@KellamБур This may come as a surprise, but: Nomadic identity is not an abstract concept or a science-fiction idea for the Fediverse.

It is reality. It exists. Right now. In stable, daily-driver software that's federated with Mastodon. And it has been for over a decade.

I'm literally replying to you here from a nomadic channel that simultaneously exists on two servers.

Nomadic identity was invented by @Mike Macgirvin (formerly American software developer of about half a century who has been living in rural Australia for decades now) in 2011 and first implemented in 2012. Almost four years before Mastodon was first launched.

In 2010, he had invented the Facebook alternative Friendica, originally named Mistpark and based on his own DFRN protocol.

Over the months, he witnessed lots of privately operated public Friendica nodes shut down with or without an announcement and the users on these nodes lose everything. He added the possibility to export and import Friendica accounts. But that would only help if a permanent shutdown was announced. It did not protect you against shutdowns out of the blue.

There was only one solution to this problem. And that was for someone's identity to not be bound to one server, but to exist on multiple servers simultaneously. The whole thing with everything that's attached to it. Name, settings, connections, posts, files in the file storage etc. etc., everything.

So in 2011, Mike designed a whole new protocol named Zot around this brand-new idea of what he called "nomadic identity" back then already.

In 2012, Mike forked Friendica into something called Red, later the Red Matrix, and rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up against Zot. Red was the first nomadic social networking software in the world, almost four years before Mastodon.

In 2015, ten months before Mastodon was first released, the Red Matrix became Hubzilla, the Fediverse's ultimate Swiss army knife.

I am on Hubzilla myself. This channel of mine is constantly being mirrored between its main instance on https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu and its clone on https://hub.hubzilla.de. Anything that happens on the main instance is backed up on the clone. I can also log into the clone and use that, and whatever happens there is backed up on the main instance.

https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu could go down, temporarily, permanently, doesn't matter; I still have my channel, namely the clone. And I can declare the clone my new main instance.

Well, Mike didn't stop at Hubzilla and its original version of the Zot protocol. He wanted to refine it and advance it, but in ways that wouldn't be possible on daily-driver software.

Zot went through several upgrades: Zot6 in 2018 (backported to Hubzilla in 2020, along with OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on). Zot8 in 2020. Zot11 in 2021 which had become incompatible with Zot6 and therefore was renamed to Nomad. Today's Nomad would be Zot12.

Also, in order to advance and test Zot, Mike created a whole bunch of forks and forks of forks. Osada and Zap for Zot6 in 2018, followed by another short-lived Osada in 2019. A third Osada, Mistpark 2020 (a.k.a. Misty) and Redmatrix 2020 in 2020 for Zot8. Roadhouse for Zot11 Nomad in 2021. All Osadas, Zap, Misty, Redmatrix 2020 and Roadhouse were discontinued on New Year's Eve of 2022.

The most recent software based on Nomad is from October, 2021. It can be found in the streams repository. It is officially and intentionally nameless and brandless, it has next to nodeinfo code that could submit statistics, and it is intentionally released into the public domain. The community named it (streams) after the code repository.

I also have two (streams) channels, one of which is cloned so far.

The newest thing, and that's what the Friendica and Hubzilla veteran @Tim Schlotfeldt ?️‍? referred to, is nomadic identity using nothing but ActivityPub, no longer relying on a special protocol.

This was not Mike Macgirvin's idea. This came from @silverpill, the creator and developer of the microblogging server application Mitra. He wanted to make Mitra nomadic, make it resilient against server shutdown. But he didn't want to port it to Nomad. He wanted to achieve it with nothing but ActivityPub.

So he hit up Mike. The two came to the conclusion: This is actually possible. And they began to work on it. Amongst the results were several FEPs coined by silverpill.

This time, Mike did not create another fork to develop nomadic identity via ActivityPub. He did it all on the nomadic branch of the streams repository while silverpill did his part on a special development branch of Mitra.

In mid-2024, after enough sparring between (streams) instances, between Mitra instances and between (streams) and Mitra, Mike was confident enough that his implementation of support of nomadic identity via ActivityPub was stable enough. He merged the nomadic branch into the dev branch which ended up being merged into the stable release branch in summer.

Now, at this point, (streams) didn't use ActivityPub for nomadic identity. It still used the Nomad protocol for everything first and foremost, including cloning. But it understood nomadic identity via ActivityPub as implemented on experimental Mitra.

However, while it worked under lab conditions, it blew up under real-life conditions. At this point, (streams) had to handle so many different identities that it confused them, and it couldn't federate with anything yet.

In mid-August, while trying to fix the problem, Mike eventually forked the streams repository into Forte. It got a name again, it got a brand identity again, it got its nodeinfo back, it was put under the MIT license again.

But most importantly: Any and all support for Nomad was ripped out, also to get rid of a whole number of IDs, namely those for Nomad-actually-Zot12 and for Hubzilla's Nomad-actually-Zot6. Forte only uses ActivityPub for everything. And so, Forte also had to fully rely on ActivityPub for nomadic identity, cloning and syncing.

For almost seven months, Forte was considered experimental and unstable. For most of the time, the only existing servers were Mike's.

But on March 12th, 2025, Mike Macgirvin released Forte 25.3.12, the first official stable release of Forte. This is what Tim wrote about. Because this actually made it into Fediverse-wide news.

Not because it's nomadic. Nomadic identity has been daily-driven for over a decade now.

But because it uses ActivityPub for nomadic identity. Which means that you can theoretically make any kinds of Fediverse software nomadic now, all without porting it to the Nomad protocol first.

