Realistically, they'll build FediHood against Mastodon and its inner workings and call it a day.
Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte all have (partly optional) dedicated profile fields for your location (street, town, postal code, region/state, nation, Facebook-style "hometown" as in place of origin). FediHood could use these. But, like so often, I've got my doubts that the makers of FediHood even only know that Friendica exists.
I mean, if they really knew even only Friendica and Hubzilla, they would have made FediHood a third-party add-on for Hubzilla.
Mastodon doesn't even really understand threaded conversations on the backend side. It can't render and display what it doesn't understand.
That's also why there's so much friction between Mastodon on one side and Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte on the other side. All four are based on enclosed, threaded, one-post-many-comments conversations in which all participants in the conversation and everyone who has received the start post always receive all comments (ignores and blocks notwithstanding). Friendica is the only one out of the bunch with no support for FEP-171b "Conversation Containers".
Mastodon has no sense or support for groups whatsoever.
Mastodon aims to be purist, old-school microblogging. Anything that isn't purist, old-school microblogging has no place on Mastodon. Not even enclosed threaded conversations. Especially not groups. For Twitter has no groups either.
The result of this is that the huge majority of Mastodon users don't even know that there are any groups anywhere in the Fediverse. What they can't see on Mastodon doesn't exist at all.
FediGroups is kluged Mastodon, but it sells itself to Mastodon users as the only group solution in the Fediverse. And Mastodon users buy it because it's literally all they know. Come up to FediGroups with something like Friendica or Hubzilla or the Threadiverse, and they'll still insist that FediGroups is vastly superior to all of them in every way imaginable. As far as I can see, FediGroups was invented by Mastodon users who at that point had never even heard of Friendica or Lemmy, who might even have believed like so many others that the Fediverse equals Mastodon.
On the other hand, Mastodon is rumoured to be working on groups itself. But knowing Mastodon's track record (as well as Mastodon's philosophy of trying hard to make the non-Mastodon Fediverse look broken and therefore very undesirable to Mastodon users), we have to expect Mastodon re-inventing the wheel in a way that's as incompatible with existing wheels and roads as it ever comes.
Mastodon has exactly zero support for groups. Most of its users don't even know that the Fediverse has groups. Mastodon is all about user accounts following user accounts.
Lemmy, on the other hand, is all about groups. User accounts literally can't follow other user accounts. Completely different technological philosophies.
Then there's the inevitable culture clash.
Make Lemmy more well-known on Mastodon, and you'll have gaggles of Mastodon extremists barging into Lemmy, behaving like they're still on Mastodon (well, technically, they are) and trying to force Mastodon's culture upon Lemmy.
Like, CW'ing posts that someone on Mastodon might find sensitive (Lemmy doesn't even have this feature), cutting "long posts" with over 500 characters into threads of itty-bitty pieces of no more than 500 characters, using the right hashtags for content discovery (Lemmy doesn't even support hashtags) and visibly mentioning everyone your comment will go to because Mastodon users are apparently easily freaked out by posts that don't come from someone whom they follow, and that don't mention them either.
They will clash with Lemmy users and, more importantly, Lemmy moderators who live by Lemmy's culture which is almost identical to Reddit's, and which has exactly nothing to do with Mastodon's culture.
Also, Lemmy's enclosed threaded conversations will clash with Mastodon which doesn't have any support for enclosed threaded conversations whatsoever. Something that especially Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and Mitra have to struggle with because they've implemented FEP-171b "Conversation Containers" which is completely and utterly incompatible with how Mastodon works. From Mastodon's point of view, both Hubzilla and its descendants and the whole Threadiverse are "broken".
The result: Mastodon users will block tons of Lemmy users. Mastodon users will demand entire Lemmy servers be Fediblocked. Entire Lemmy servers will end up on subscribable Mastodon blocklists for behaving too "un-Mastodon-like". Lemmy servers, in turn, will defederate from tons of Mastodon servers. Once enough big Lemmy servers have blocked mastodon.social (which is 22% of the whole Fediverse, and which is chock-full of the most clueless Mastodon users), it's game over.
You want to advertise Lemmy? On Twitter? Like, get Twitter users to leave Twitter for "the Fediverse" as in Lemmy?
Hardly anyone even seems to manage to get Twitter users to leave Twitter for one of the *omas or one of the *keys or any other microblogging server app in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon (except for East Asia where the *keys rule supreme). Now you want to get Twitter users to move to a Reddit clone?
Oh, and if your effort should indeed show signs of success, you'll draw the ire of the fanatic, extremist Mastodon fans upon you who are trying hard to paint the Fediverse as only Mastodon in order to get rid of everything else. And yes, they really exist.
Also, I’m going to be blunt in saying this; he apes existing ideas (insta, TikTok), gives them a quasi corpo social platform facade with the goal to be welcoming to the refugees who jump the fences.
But this is what people want. Not alternatives that are different because they're better. Not alternatives that are better because they're different, because they intentionally don't ape a corporate silo. No, what they want is all-out, 1:1 clones of corporate silos in the Fediverse so they don't have to get used to something new.
One reason why Bluesky is so successful is because it's a clone of 2012 Twitter, both the Web interface and the official app.
I've read people reject Friendica as a Facebook alternative because it's look and feel is so different from Facebook's. Because they expected a full-on Facebook clone, and Friendica isn't one.
I dare say that a lot fewer people would have escaped from Reddit to Lemmy if Lemmy wasn't so bloody close to Reddit in UI and UX.
Now I'm wondering if it'd be feasible to extend OpenWebAuth magic sign-on (developed by the Friendica and Hubzilla creator Mike Macgirvin in the Friendica fork-fork-forks Osada and Zap in 2018; now available on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte client-side and server-side and on Friendica only client-side) to something that works similarly.
I log into hub.netzgemeinde.eu, and I choose @jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu as my active channel (the latter is something Hubzilla-specific).
Most Mastodon users are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best, and nothing in existence can beat it in any way possible. They defend their "Mastodon Fediverse" against "inferior, barbaric, culture-less intruders" like Akkoma or Sharkey or Friendica tooth and nail. They absolutely refuse to accept that something, anything in the Fediverse can be better than Mastodon at anything. Of course, when they get people into the Fediverse, they railroad them straight into Mastodon, and they intentionally say nothing about the rest of the Fediverse.
Only those who actually start daily-driving something else than Mastodon realise that there are things in the Fediverse that outclass Msatodon.
Pixelfed is an Instagram clone. You can even import entire Instagram accounts worth of images and image posts into a Pixelfed account.
However, Pixelfed's culture is not derived from Instagram's culture. It's literally Mastodon's culture. The most common migration path into Pixelfed isn't Instagram > Pixelfed, it's Twitter > Mastodon > "I'mma try out this photo-posting add-on for Mastodon" > Pixelfed.
It'd be interesting to see what'd happen if there really was a mass exodus from Instagram to Pixelfed at such a scale that the Mastodon hardliners on Pixelfed are overrun. Also considering Pixelfed has exactly one developer who also has to handle Loops, Fedilab and the FediDB as one-man shows.
This only works for users in North America, though. Even though Meta had introduced this feature for EU appeasement purposes. ("See? We do support open standards!")
If it still works in the first place, that is. And I'm not talking about loads of Fediverse servers blocking Threads and two Fediverse server applications even having the means to block Threads by user agent rather than URLs.
These four had different client APIs. At least AIM's client API had to be reverse-engineered; same for MSN, Y!M and ICQ. At least some of these four declared using an unofficial client a criminal offence. Facebook required not only an account, but an account with special developer creds of sorts to be able to access the client API, and in the mid-2010s, they disallowed third parties to extract content from Facebook entirely.
The only "common" thing was the Twitter client API. This may have been open for a while until Twitter started forcing people onto the official app by doing what MSN, AIM, Y!M and ICQ had been doing for years already and changing their API every once in a while. Before then, Identi.ca/StatusNet used the Twitter client API, too, so that the same app could be used for Twitter and StatusNet, provided a server could be chosen in the app.
However, the latter was tricky. Most Twitter apps were hard-coded only for Twitter, also because their devs had never even heard of Identi.ca. Most of the rest were hard-coded to Twitter and Identi.ca because their devs had never heard of StatusNet, and they thought that Identi.ca was another isolated monolithic silo. (To be fair, when Identi.ca was still based on StatusNet, it was about 90% of StatusNet.) There were only a tiny handful of apps where you could enter a StatusNet server yourself.
I think the best bet might be to improve the UX on the official Mastodon app, make an official Lemmy app named Lemmy, etc. Have “make an account” default to the largest instance, but have a “choose a different instance” option in smaller font as well,
This is literally what the official Mastodon app does. Short name, long name, e-mail, password, server selection field that defaults to mastodon.social. Without the question mark and explaining to people what a server is.
This is why practically everyone who joins Mastodon is railroaded to mastodon.social. In addition to everyone being railroaded to Mastodon already without being told that there's other stuff than Mastodon connected to Mastodon and posting into Mastodon, let alone that they could use that other stuff themselves.
This is why mastodon.social has 22% of the monthly active users in the whole Fediverse and about a third of Mastodon's monthly active users.
The result is that many think that Mastodon is just a phone app. They don't know what's behind it. Once they learn about mastodon.social, they think that mastodon.social is the Mastodon website. Many Mastodon newbies take at least several months to even learn that Mastodon is decentralised and not another centralised single-website silo.
