Jupiter Rowland

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.

No idea, I’m not that deeply into it.

The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren’t Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.

If you see someone tell Mastodon users that the Fediverse isn’t Mastodon, they’re hardly ever on Mastodon themselves. They’re most likely on Friendica which suffers the most from obnoxious Mastodon users, and if not, they’re likely to be on Firefish or Akkoma or sometimes on Hubzilla.

The most extreme case I’ve encountered was a Mastodon developer who tried to convince me, a Hubzilla veteran, that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete project in the Fediverse. Fortunately for him, I didn’t ask him about full text formatting support, permissions, nomadic identity, multiple independent identities on one login, WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV or a built-in wiki engine.

But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it’s a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO.

Worse yet, “coming into it” is also applied to everything in the Fediverse that isn’t Mastodon. After learning that there’s, in fact, more than Mastodon in the Fediverse, many Mastodon users still think Eugen Rochko has invented the Fediverse, and everything must have come after Mastodon.

Thus, even Friendica users who have been around since before Mastodon even saw its very first release are being forced to ditch Friendica’s own culture, adopt Mastodon’s culture instead and stop using all of Friendica’s features that Mastodon doesn’t have. And Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon. It has its own well-defined culture which is very different from Mastodon’s because Friendica is so much different from Mastodon.

It’s almost like European colonists vs natives, only that the European colonists didn’t assume the natives had entered the previously completely uninhabited land after them.

Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could buy Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances.

Or going someplace in the Fediverse that’s neither Mastodon nor Lemmy nor Pixelfed.

I think in many cases it was never about Bluesky or Jack Dorsey who never really had a saying on Bluesky proper anyway. It was more about keeping the Fediverse ActivityPub-only or even Mastodon-only.

In that light, I think the only reason why there haven’t been any calls for totally Fediblocking all of Hubzilla is because 75% of the Fediverse have never even heard the name, and maybe a few hundred people outside Hubzilla know how it works and what it does. No critical mass to be appalled. And Hubzilla not being based on ActivityPub and technically being bridged to Mastodon via its own per-channel bridges would be only one out of many possible reasons to want it “gone from the Fediverse”.

Because nobody knows they exist. Especially not on Mastodon. And even less outside the Fediverse, tech media included.

And truth be told, way too many Mastodon users don’t want to know. They want the Fediverse to remain what they thought it was when they joined: only vanilla Mastodon.

Really goes to show that Lemmy is full of tech-curious geeks: Tell a Lemmy user about a Fediverse project that’s neither Lemmy nor Mastodon, and it’s much more likely for the reply to be something along the lines of, “where public instances.”

When /kbin was zerg-rushed after the Reddit enshittification, it wasn’t ready yet. It was a public alpha. It had five instances, all official, all experimental, only one of them public. I guess the dev had intended to calmly and orderly develop it until it’d be ready for prime-time. But all of a sudden, it was either developing missing features or removing bugs for those who daily-drove it in this state in expectation of it being a stable point release.

I’m on a (streams) instance on which someone else is following pr0n accounts. That instance is small enough (13 channels, including clones of external channels) to suggest them as contacts to me until I’ve removed them as suggestions.

Only boobs I saw without searching mastodon.social for non-pr0n hashtags.

Curated tits then?

Sorting Hat for Lemmy?

But hardly anyone in the Fediverse, next to no-one on Mastodon and literally no-one outside the Fediverse knows that Misskey exists. Not outside of Japan anyway. Or any of the Forkeys, for that matter (if you’re a Westerner and neither an otaku nor a weeb, Iceshrimp or Sharkey may suit you better).

For more Mastodon users than not, the Fediverse = Mastodon. And outside the Fediverse, hardly anyone has even heard of the Fediverse.

Exactly why most Germans only had a @t-online.de address back in the day. The only exceptions were those who needed an e-mail account before they had their own home and their own landline connection.

IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.

Plus, it keeps the obnoxious “But muh follower count” fame whores and the majority of the “Why can’t this be exactly like Twitter, I want a total Twitter clone” dumb-dumbs out. They’d ruin Fediverse culture even more than the second migration wave two years ago which was so massive that those who fled back then only encountered each other on Mastodon and hardly anyone who had been in the Fediverse before then.

Still, this chart looks like it’s actually counting phone apps rather than providers. Google doesn’t have two separate e-mail services AFAIK.

Nobody really actively chooses Apple Mail.

It’s just that they buy iPhones, and they want a total no-brainer, like, a phone that’s fully set up and ready to use without them having to do anything because it, like, totally confuzzles them 'n stuff. So whichever friendly salesperson sells them their phone also sets everything up for them. Including an e-mail account because they need one for their Apple account, but they don’t know if they’ve got one.

If they buy an Android phone, it’s the same, only that they get a Gmail account if they don’t happen to already have one.

It actually doesn’t.

Install the official Mastodon app on your phone, launch it, scroll past the instance selection box that railroads you to mastodon.social anyway, and it’s no more complicated than Twitter. It’s just that nobody knows that.

Fun fact: The official Bluesky app has a selection box for a PDS, too. It’s no more and no less complicated than the official Mastodon app. Nobody knows that either.

Granted, of course, if you let yourself be railroaded, the place where you land in the Fediverse won’t be the bee’s knees, and you won’t know that there are not only better Mastodon instances (or more Mastodon instances in the first place), but also better server applications than Mastodon (or anything else than Mastodon in the Fediverse in the first place). But hey, it’s easy-peasy.

Awful user experience can be anything from side-effects of decentralisation (no, you can’t search the entire Fediverse for something; no, you can’t even search all of Mastodon for something) to Mastodon’s official app being crap and people being unwilling/unable to use an app that isn’t named “Mastodon” to Mastodon refusing to catch up with the rest of the Fediverse in features to Mastodon refusing to finally become the 1:1 Twitter clone expect it to be. Mind you, the latter two contradict each other.

Another feature-rich Forkey from before Firefish’s first “death” which, as I’ve read somewhere, must have managed to iron out more of Misskey’s original issues than the other Forkeys.

where pleroma

where akkoma

where misskey

where firefish

where iceshrimp

where sharkey

where cherrypick

where catodon

where mitra

No. The various Fediverse server applications are too different in how they work.

First of all, it isn’t all just about object types. The architecture of various Fediverse server applications is vastly different, including how they handle objects, and how they distribute them.

For example, on Mastodon, a thread is just a loose string of posts and more posts which, technically, are identical in properties. Mastodon doesn’t know conversations, and Mastodon doesn’t know groups. You receive the posts from those whom you follow plus, by default, the posts that mention you.

Friendica does know conversations, and it knows groups because it has them implemented. On Friendica, a thread is one (1) post plus comments, just like on Facebook or on blogs. You receive the posts from those whom you’re connected with, but not their comments on other people’s posts. Plus, you receive all comments on posts from those whom you’re connected with. Receiving posts from those whom you’ve mentioned is optional but off by default AFAIK.

Forte is like Friendica, but with nomadic identity. That obviously isn’t a client thing.

Hubzilla and (streams) are like Forte, but with wholly different protocols that were made for nomadic identity in the first place and with ActivityPub as an optional extra.

Lemmy, Mbin and PieFed are all about conversations and groups. You literally can’t follow Lemmy users (something that Mastodon users will never understand), you can only follow Lemmy communities (something that’s totally alien to many Mastodon users).

There are many more differences.

Mastodon’s HTML sanitiser that rips out most text formatting is on the server side AFAIK. If you make Mastodon the gold standard, say buh-bye to numbered lists, horizontal lines, tables etc. (And I’m not kidding, there are places in the Fediverse that support these. In posts.)

Character limits are server-side. Since the huge majority of Fediverse users and many Fediverse devs think the Fediverse was made as a Twitter replacement, they also think that there has to be an arbitrary character limit, otherwise it wouldn’t be microblogging, right? Welll, then Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Nomad can wave good-bye to their unlimited character counts and 100,000±character posts.

Filters are server-side. And they work vastly differently on different Fediverse server apps. Some import filtered content and then delete it. Others reject it.

Permissions are server-side. Permissions are absolutely essential and integral parts of Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, but the entire rest of the Fediverse doesn’t even know they exist. Of course, it’d be great if everything down to mastodon.social implemented the (streams)/Forte permissions system, but it’d completely overwhelm those who came to mastodon.social in search of Twitter without Musk.

Another feature that Friendica and Hubzilla could kiss good-bye if there was only one unified server backend are multiple profiles per account. Speaking of which, it’s farewell to multiple channels (identities, like accounts everywhere else) on one account/login for Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. Unless everything else is willing to implement both.

Lastly, Hubzilla has absolute literal shit-tons of features on top of even Friendica. Both have built-in file spaces, but Hubzilla has one with WebDAV connectivity (as do (streams) and Forte). Both have federated event calendars, but Hubzilla also uses it as a frontend for its built-in CalDAV calendar server (which is headless on (streams) and Forte). Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte have an optional CardDAV addressbook server. Hubzilla also has optional stuff like non-federating long-form articles, “cards” that work similarly, a simple built-in wiki engine for multiple wikis per channel with multiple pages each, support for simple webpages (the official Hubzilla website is on a Hubzilla channel) and so forth. I’m not even remotely kidding with any of this.

If you want to unify Fediverse servers, they’d all have to become Hubzilla, but with nomadic ActivityPub.