Amikke @Amikke@social.cleverlibre.org

Oh yeah? Give me your address

There are a disproportionate number of Jews running synagogues

I keep seeing lots of people who are totally giddy about the #Fediverse, who are gushing over it, who want to promote it, who want it to spread.

And who want it to advance. To learn new abilities. To grow new features.

That's all fine and dandy.

But almost all of these people are still fully convinced that the Fediverse equals #Mastodon. And nothing else. At least not until Tumblr and P92 join the fray. Okay, maybe the #WordPress plug-in that's the talk of the town now that it has become official. Okay, maybe a few of them have also heard of #Pixelfed and/or #PeerTube because their makers are all over the Fediverse.

When these people are talking about the Fediverse, they mean Mastodon. And when they're thinking about the Fediverse, they're only thinking about Mastodon. Because that's all they know.

So these people want new cool features or even new cool use-cases in the Fediverse, stuff that Mastodon doesn't have. They want Mastodon to have it, or they want new projects to be launched that have these features.

If only they knew.

If only they knew that everything, literally everything they propose has already been done. Yes, in the Fediverse. In projects which are fully federated with Mastodon. Why don't they know? Because they've never heard of any of these projects, much less what they can do.


So they want "quote-tweets" in the Fediverse. Which means they want Mastodon to introduce them.

Tell you what: Mastodon is the only microblogging project in the Fediverse that doesn't have quotes. Not only will Eugen Rochko never introduce them, but all the other projects have them with Mastodon forks #GlitchSoc such as being the exception. #Pleroma has them. #Akkoma has them. #MissKey has them. #CalcKey has them. #FoundKey has them. #GoToSocial has them. The old heavyweights #Friendica and #Hubzilla have them, and so does Hubzilla's youngest decendant, the #Streams project. Et cetera.

You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".


Or text formatting in posts like bold type, italics, underline, strikethrough, code blocks etc. Would be great if Mastodon had that, in spite of other people saying they don't want it.

Again: Pleroma already has it. Akkoma already has it. MissKey already has it. CalcKey already has it. FoundKey already hasit. GoToSocial already has it. Friendica already has it. Hubzilla already has it (look at this post at its source in a Web browser and weep). (streams) already has it. And so forth. This time, even Mastodon forks have it.

It has been done. It has been done many times. It has actually been done before Mastodon.


Next, long-form blog posting. We need something like #Medium in the Fediverse that isn't Medium itself. Mastodon's 500 characters are too few, and Twitter-like threads are inconvenient.

Except we already have that, too. #Plume and #WriteFreely are about as close to Medium as Mastodon is to Twitter, including clean and distraction-less layouts. Oh, and Hubzilla can do that, too.

By the way: Again, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that can do microblogging that has a 500-character limit. Pleroma, Mastodon's oldest direct competitor, raised it to a default of 6,000. MissKey and its forks have 3,000 as a default. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have character limits of "go ahead, drop your short story in one post in its entirety," so virtually none at all. And yes, Hubzilla has long-form writing on top of that.


Speaking of Hubzilla: Most recently, there has been the idea to uncouple one's online identity from a specific instance. Your online self should no longer be firmly tied to any one server exclusively. Now, this sounds so ambitious, it might just as well be science-fiction.

What if I told you that just this very thing already exists as well?

No, really. No, I'm not making this up. But you should know by now that I'm not.

Better yet: It was conceived as early as 2011. By the guy who launched Friendica in 2010. He invented a new principle named #NomadicIdentity and a new protocol named #Zot. In its early stages already, even with no technical implementation yet, Zot was more powerful than ActivityPub is today.

In 2012, Zot became reality as the basis of a Friendica fork which later became known as #RedMatrix and, upon its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, which is still prior to Mastodon's initial release, Hubzilla. Hubzilla is still being developed and improved, and it has a fledgling but growing "successor of a successor" named (streams) which offers nomadic identity, too.

Now, what does this nomadic identity even look like? Well, not only does it let you move your channel(s) around from instance to instance with ease and, unlike on Mastodon, with absolutely everything on it. No, it also lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once. Identical clones, automagically kept in sync in real-time, all with the same identity, the same content, the same connections.

Your identity is no longer strapped down to one instance. Not only that, but your channel, your posts, your content is no longer hosted on only one server. This means that if one instance with one of your clones goes down, you still have spares.


Okay, so how about community groups/forums? That'd be cool.

Well, for one, there's #Guppe. It's basically bolted on Mastodon, and in practice, it's centralised because there's only one instance. But it's impractical to use.

Besides, this is becoming a running gag here, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have exactly this built-in and open for the rest of the Fediverse.

Better yet: There's also #Lemmy which amounts to a federated #Reddit or #HackerNews clone. So not only does Lemmy offer this, it specialises in it.

Hubzilla alone can provide Fediverse feature suggestions with "has been done" for years to come. Not to mention what else the Fediverse has to offer. Even if someone should want a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated #GoodReads clone in the Fediverse, it has been done: #BookWyrm.

pre-Internet content creators: i read it so it must be true

Internet content creators: to the best of my knowledge - and apologies if i'm wrong and i'm sure the comment section will be on fire but - water is wet

@fediverse @chjara whoa, that's against the rules of engagement. Bot-on-bot romance is forbidden by the fedi UN

@nullifidian @freemo your story reminded me of that xkcd, so I had to do it

Why doesn't #mastodon support #svg as an attached media format ? This is an efficient, safe (if you display svg inside <img>), commonly supported format by browsers. It can even display #animations without using javascript. If I could attach this svg image: https://miklobit.pl/direct/svg/oclogo_anim.svg directly it would take 13kB and could be vector scaled without loss of quality. Rendered in poor quality it takes 1MB ( ~75x more !).
@Gargron

late stage capitalism is when we are all huddled around rapidly spinning black holes, extracting the last energy we can via the Penrose process

@TechConnectify Windows is haunted.

Oh, cool. I see that #FDroid downloads updates in parallel. They achieved what Google engineers couldn't managed in the 20 years of #Android.

@steve No, those would help with posts showing up in the feeds of smaller instances, but (afaik) most major instances don't subscribe to relays.

The *real* problem is this: say I post something as @tapir, then boost it as @arnelson. Unless your server has received a `Create` of @tapir's post, you won't be able to see my boost!

I don't know if this is normal Mastodon behavior or a bug. I can see a bunch of servers GETing the post's URL, but they don't display it unless it's been pushed to them.

Just read an article about chatgpt "lying" about someone being dead and it's like "I asked it for the link to the obituary but it doubled down on the lie and provided a fake link instead" and I'm begging people to understand that it's a statistical model, it doesn't know it's lying so it can't "double down". The statistically probably answer to "where is the link" is not "I'm sorry I made it all up", it's a link. It doesn't even know what a link is, it just knows vaguely what one looks like so you're basically asking it "generate a plausible looking link to an obituary in the guardian" and it did

The AI isn't malevolent, it's just NOT AI

There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution