@Rob Shearer

Excellent write-up, agree with most of the points.

On a related note: it is a pity that the poorly thought-out and designed Mastodon became the overwhelmingly popular Fediverse platform. I wish it were one of the Mike Macgirvin creations such as Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte, with their advanced features such as Nomadic Identity, OpenWebAuth (Federated Single Sign On), conversation containers for threaded conversations, extremely fine-grained privacy controls, etc.

Nomadic Identity, in particular, is brilliant. This is how it works. You have a channel (that participates in the Fediverse, this is equivalent to an account on Mastodon) on any account on, let us say, Hubzilla instance A. You can open another account on Hubzilla instance B, and create a clone there of your channel on instance A. So this clone becomes a live, real-time backup of your channel; the backup includes your connections as well as your posts. And it is bidirectional. You can log on to your clone channel on B, and use it like your main instance, and now the clone on instance A will mirror your activity. If you wish, you can clone the channel on a third instance C. If one of A or B or C abruptly shuts down, you can continue operating your channel from your clone channel, so you lose nothing.

This addresses one of your pain points as to how account migration does not work on Mastodon.

By the way: you can have multiple channels per instance, and you can have clones of each channel on different instances. So if you wish, you can have separate channels for your hobbies and your professional activities and your politics; all contained and operated within a single account on a particular instance.

You can read more about Nomadic Identity here

#^https://medium.com/@tamanning/nomadic-identity-brought-to-you-by-hubzilla-67eadce13c3b

and here.

#^https://medium.com/@tamanning/getting-started-with-nomadic-identity-how-to-create-a-personal-channel-on-hubzilla-7d9666a428b

It is said that Bluesky is working on pioneering something like Nomadic Identity. Ironically, Mike Macgirvin had already pioneered it all the way back in 2012. He initially did it with Nomad (which underlies Hubzilla and (streams)), a protocol far richer and better-defined than ActivityPub; and recently, he even got Nomadic Identity working on ActivityPub.

#^https://fediversity.site/item/b69ce5a0-0c22-4933-8393-dce7100f4584

Unfortunately, the movers and shakers of the ActivityPub world keep pretending that Mike Macgirvin and his work does not exist.

Then there’s OpenWebAuth for Federated Single Sign On. This enables seamless granting of permissions for you to operate your social dashboard from different parts of the Fediverse.

You can read here how Nomadic Identity and OpenWebAuth together enable network resilience, censorship resistance, and ease of migration.

#^https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/activitypub-nomadic-identity/

There’s also conversation containers—these ensure that unlike on Mastodon, every single post/comment in a conversation thread is visible to every single person participating in or merely viewing the thread. (Also: you don't need @ tagging, anyone who participated in the conversation by replying at least once or by boosting or liking some post is notified of all new posts/comments.)

I won’t elaborate on the fine-grained privacy controls, but I think they too address some of your pain points with Mastodon.

Having said all that, I must mention that your core criticism of Mastodon also applies to Hubzilla, (streams), and Forte: there is asynchronous distribution of “some subset of a global database across some parts of the network”. I personally think there ought to be a truly universal search and community-controlled user-specific custom algorithms to address this problem, but I doubt the vocal part of the userbase here would agree.

And relative to Mastodon, the Hubzilla+(streams)+Forte community is tiny, so there is hardly any local content.

#Nomad #Zot #ActivityPub #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Forte #NomadicIdentity #OpenWebAuth #ConversationContainers #PrivacyControls

@Jeff Atwood