A lucky few take a few extra months to understand that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Many take years. A whole lot from either group can't cope with those intruders into their precious fluffy Mastodon Fediverse, and they want their precious fluffy Mastodon-only Fediverse back. Like, they absolutely shat brix when they came across the first "toot" with over 500 characters, and now they're trying hard to force the whole Fediverse to behave precisely like vanilla Mastodon.
I've seen Mastodon users duking it out with Akkoma/Calckey/Friendica/Hubzilla/etc. users often enough, believe me.
Many more, however, still believe to this day. that the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Or at most Mastodon with a few extras glued on. They believe that PeerTube is a YouTube-like Mastodon add-on for videos that are too long to upload them to Mastodon. But if it looks like it could have come from Mastodon, they think it did come from Mastodon.
But for the Fediverse as a whole, railroading everyone to Mastodon can't be a solution.
Yes, Mastodon is for dumb-dumbs. It's easy to get.
But, and this is something that people who only use Mastodon fail to understand, Mastodon is so lacking it hurts. It hurts the rest of the Fediverse.
There are so many cool features all over the Fediverse. Very useful features. But if Mastodon doesn't have them, and if Mastodon doesn't support them, then they simply don't matter because the place where everyone goes doesn't support them.
For example, the Fediverse has loads of places with discussion groups. The Threadiverse, Friendica and its descendants etc. Especially the latter is great for those who are looking for something like Facebook Groups. But Mastodon has no support for groups whatsoever. And so everyone is stuck with shouting into the void with hashtags and hoping someone somewhere out there will read it because that's all you can do on Mastodon. And large parts of the rest of the Fediverse have to follow suit and sometimes use dirty hacks to "follow hashtags" like you can natively do on Mastodon.
As for celebrities, there are a few in the Fediverse. Of course, they're all on Mastodon, and they're too busy and not geeky enough to understand that there's a Fediverse beyond Mastodon (and what seems to be glued onto Mastodon, if anything). But there are no AAA celebs of the kind that have hundreds of millions of Twitter followers.
Mastodon internally converts it into something it understands, maybe using Webfinger.
That'd be one reason why Webfinger, which is not part of the official W3C ActivityPub spec, is a hard requirement for federating with Mastodon.
The idea behind this Firefox add-on idea appears to be that it shall work with any Fediverse server application, regardless of which one you use. Or it should be if it has "Fediverse" in its description. You should be able to use it with Mastodon or with Lemmy, but you should be able to use it with Akkoma or Misskey or Iceshrimp.NET or Hollo or Mbin or Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Wafrn all the same.
But it already gets tricky if it has to support Lemmy (as in being on Lemmy) in addition to Mastodon.
Truth be told, this is what happens when devs try to pitch and explain their own work to people. That is, there has been some input from the community, but it can be improved.
Hubzilla has probably got the best documentation of all Fediverse projects, fairly recently re-written from scratch by a user. But the official website doesn't link to it.
Realistically speaking, this could only work as another development that's built directly and only against Mastodon. Something that won't work anywhere else.
These URLs are different everywhere in the Fediverse, that's why. It'd be tedious to implement even only the most common Fediverse server applications, and it'd be even more tedious to implement them all.
For one, profile/account/channel URLs are different everywhere. Besides, the URL for someone else's profile/account/channel on your server is different everywhere yet again.
Here are a few out of many examples. Let's assume you're on foo.com, and you want to look at the profile of alice@bar.org.
Lemmy users
The local scheme is /u/
The remote scheme is /u/@
Lemmy communities
The local scheme is /c/
The remote scheme is /c/@
Mastodon up to 4.6, also Pixelfed, Pleroma, Akkoma and apparently also GoToSocial:
The local scheme is /users/
The alternative local scheme is /@
The remote scheme is /users/@
Mastodon from 4.7 on:
The local scheme is /ap/users/
The alternative local scheme is /@
The remote scheme is /ap/users/@
PeerTube accounts (there's no content to be found here):
The local scheme is /a/ or /accounts/
PeerTube channels (this is where the actual videos are):
The local scheme is /c/ or /video-channels/
*key:
The local scheme is /users/
The alternative local scheme is /@
WriteFreely:
The local scheme is /api/collections/
Friendica:
The local scheme is /profile/
Hubzilla:
The local scheme is /channel/
The remote scheme for the local "in-between page" is /chanview?f=&hash=<Full local account/channel URL of the remote account/channel>
The remote scheme for actually viewing the account/channel remotely, but using OpenWebAuth magic sign-on, is <Full local account/channel URL of the remote account/channel>?zid=@
This means that the remote URL on Hubzilla is different, depending on where the account/channel is. The remote scheme for a Hubzilla channel is different from the remote scheme for a Mastodon account, which is different from the remote scheme for a *key account, which is different from the remote scheme for a Lemmy community.
So if you want to use such an add-on, and you're on Hubzilla, then the add-on will have to know which Fediverse server application @user@domain.tld is on.
Oh, and if that wasn't bad enough: Not everything everywhere in the Fediverse uses @user@domain.tld. Some server applications use user@domain.tld. Friendica has done so since 2010, Hubzilla has since 2012, just to give you two examples.
So the add-on would have to cope with Fediverse handles with as well as without the leading @ and be able to tell whether that ID without the leading @ is an e-mail address, a Fediverse handle, an XMPP ID or something else again.
In the first half of the 2010s, Friendica appeared to have the solution for this problem.
People needed a Twitter account to keep up with what's going on on Twitter. They needed a Facebook account to keep up with what's going on on Facebook. They needed a Tumblr account to keep up with what's going on on Tumblr.
And they had to log into these three websites separately.
In came Friendica with the goal to connect to anything that moved and then some.
You could run your Twitter account, your Facebook account and your Tumblr account through Friendica.
Perk #1: Three commercial, corporate, popular services, three accounts on commercial, corporate, popular services, but all on one website. With one login. All at once. Plus a better-than-Facebook Facebook alternative that was fully capable of long-form blogging on top.
Oh, and if you were interested in that diaspora* thing, Friendica had you covered there as well.
Even if you wanted to get into contact with folks on (pre-pump.io conversion) Identi.ca or elsewhere on StatusNet, again, Friendica had you covered.
Perk #2: You could use Facebook without actually using Facebook. You could interact with your Facebook friends, but you didn't have to log onto facebook.com and let Zuck spy on you through that website in order to do that.
Perk #3: You could crosspost to everywhere all at once. You could send literally the same post to Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr. And diaspora*. And Identi.ca/StatusNet. Oh, and, of course, Friendica itself. And LiveJournal and a WordPress blog and Dreamwidth and Libertree.
Not by copy-pasting and sending the same text ten times. But by actually only sending that one message.
And you only had one comment tree under that message with comments from everywhere. Of course, Twitter users couldn't see comments from Facebook etc. But you, you could see them all in one place.
However, and I know this from personal experience, this didn't work. Either it was too technical, or people didn't needed alternatives to stuff that just worked for them, or both.
Also, after a couple of years, Facebook no longer let third parties extract data. If you, as a Friendica admin, were caught doing just that with the old Facebook connector, then Facebook terminated not only the dev license you needed to run the Facebook connector on Friendica, but your entire Facebook account. (For a time reference, all this was before Mastodon was launched.)
Any reasons why this was created from scratch instead of as an add-on for Friendica or Hubzilla?
Oh, right, because hardly anyone knows that Friendica exists, next to nobody knows that Hubzilla exists, and definitely nobody outside these two (and their offspring) knows that they're modular to begin with.
Also, I guess that the only other thing in the Fediverse that vutuv is compatible with is Mastodon. Again.
It needs to be completely for dumb-dumbs. A phone app named "Fediverse" or something that's even easier to set up than the official Mastodon app.
It needs even bigger dopamine kicks and even worse brainrot than Instagram and TikTok.
It needs influencers and other hyped-up online celebs with millions upon millions of followers and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of likes every week.
The only other alternative would be the big corporate silos being shut down or blocked with no other corporate silos to take their place so that your friends can't get their kicks from corporate silos anymore. Even if that amounted to cold turkey.
PieFed fully covers Lemmy/Mbin and Mastodon/the microblogging parts of the Fediverse, maybe also Pixelfed/image-posting.
Friendica should be able to cover microblogging (Mastodon, Misskey etc.), the Threadiverse (Lemmy, PieFed etc.), images (Pixelfed, Vernissage etc.) as well as fully-featured long-form blogging (WordPress, WriteFreely, Ghost etc.). In fact, you can even have groups on Friendica, but I'm not sure if and how well Lemmy, Mbin and PieFed users can subscribe to them.
The only reason to have a PieFed account next to a Friendica account is if you discover that you can't send new posts to Lemmy communities, Mbin magazines or PieFed communities from Friendica. (It happens to be somewhere between difficult and impossible from Hubzilla, by the way.)
If you want to follow PeerTube channels and comment on PeerTube videos, you definitely don't need a PeerTube account. You can do that from just about everywhere. You only need a PeerTube account if you want to post videos yourself. You can upload videos to Friendica and embed them into posts, but you really shouldn't because Friendica isn't made for streaming big hi-res videos to a whole bunch of users simultaneously.
Likewise with Castopod and podcasts. Or with Owncast and video streams. Or with Funkwhale or Bandwagon and music.
