the NSFW app on Hubzilla. But it does, technically, namely its word filters which have the option to hide a post behind a content warning. They were introduced with Mastodon 4. They're actually more powerful than any filters on Hubzilla.

But they're also much more inconvenient. You have to create and configure one filter for each keyword or hashtag that you want to filter. Nice for übergeeks, but borderline impossible to use for casual users, especially those on phones. No wonder next to nobody uses them, and everyone relies on people putting content warnings where a summary should be. For comparison: Hubzilla's NSFW app isn't configurable, but it's one filter for everything with one text field for everything that even supports RegEx. You can copy-paste and share entire filter strings if you want to.

So I suggested filter presets for content warnings that could simply be clicked on and off. Should they end up in master, you're invited to pat my digital shoulders. Should they not, at least I've tried.

@dynamic @mekka okereke :verified: @Johannes Ernst @Richard MacManus @Jon Male domination comes from the #Fediverse still being very very "techy", and I dare say that men have a higher tendency of wanting to put up with stuff like learning what instances and decentralisation are and finding the right instance and the right app than women. Computer geeks, especially FLOSS geeks who value freedom and open-source higher than convenience, are predominantly male. For example, I don't think that every other i3wm ricer is a woman.

That said, I think it has improved over the last months and few years. And the Fediverse as we know it now was brought forward a great deal by queer people who weren't welcome on centralised corporate silos.

Before that and before there were dedicated mobile apps, especially for the iPhone, when the Fediverse and the pre-#Mastodon #FederatedSocialWeb (which, in this context, means #Friendica and #Hubzilla first and foremost) could only be used through Web browsers, they were mostly meeting-places for Linux geeks who deeply distrusted anything corporate, commercial, non-free and closed-source and a bunch of left-wing activists who tried to hide from the public eye. From my experience, there were more Linux users than users of anything else combined, including both Windows and iOS. And the whole thing had zero media coverage and lived on word-of-mouth from tech geek to tech geek. You can imagine what a sausage party that was.

@CynthesisToday If you want to speak to someone who really knows his way around communications protocols, I'll have to refer you to @mike, creator of #Friendica, #RedMatrix, #Hubzilla, #Osada, #Zap, #Misty, #Roadhouse and #Streams and of the #FederatedSocialWeb protocols #DFRN (base protocol for Friendica) and #Zot (base protocol for all the others), thus also inventor of #NomadicIdentity, as well as contributor to both the #Diaspora protocol and #ActivityPub.

@Fediverse News Some of the projects in the #Fediverse that offer #groups or #forums have #test groups which come in handy if you want to test the compatibility of the project you're using (or developing) with that particular other project.

#Guppe has a test group on a.gup.pe.

#Lemmy has test communities on lemmy.ml, on Sopuli and for German users on Feddit.

#kbin has a test magazine on kbin.social.

I am not aware of test forums on #Friendica, #Hubzilla and #Streams, though. If they exist, maybe you can name them in the comments.

If they don't exist, I think it'd be worth creating them so that developers of other projects can test the compatibility of their projects with the old #FederatedSocialWeb guard and its most recent offspring without spamming existing forums.

@cody This actually makes me wonder how #kbin interacts with Mike Macgirvin's old #FederatedSocialWeb projects #Friendica and #Hubzilla and the more recent #Streams. For at least Friendica and Hubzilla (optionally) also have a dislike button. Friendica had it before everything else back then.

I'm not even sure if the #ActivityPub connectors (none of these projects is based on ActivityPub, all are based on protocols developed by Mike himself) translate dislikes in the first place. They're the only way to establish connections between Friendica and the other two, but I don't know if ActivityPub itself supports dislikes.

@ophiocephalic 🐍 @Tim Chambers @Fediverse Report @Spread Mastodon As a #FederatedSocialWeb veteran and former self-hoster of my own private #Friendica and #Hubzilla instances, I have to say that I can hardly see literally absolutely the whole Fediverse fediblocking #Meta.

You have to keep a few things in mind.

First of all, the Fediverse is not only #Mastodon. Nor is the Fediverse only about a dozen big projects. The Fediverse is dozens upon dozens of big and small projects.

For the whole Fediverse to fediblock Meta, every single last one of them, even just recently launched private proof-of-concept alphas of brand-new projects which nonetheless will federate, will require not only a mandatory instance-wide blocking mechanism, but a mandatory standard blacklist with Meta's instance on it. Otherwise developers can't test-drive their new Fediverse server application without their test instance being defederated left and right for not blocking Meta.

Of course, this would also mean that everything that even only as much as understands #ActivityPub would require such a mandatory default blacklist with Meta on it. Even if it isn't based on ActivityPub. Even if ActivityPub is an add-on, a plug-in, maybe even third-party like in the case of #WordPress. Even if ActivityPub has to be manually activated instance-wide by the admin and then separately by the users for each one of their channels like in Hubzilla's case.

That is, putting Meta on the same list as all other defederated instances would probably be considered not enough. Blocking Meta would have to be hard-coded into the engine of the project itself, also to mandatorily roll it out to all instances of all projects. Instance block lists aren't part of the source code, and if they became that, lots of not-so-techy instance admins would end up with file conflicts they can't solve because the git pull involved in the upgrade would try to create a file that already exists.

Still, this wouldn't be 100% water-tight. An absolutely mandatory fediblock for Meta would mean certain death for lots and lots of small private instances. Admins of such tiny instances often only do the very bare necessities to keep them running. Sometimes they rarely or never even upgrade the underlying operating system, much less the Fediverse project running on it. Why should they? It runs. And an upgrade means a) a hassle and b) probably more of a hassle if stuff breaks.

Just to prove my point: There are still Mastodon 3.x instances in the Fediverse. There are still a very few running small instances of #Osada and #Zap, both of which have been discontinued on New Year's Eve 2022. These projects are no longer maintained. They won't get any updates anymore. They were superseded by #Streams, and not everyone who still runs these old projects wants to do the switch.

And then there are those projects that are technically still in development, but whose development has slowed down dramatically. Look at how often #Pleroma rolls out new versions. And Pleroma isn't exactly obscure, it has public instances. Or look at #Plume which counts as still actively developed, but whose devs barely find any time to do anything, so it often doesn't get any updates in many months. I don't even think that Plume has any means of blocking instances by blacklist.

So if blocking Meta becomes mandatory, you can fediblock an entire long-form blogging project out of the Fediverse with all its private and public instances because not a single instance will participate in blocking Meta, because not a single instance is even capable of doing that, because the capability is not included and rolled out in time, because the devs can't find the time to include it.

@Kaity A @Ada While I do appreciate your effort, how much of the Fediverse do you plan this to cover within less than, say, two months?

blahaj.zone?

All #Mastodon instances?

Or all instances of all #Fediverse projects?

The latter, so much I can tell you, will be impossible to achieve. First of all, of course, this would require extensive modification to many Fediverse projects that aren't Mastodon. Keep in mind that there are some projects that are both years older than Mastodon and based on a protocol that is not #ActivityPub.

#Friendica (6 years older than Mastodon) might have to dig deeply into its UI, its underlying #DFRN protocol (8 years older than ActivityPub), of course the ActivityPub connector and maybe actually also all the other connectors, of which Friendica has many. If bad comes to worse, Friendica would have to enforce Mastodon users' quote and interaction limits upon #Diaspora users, and Diaspora* and Mastodon aren't even federated with one another and only touch each other on a few projects that are federated with both.

Second, the development of some projects has slowed down to an almost or actual still-stand. You won't see #Plume integrate everything that you've planned before July. It'd be a miracle to see Plume even roll out a bugfix release until then.

Third, @Mario Vavti and @mike are very unlikely let anyone on Mastodon force them to design #Hubzilla and #Streams, or even the #Zot or #Nomad protocol, in any particular way. It's bad enough that the Mastodon core devs try to bully them into re-designing stuff that's many years older than Mastodon.

By the way, both Hubzilla and (streams) have part of what you want to introduce built in already now. Hubzilla actually had it before Mastodon even existed.

What you're trying to do is
a) re-invent the wheel
b) make your wheel design mandatory for the whole Fediverse
c) force Hubzilla and (streams) to discard their way of handling permissions which is firmly integrated with the Zot/Nomad protocol and its own very detailed and fine-grained permission control, the kind of which even the #CalcKey devs couldn't imagine in their wildest dreams, and which has seen some 11 years of daily operation, and replace it with yours

Fourth, there are still some instances of some projects out there that haven't seen a single update this whole year. Or for over a year. There still seem to be Hubzilla hubs alive that run 5.x or even 4.x while the current version is 8.2, and 8.4 is just around the corner. There are also still instances of the (indirect) Hubzilla forks #Osada and #Zap alive, and both projects have been EOL and discontinued since New Year's Eve. These instances will continue not having what you want the whole Fediverse to have.