Other things may be trickier. Friendica has an event calendar, but I don't think it's as capable of handling and editing Mobilizon calendars as Mobilizon itself.
Realistically, they'll build FediHood against Mastodon and its inner workings and call it a day.
Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte all have (partly optional) dedicated profile fields for your location (street, town, postal code, region/state, nation, Facebook-style "hometown" as in place of origin). FediHood could use these. But, like so often, I've got my doubts that the makers of FediHood even only know that Friendica exists.
I mean, if they really knew even only Friendica and Hubzilla, they would have made FediHood a third-party add-on for Hubzilla.
Mastodon doesn't even really understand threaded conversations on the backend side. It can't render and display what it doesn't understand.
That's also why there's so much friction between Mastodon on one side and Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte on the other side. All four are based on enclosed, threaded, one-post-many-comments conversations in which all participants in the conversation and everyone who has received the start post always receive all comments (ignores and blocks notwithstanding). Friendica is the only one out of the bunch with no support for FEP-171b "Conversation Containers".
Mastodon has no sense or support for groups whatsoever.
Mastodon aims to be purist, old-school microblogging. Anything that isn't purist, old-school microblogging has no place on Mastodon. Not even enclosed threaded conversations. Especially not groups. For Twitter has no groups either.
The result of this is that the huge majority of Mastodon users don't even know that there are any groups anywhere in the Fediverse. What they can't see on Mastodon doesn't exist at all.
FediGroups is kluged Mastodon, but it sells itself to Mastodon users as the only group solution in the Fediverse. And Mastodon users buy it because it's literally all they know. Come up to FediGroups with something like Friendica or Hubzilla or the Threadiverse, and they'll still insist that FediGroups is vastly superior to all of them in every way imaginable. As far as I can see, FediGroups was invented by Mastodon users who at that point had never even heard of Friendica or Lemmy, who might even have believed like so many others that the Fediverse equals Mastodon.
On the other hand, Mastodon is rumoured to be working on groups itself. But knowing Mastodon's track record (as well as Mastodon's philosophy of trying hard to make the non-Mastodon Fediverse look broken and therefore very undesirable to Mastodon users), we have to expect Mastodon re-inventing the wheel in a way that's as incompatible with existing wheels and roads as it ever comes.
Try Fediverse Observer and FediDB, have some more.
Again, try Fediverse Observer and FediDB.
This has its own hurdles.
Mastodon has exactly zero support for groups. Most of its users don't even know that the Fediverse has groups. Mastodon is all about user accounts following user accounts.
Lemmy, on the other hand, is all about groups. User accounts literally can't follow other user accounts. Completely different technological philosophies.
Then there's the inevitable culture clash.
Make Lemmy more well-known on Mastodon, and you'll have gaggles of Mastodon extremists barging into Lemmy, behaving like they're still on Mastodon (well, technically, they are) and trying to force Mastodon's culture upon Lemmy.
Like, CW'ing posts that someone on Mastodon might find sensitive (Lemmy doesn't even have this feature), cutting "long posts" with over 500 characters into threads of itty-bitty pieces of no more than 500 characters, using the right hashtags for content discovery (Lemmy doesn't even support hashtags) and visibly mentioning everyone your comment will go to because Mastodon users are apparently easily freaked out by posts that don't come from someone whom they follow, and that don't mention them either.
They will clash with Lemmy users and, more importantly, Lemmy moderators who live by Lemmy's culture which is almost identical to Reddit's, and which has exactly nothing to do with Mastodon's culture.
Also, Lemmy's enclosed threaded conversations will clash with Mastodon which doesn't have any support for enclosed threaded conversations whatsoever. Something that especially Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and Mitra have to struggle with because they've implemented FEP-171b "Conversation Containers" which is completely and utterly incompatible with how Mastodon works. From Mastodon's point of view, both Hubzilla and its descendants and the whole Threadiverse are "broken".
The result: Mastodon users will block tons of Lemmy users. Mastodon users will demand entire Lemmy servers be Fediblocked. Entire Lemmy servers will end up on subscribable Mastodon blocklists for behaving too "un-Mastodon-like". Lemmy servers, in turn, will defederate from tons of Mastodon servers. Once enough big Lemmy servers have blocked mastodon.social (which is 22% of the whole Fediverse, and which is chock-full of the most clueless Mastodon users), it's game over.
You want to advertise Lemmy? On Twitter? Like, get Twitter users to leave Twitter for "the Fediverse" as in Lemmy?
Hardly anyone even seems to manage to get Twitter users to leave Twitter for one of the *omas or one of the *keys or any other microblogging server app in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon (except for East Asia where the *keys rule supreme). Now you want to get Twitter users to move to a Reddit clone?
Oh, and if your effort should indeed show signs of success, you'll draw the ire of the fanatic, extremist Mastodon fans upon you who are trying hard to paint the Fediverse as only Mastodon in order to get rid of everything else. And yes, they really exist.
But this is what people want. Not alternatives that are different because they're better. Not alternatives that are better because they're different, because they intentionally don't ape a corporate silo. No, what they want is all-out, 1:1 clones of corporate silos in the Fediverse so they don't have to get used to something new.
One reason why Bluesky is so successful is because it's a clone of 2012 Twitter, both the Web interface and the official app.
I've read people reject Friendica as a Facebook alternative because it's look and feel is so different from Facebook's. Because they expected a full-on Facebook clone, and Friendica isn't one.
I dare say that a lot fewer people would have escaped from Reddit to Lemmy if Lemmy wasn't so bloody close to Reddit in UI and UX.
Now I'm wondering if it'd be feasible to extend OpenWebAuth magic sign-on (developed by the Friendica and Hubzilla creator Mike Macgirvin in the Friendica fork-fork-forks Osada and Zap in 2018; now available on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte client-side and server-side and on Friendica only client-side) to something that works similarly.
Maybe this could be extended to:
We've already got this in the Fediverse.
Most Mastodon users are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best, and nothing in existence can beat it in any way possible. They defend their "Mastodon Fediverse" against "inferior, barbaric, culture-less intruders" like Akkoma or Sharkey or Friendica tooth and nail. They absolutely refuse to accept that something, anything in the Fediverse can be better than Mastodon at anything. Of course, when they get people into the Fediverse, they railroad them straight into Mastodon, and they intentionally say nothing about the rest of the Fediverse.
Only those who actually start daily-driving something else than Mastodon realise that there are things in the Fediverse that outclass Msatodon.
Pixelfed is an Instagram clone. You can even import entire Instagram accounts worth of images and image posts into a Pixelfed account.
However, Pixelfed's culture is not derived from Instagram's culture. It's literally Mastodon's culture. The most common migration path into Pixelfed isn't Instagram > Pixelfed, it's Twitter > Mastodon > "I'mma try out this photo-posting add-on for Mastodon" > Pixelfed.
It'd be interesting to see what'd happen if there really was a mass exodus from Instagram to Pixelfed at such a scale that the Mastodon hardliners on Pixelfed are overrun. Also considering Pixelfed has exactly one developer who also has to handle Loops, Fedilab and the FediDB as one-man shows.
This only works for users in North America, though. Even though Meta had introduced this feature for EU appeasement purposes. ("See? We do support open standards!")
If it still works in the first place, that is. And I'm not talking about loads of Fediverse servers blocking Threads and two Fediverse server applications even having the means to block Threads by user agent rather than URLs.
They didn't even have a common open standard.
These four had different client APIs. At least AIM's client API had to be reverse-engineered; same for MSN, Y!M and ICQ. At least some of these four declared using an unofficial client a criminal offence. Facebook required not only an account, but an account with special developer creds of sorts to be able to access the client API, and in the mid-2010s, they disallowed third parties to extract content from Facebook entirely.
The only "common" thing was the Twitter client API. This may have been open for a while until Twitter started forcing people onto the official app by doing what MSN, AIM, Y!M and ICQ had been doing for years already and changing their API every once in a while. Before then, Identi.ca/StatusNet used the Twitter client API, too, so that the same app could be used for Twitter and StatusNet, provided a server could be chosen in the app.
However, the latter was tricky. Most Twitter apps were hard-coded only for Twitter, also because their devs had never even heard of Identi.ca. Most of the rest were hard-coded to Twitter and Identi.ca because their devs had never heard of StatusNet, and they thought that Identi.ca was another isolated monolithic silo. (To be fair, when Identi.ca was still based on StatusNet, it was about 90% of StatusNet.) There were only a tiny handful of apps where you could enter a StatusNet server yourself.
This is literally what the official Mastodon app does. Short name, long name, e-mail, password, server selection field that defaults to mastodon.social. Without the question mark and explaining to people what a server is.
This is why practically everyone who joins Mastodon is railroaded to mastodon.social. In addition to everyone being railroaded to Mastodon already without being told that there's other stuff than Mastodon connected to Mastodon and posting into Mastodon, let alone that they could use that other stuff themselves.
This is why mastodon.social has 22% of the monthly active users in the whole Fediverse and about a third of Mastodon's monthly active users.
The result is that many think that Mastodon is just a phone app. They don't know what's behind it. Once they learn about mastodon.social, they think that mastodon.social is the Mastodon website. Many Mastodon newbies take at least several months to even learn that Mastodon is decentralised and not another centralised single-website silo.
A lucky few take a few extra months to understand that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Many take years. A whole lot from either group can't cope with those intruders into their precious fluffy Mastodon Fediverse, and they want their precious fluffy Mastodon-only Fediverse back. Like, they absolutely shat brix when they came across the first "toot" with over 500 characters, and now they're trying hard to force the whole Fediverse to behave precisely like vanilla Mastodon.
I've seen Mastodon users duking it out with Akkoma/Calckey/Friendica/Hubzilla/etc. users often enough, believe me.
Many more, however, still believe to this day. that the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Or at most Mastodon with a few extras glued on. They believe that PeerTube is a YouTube-like Mastodon add-on for videos that are too long to upload them to Mastodon. But if it looks like it could have come from Mastodon, they think it did come from Mastodon.
But for the Fediverse as a whole, railroading everyone to Mastodon can't be a solution.
Yes, Mastodon is for dumb-dumbs. It's easy to get.
But, and this is something that people who only use Mastodon fail to understand, Mastodon is so lacking it hurts. It hurts the rest of the Fediverse.
There are so many cool features all over the Fediverse. Very useful features. But if Mastodon doesn't have them, and if Mastodon doesn't support them, then they simply don't matter because the place where everyone goes doesn't support them.
For example, the Fediverse has loads of places with discussion groups. The Threadiverse, Friendica and its descendants etc. Especially the latter is great for those who are looking for something like Facebook Groups. But Mastodon has no support for groups whatsoever. And so everyone is stuck with shouting into the void with hashtags and hoping someone somewhere out there will read it because that's all you can do on Mastodon. And large parts of the rest of the Fediverse have to follow suit and sometimes use dirty hacks to "follow hashtags" like you can natively do on Mastodon.
As for celebrities, there are a few in the Fediverse. Of course, they're all on Mastodon, and they're too busy and not geeky enough to understand that there's a Fediverse beyond Mastodon (and what seems to be glued onto Mastodon, if anything). But there are no AAA celebs of the kind that have hundreds of millions of Twitter followers.
Mastodon internally converts it into something it understands, maybe using Webfinger.
That'd be one reason why Webfinger, which is not part of the official W3C ActivityPub spec, is a hard requirement for federating with Mastodon.
The idea behind this Firefox add-on idea appears to be that it shall work with any Fediverse server application, regardless of which one you use. Or it should be if it has "Fediverse" in its description. You should be able to use it with Mastodon or with Lemmy, but you should be able to use it with Akkoma or Misskey or Iceshrimp.NET or Hollo or Mbin or Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Wafrn all the same.
But it already gets tricky if it has to support Lemmy (as in being on Lemmy) in addition to Mastodon.
Truth be told, this is what happens when devs try to pitch and explain their own work to people. That is, there has been some input from the community, but it can be improved.
Hubzilla has probably got the best documentation of all Fediverse projects, fairly recently re-written from scratch by a user. But the official website doesn't link to it.
Realistically speaking, this could only work as another development that's built directly and only against Mastodon. Something that won't work anywhere else.
These URLs are different everywhere in the Fediverse, that's why. It'd be tedious to implement even only the most common Fediverse server applications, and it'd be even more tedious to implement them all.
For one, profile/account/channel URLs are different everywhere. Besides, the URL for someone else's profile/account/channel on your server is different everywhere yet again.
Here are a few out of many examples. Let's assume you're on foo.com, and you want to look at the profile of alice@bar.org.
Lemmy users
The local scheme is /u/
The remote scheme is /u/@
Lemmy communities
The local scheme is /c/
The remote scheme is /c/@
Mastodon up to 4.6, also Pixelfed, Pleroma, Akkoma and apparently also GoToSocial:
The local scheme is /users/
The alternative local scheme is /@
The remote scheme is /users/@
Mastodon from 4.7 on:
The local scheme is /ap/users/
The alternative local scheme is /@
The remote scheme is /ap/users/@
PeerTube accounts (there's no content to be found here):
The local scheme is /a/ or /accounts/
PeerTube channels (this is where the actual videos are):
The local scheme is /c/ or /video-channels/
*key:
The local scheme is /users/
The alternative local scheme is /@
WriteFreely:
The local scheme is /api/collections/
Friendica:
The local scheme is /profile/
Hubzilla:
The local scheme is /channel/
The remote scheme for the local "in-between page" is /chanview?f=&hash=<Full local account/channel URL of the remote account/channel>
The remote scheme for actually viewing the account/channel remotely, but using OpenWebAuth magic sign-on, is <Full local account/channel URL of the remote account/channel>?zid=@
This means that the remote URL on Hubzilla is different, depending on where the account/channel is. The remote scheme for a Hubzilla channel is different from the remote scheme for a Mastodon account, which is different from the remote scheme for a *key account, which is different from the remote scheme for a Lemmy community.