Next question: How exactly do you want such limitations to be enforced? Do you simply want to keep offending posts/comments from being created? Or do you actually want to go as far as UI buttons being greyed out or disappearing altogether on the UIs of all Web interfaces of all projects and on all desktop and mobile apps?

In the case of quoting, either will be very difficult to achieve outside of Mastodon, especially on the old #FederatedSocialWeb projects Friendica and Hubzilla and their newest offspring, (streams).

See, when Mastodon will introduce quotes, it'd be a button, and everything else will be hocus-pocus happening in the background. On Friendica and Hubzilla, quotes, just like any kind of text formatting, are done with BBcode which is in the post/comment editor in plain sight and can be edited. In (streams)' case, Markdown and HTML come on top.

There are about a thousand and one ways for me to quote you or anyone else. I'd demonstrate a selection of them, but Mastodon's text formatting limitations won't let me, at least not short of taking a screenshot of both the source code and what it looks like. If you want to keep everyone on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) from quoting those who don't want to be quoted with 100% reliability, these three projects would need editors that could catch all possible ways of quoting someone. If you still want them to rule out false positives, it's really approaching impossibility.

@fastfinge What if I told you that just about the whole Fediverse supports quotes, only Mastodon doesn't?

What if I told you that #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse? What if I told you that I myself am not on Mastodon, although this post of mine has appeared on your timeline?

What if I told you that, in fact, the Fediverse has been around for much longer than Mastodon?

What if I told you that it started in 2008 with something called Laconi.ca, now known as #GNUsocial (#^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social)

Okay, GNU social doesn't really count as part of today's Fediverse because it doesn't support #ActivityPub. And okay, it wasn't called the Fediverse back then but the #FederatedSocialWeb. But still, the whole concept isn't new. It was not invented by Eugen Rochko.

Still, even today's Fediverse is more than Mastodon and older than Mastodon. And just about everything that isn't Mastodon supports quotes while still being fully federated with Mastodon.

But let me elaborate (warning, this post is over 12 times as long as a toot can possibly be):

#Friendica (#^https://friendi.ca, #^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/Special:MyLanguage/What_is_Friendica%3F) was launched in July 2010. That was six years before Mastodon. It was created by a guy named Mike Macgirvin as a decentralised, distributed, federated replacement for Facebook. No, not Twitter. Facebook.

From the very beginning, it had many features which Mastodon users keep demanding today. Including quotes. Again, when Mastodon was launched, Friendica had had these features in daily productive use for six years already.

And yet, people don't use quotes to harass others by "stealing" discussions. This is technically impossible on Friendica due to its architecture which is more like Facebook or a blog or a forum and less like Twitter or Mastodon. Threads aren't stand-alone posts floating around the timelines, loosely tied together by increasing numbers of mentions. Instead, they're start-post-and-comments structures. Replies aren't stand-alone posts. Replies are comments firmly tied to one start post by Friendica's internal structure.

Oh, and Friendica doesn't run on ActivityPub. It has its own internal protocol, #DFRN. Still, Friendica quickly created an ActivityPub connector and federated with Mastodon, thus becoming part of the Fediverse. Friendica federates with a whole lot of projects and platforms. In fact, there is a growing number of forums mostly frequented by Mastodon users which run on Friendica, such as FediverseNews.

I myself am on #Hubzilla (#^https://hubzilla.org, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/Special:MyLanguage/What_is_Hubzilla%3F). It started life in 2012, still four years before Mastodon, as a fork of Friendica, created by Friendica's own inventor. In 2011 already, Mike had conceived an even more powerful protocol named #Zot which comes with features that are outright utterly unimaginable for Mastodon users such as #NomadicIdentity. Hubzilla even had its first stable release before Mastodon was launched.

And Hubzilla still has almost all the features Friendica has with a whole lot more on top. Again, including quotes. Again, yes, before Mastodon refused to have them. And again, yes, without anyone misusing them for harassment.

And again, it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to read this.

I should also mention that both Friendica and Hubzilla have technical barriers in the way of publicly quoting private or restricted posts, at least with references/a connection to the quoted post. Hubzilla in particular has access rights control on a level you couldn't possibly imagine in your wildest dreams.

And just about everything else in the Fediverse that's microblogging or macroblogging has official, built-in quote support.

#Pleroma (#^https://pleroma.social/, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Pleroma%253F) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
#Akkoma (#^https://akkoma.social/), a Pleroma fork, has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
#MissKey (#^https://misskey-hub.net/en/, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Misskey%253F) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
#CalcKey (#^https://calckey.cloud/, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Calckey%3F) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
#FoundKey (#^https://akkoma.dev/FoundKeyGang/FoundKey) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
#GoToSocial (#^https://docs.gotosocial.org/, #^https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_GoToSocial%3F) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.
#Socialhome (#^https://socialhome.network/) has quotes. And it's part of the Fediverse and federated with Mastodon.

Yes, they're all federated with Mastodon. This means that users of any of these projects, including Friendica and Hubzilla, can read Mastodon posts and quote them in their replies, and these replies, in turn, can be read on Mastodon.

Okay, so the Fediverse has two, three, four... ten projects, and all but Mastodon support quotes, and nowhere are there people demanding the feature be removed due to rampant harassment?

No, these are only the microblogging and macroblogging projects, and only those of the macroblogging projects that aren't primarily for long-form blogging, i.e. that aren't mimicking Medium, that aren't mimicking WordPress, that aren't #Wordpress itself. Yes, there are WordPress blogs in the Fediverse, federated with Mastodon.

In fact, the Fediverse is even much, much bigger than that (#^https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/, #^https://the-federation.info/).

Now go block me for harassing you, for being an ableist swine because I treat blind people equally instead of mollycoddling them wherever possibly, even for being a fascist or just for shattering your worldview into itty bitty pieces. This post of mine stands.

CC @Patrick, the Linux guy so that you know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon, too
Also CC @Ada @James

@Fediverse News This is another post to demonstrate what is possible in #Hubzilla posts and how much of it, if anything, arrives on instances of other projects. It also demos the functionality of Hubzilla's NSFW app; if you've installed it, it should give you a content warning.

For those who don't know yet: Hubzilla is a fork of #Friendica, created by Friendica's own creator, Mike Macgirvin. Friendica, then named Mistpark, was launched in summer 2010, six years before #Mastodon, already as a free-as-in-free-license, open-source, decentralised, distributed, federated alternative to Facebook. Basically what Mastodon was to Twitter six years later.

Friendica was geared right away towards macroblogging with forum functionality on top. Its capabilities were chosen accordingly, including no character limit, image embedding (with included manageable file space to upload images to) and text formatting through BBcode.

Hubzilla, then named Red, was forked off Friendica in 2012, four years before Mastodon. It was converted to a whole new protocol which Mike had conceived in 2011 with capabilities previously unseen on the #FederatedSocialWeb, now known as the #Fediverse, especially #NomadicIdentity. Otherwise, most of the features were kept the same, and even many more came on top. Hubzilla turned from a distributed social network into a nomadic social content management system.

While neither Friendica nor Hubzilla uses #ActivityPub internally as their protocol, both have built-in "translators" that enable them to connect to Mastodon and other ActivityPub-based Fediverse projects.

The main intention behind this post is to show Mastodon users in particular what Fediverse projects that aren't Mastodon are capable of. It shall also demonstrate how Mastodon cripples posts coming in from non-Mastodon instances.

Again, when Mastodon was launched, Hubzilla already had these features, and it had had them for four years already.

The Mastodon users amongst you will only see the crippled form of this post and probably wonder what I'm talking about. If you're using Mastodon through a Web browser, click on the date/the age of the post, and it'll take you to the original (as opposed to the mangled Mastodon output). For your convenience, especially that of those of you on mobile apps, I will also stitch together screenshots of this post and additionally publish it as an article.

Five images should be embedded in this post. All are stored on the file space built into my Hubzilla channel.

The #demonstration starts right below ↓ this horizontal line ↓:

Centred text.
Link to the Hubzilla website which runs on Hubzilla itself.
Bold type.
Italics.
Bold and italics.
Underline.
Strikethrough.

Text in a generic sans-serif typeface.
Text in a generic serif typeface.
Text in a generic monospace typeface.
Text in Courier.
Text in Arial (if that's installed on your device).
Text in Helvetica (if that's installed on your device).
Text in Free Sans (if that's installed on your device).
Text in Arial with Helvetica and Free Sans as fallbacks.

Very large text.
Extra large text.
Large text.
Small text.
Extra small text.
Very small text.
Size 12 text.
Size 20 text.

Headline 1.

Headline 2.

Headline 3.

Headline 4.

Headline 5.

Headline 6.

An in-line code block.

Multiple-line
code block.

Code blocks can also highlight 20 different languages.

Red text.
Blue text.
Dark blue text.
Teal text.
Fuchsia text.
Olive text.
Text coloured in #005387 (RAL 5005 signal blue).
Text coloured in #789922 (like >greentext on 4chan).

Text highlighted in yellow.
Floral white text highlighted in #008351 (RAL 6024 traffic green).

↓ Here goes a picture of the 7-segment digit 1. Alt-text should be, "7-segment digit 1."

↑ Here goes the picture.

Jupiter Rowland wrote:
This is a self-quote.

This is a quote, too.

This is a quote, three.

This is a spoiler: spoiler

Now the spoiler is open.

↓ Here goes a picture of the 7-segment digit 2. Alt-text should be, "7-segment digit 2."

↑ Here goes the picture.

↓ Here goes a table.

First table headerSecond table headerTable contentMore table contentEven more table contentStill more table content
↑ Here goes a table.

↓ Here goes a picture of the 7-segment digit 3. Alt-text should be, "7-segment digit 3."

↑ Here goes the picture.

Bullet-point list.
More bullet-point list.
Even more bullet-point list.

Numbered list.
More numbered list.
Even more numbered list.

Roman numbered list.
More Roman numbered list.
Even more Roman numbered list.

Minuscule Roman numbered list.
More minuscule Roman numbered list.
Even more minuscule Roman numbered list.

List with letters.
More list with letters.
Even more list with letters.

List with capital letters.
More list with capital letters.
Even more list with capital letters.

↓ Here goes a picture of the 7-segment digit 4. Alt-text should be, "7-segment digit 4."

↑ Here goes the picture.

Embedded YouTube video through Invidious:
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=_9nCAOM5V1g

Same video on PeerTube (which is part of the Fediverse, too):
https://video.hardlimit.com/videos/watch/f32a07ec-5f5b-4629-a7e2-7db7993d218f

↓ Here goes a picture of the 7-segment digit 5. Alt-text should be, "7-segment digit 5."

↑ Here goes the picture.

Special features of Hubzilla and (streams):
Your name:
Your short name:
Your hub:
Your profile picture, automatically embedded:

Your channel, automatically embedded and clickable:

For the record: This post has 7,750 characters.

@cwebber

Happy new year!

At the end of last year I decided to again become a bit involved in the #FederatedSocialWeb and have already made some small steps updating my knowledge.

Awesome Fediverse

Eine Liste von awesome Fediverse-Links:

fediverse.party – Ein ziemlich vollständiger „Fediverse Guide“, detaillierte Beschreibungen der großen Services und eine Sammlung von Plugins und Plattformen.
~~fediverse.network~~ – Statistiken zu fediverse Instanzen, Servern und Hosts. Betreiber können zusätzlich ihre Instanz administrieren und Statistiken einsehen.
the-federation.info – Statistiken zu fediverse Nodes, Projekten und Protokollen.
switching.software – switching.software möchte Dich beim Wechsel zu freier und offener Software unterstützen. Unser Ziel ist, dass Du proprietären, unfreien Programmen und Plattformen einfach den Rücken zukehren kannst. So möchten wir Deine Privatsphäre, Deine Meinungsfreiheit und Dein Recht auf Selbstbestimmung stärken.
wedistribute.org – Ein Blog rund um das Thema „Fediverse“.
instances.social – Suche dir deine passende Mastodon Instanz.
~~search.social~~ – Eine fediverse Suchmaschine.
~~distsn.org~~ – Eine Suche für Pleroma/Mastodon Instanzen und Fediverse Benutzern.

#FederatedSocialWeb

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