So if you want to use such an add-on, and you're on Hubzilla, then the add-on will have to know which Fediverse server application @user@domain.tld is on.
Oh, and if that wasn't bad enough: Not everything everywhere in the Fediverse uses @user@domain.tld. Some server applications use user@domain.tld. Friendica has done so since 2010, Hubzilla has since 2012, just to give you two examples.
So the add-on would have to cope with Fediverse handles with as well as without the leading @ and be able to tell whether that ID without the leading @ is an e-mail address, a Fediverse handle, an XMPP ID or something else again.
In the first half of the 2010s, Friendica appeared to have the solution for this problem.
People needed a Twitter account to keep up with what's going on on Twitter. They needed a Facebook account to keep up with what's going on on Facebook. They needed a Tumblr account to keep up with what's going on on Tumblr.
And they had to log into these three websites separately.
In came Friendica with the goal to connect to anything that moved and then some.
You could run your Twitter account, your Facebook account and your Tumblr account through Friendica.
Perk #1: Three commercial, corporate, popular services, three accounts on commercial, corporate, popular services, but all on one website. With one login. All at once. Plus a better-than-Facebook Facebook alternative that was fully capable of long-form blogging on top.
Oh, and if you were interested in that diaspora* thing, Friendica had you covered there as well.
Even if you wanted to get into contact with folks on (pre-pump.io conversion) Identi.ca or elsewhere on StatusNet, again, Friendica had you covered.
Perk #2: You could use Facebook without actually using Facebook. You could interact with your Facebook friends, but you didn't have to log onto facebook.com and let Zuck spy on you through that website in order to do that.
Perk #3: You could crosspost to everywhere all at once. You could send literally the same post to Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr. And diaspora*. And Identi.ca/StatusNet. Oh, and, of course, Friendica itself. And LiveJournal and a WordPress blog and Dreamwidth and Libertree.
Not by copy-pasting and sending the same text ten times. But by actually only sending that one message.
And you only had one comment tree under that message with comments from everywhere. Of course, Twitter users couldn't see comments from Facebook etc. But you, you could see them all in one place.
However, and I know this from personal experience, this didn't work. Either it was too technical, or people didn't needed alternatives to stuff that just worked for them, or both.
Also, after a couple of years, Facebook no longer let third parties extract data. If you, as a Friendica admin, were caught doing just that with the old Facebook connector, then Facebook terminated not only the dev license you needed to run the Facebook connector on Friendica, but your entire Facebook account. (For a time reference, all this was before Mastodon was launched.)
Any reasons why this was created from scratch instead of as an add-on for Friendica or Hubzilla?
Oh, right, because hardly anyone knows that Friendica exists, next to nobody knows that Hubzilla exists, and definitely nobody outside these two (and their offspring) knows that they're modular to begin with.
Also, I guess that the only other thing in the Fediverse that vutuv is compatible with is Mastodon. Again.
No dice.
It needs to be completely for dumb-dumbs. A phone app named "Fediverse" or something that's even easier to set up than the official Mastodon app.
It needs even bigger dopamine kicks and even worse brainrot than Instagram and TikTok.
It needs influencers and other hyped-up online celebs with millions upon millions of followers and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of likes every week.
The only other alternative would be the big corporate silos being shut down or blocked with no other corporate silos to take their place so that your friends can't get their kicks from corporate silos anymore. Even if that amounted to cold turkey.
PieFed fully covers Lemmy/Mbin and Mastodon/the microblogging parts of the Fediverse, maybe also Pixelfed/image-posting.
Friendica should be able to cover microblogging (Mastodon, Misskey etc.), the Threadiverse (Lemmy, PieFed etc.), images (Pixelfed, Vernissage etc.) as well as fully-featured long-form blogging (WordPress, WriteFreely, Ghost etc.). In fact, you can even have groups on Friendica, but I'm not sure if and how well Lemmy, Mbin and PieFed users can subscribe to them.
The only reason to have a PieFed account next to a Friendica account is if you discover that you can't send new posts to Lemmy communities, Mbin magazines or PieFed communities from Friendica. (It happens to be somewhere between difficult and impossible from Hubzilla, by the way.)
If you want to follow PeerTube channels and comment on PeerTube videos, you definitely don't need a PeerTube account. You can do that from just about everywhere. You only need a PeerTube account if you want to post videos yourself. You can upload videos to Friendica and embed them into posts, but you really shouldn't because Friendica isn't made for streaming big hi-res videos to a whole bunch of users simultaneously.
Likewise with Castopod and podcasts. Or with Owncast and video streams. Or with Funkwhale or Bandwagon and music.
Other things may be trickier. Friendica has an event calendar, but I don't think it's as capable of handling and editing Mobilizon calendars as Mobilizon itself.