For the future, Mike and silverpill envision a Fediverse in which one can clone between different server applications. A Fediverse in which one can have one and the same identity cloned across multiple servers of Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Mitra, Forte, Mobilizon, Lemmy, BookWyrm etc., all with the same name, all with the same content and settings (as far as the software allows; you will certainly not be able to clone your PeerTube videos to Mastodon and Lemmy).

Even if you don't intend to clone, it will make moving instances and even moving from one software to another dramatically easier.

If you're concerned about your privacy, let me tell you this:

Hubzilla's privacy, security and permissions system is unparalleled in the Fediverse. Except for that on (streams) and Forte which is another notch better.

I can define who can see my profile (my default, public profile on Hubzilla where each channel can have multiple profiles).
I can define who can see my stream and my posts when looking at my channel.
I can define who can see my connections (Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte don't distinguish between follower and followed; they aren't Twitter clones).
I can define who can look into my file space (individual permission settings per folder and per file notwithstanding).
I can define who can see my webpages on Hubzilla (if I have any).
I can define who can see my wikis on Hubzilla (no shit, I've got wikis on my Hubzilla channel).

On Hubzilla, I can define individually for any of these whether it's

• everyone on the Internet
• everyone with a recognisable Fediverse account
• everyone on Hubzilla (maybe also on (streams); anyone using ActivityPub is definitely excluded here)
• everyone on the same server as myself (AFAIK, only main instances of channels count here, clones don't)
• unapproved (= followers) as well as approved (= mutual) connections
• confirmed connections
• those of my confirmed connections whom I explicitly grant that permission by contact role
• only myself

There's a whole bunch more permissions than these. And they all have seven or eight permission levels (depending on whether the general non-Fediverse public can be given permission).

On (streams) and Forte, I can define whether things are allowed for

• everyone on the Internet (where applicable)
• everyone with a recognisable Fediverse account
• all my approved connections
• only me myself plus those whom I explicitly grant that permission in the connection settings

Yes, connection settings. Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte give you various ways of configuring individual connections, much unlike Mastodon. This includes what any individual connection is allowed to do.

Hubzilla uses so-called "contact roles" for that, presets with a whopping 17 permissions to grant or deny for any one individual connection. That is, what the channel generally allows, a contact role can't forbid.

(streams) and Forte still have 15 permissions per contact, but they lack some features which Hubzilla has permissions for. These permissions can be set individually for each connection, or you can define permission roles that cover all 15 permissions to make things easier.

Okay, how about posting in public vs in private? And when I say "private", I mean "private". It's "private messages" on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, not "direct messages".

Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte let you post

• in public
• only to yourself
• only to your connections ((streams) and Forte only; Hubzilla requires a privacy group with all your connections in it for this)
• to all members of one specific privacy group (Hubzilla)/access list ((streams), Forte); that's like being able to only post to those on one specific list on Mastodon
• to everyone to whom one specific non-default profile is assigned (Hubzilla only)
• to a specific group/forum (I'll get back to that later)
• to a custom one-by-one selection of connections of yours

Now, let's assume I have a privacy group with Alice, Bob and Carol in it. I send a new post to only this privacy group. This means:

• Only Alice, Bob and Carol can see the post and the conversation.
• Alice can reply to me, Bob and Carol.
• Bob can reply to me, Alice and Carol.
• Carol can reply to me, Alice and Bob.
• Nobody else can see the post. Not even by searching for it. Not by hashtag either. Not at all.
• Nobody else can see any of the comments.
• Nobody else can comment.

If one of them was on Mastodon, they'd see my post as a DM, by the way, and they could only reply to me. But that's Mastodon's limitation because it understands neither threaded conversations nor permissions.

Or how about reply control? This is something that many Mastodon users have been craving for quite a while now. Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte have them. Right now. And they work. They have since 2012.

Hubzilla optionally lets me disallow comments on either of my posts. Users on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte won't even be able to comment; they won't have the UI elements to do so. Everyone else is able to comment locally. But that comment will never end up on my channel. It will never officially be added to the conversation. And at least users on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte will never fetch that comment from my channel as part of the conversation, i.e. never at all.

(streams) and Forte can go even further with all available options. They can disallow comments like Hubzilla. But in addition, they can allow only the members of one particular access list to comment, regardless of who can see the post/the conversation. On top of that, comments can be closed at a pre-defined point in the future. And then you even have a channel-wide setting for how long people can comment on your posts.

Oh, and there's even a setting for who is generally permitted to comment on your posts. And you can additionally allow specific connections of yours to comment on your posts.

Lastly, I've already mentioned groups/forums. Like, you know, Web forums or Facebook groups or subreddits or whatever. Like Guppe Groups on a mountain of coke and with moderation and permission control and optionally private.

Hubzilla has them, and it has inherited them from Friendica. (streams) has them. Forte has them. They're basically channels like social networking channels, but with some extra features. This includes that everything that's send to a group/forum as what amounts to a PM is automatically forwarded to all other members.

On Hubzilla, a forum can be gradually made private by denying permission to see certain elements to everyone but its own members (= connections): the profile, the members, what's going on in it. Depending on what you want or do not want people to see.

On (streams) and Forte, you have four types of forums:

• public, and members can upload images and other files to the forum channel
• public, but members cannot upload images and other files to the forum channel
• like above, but additionally, posts and comments from new members must be manually approved by the admin(s) until their connections are configured to make them full members
• private, non-members can't see the profile, non-members can't see the connections, non-members can't see what's going on in it, but members can upload images and other files to the forum channel

In addition, on all three, a group/forum channel can choose to hide itself from directories. This is always an extra option that's independent from public/private.

What we have here is the most secure and most private Fediverse software of all.

And, once again, at its core, this is technology from 2012. It pre-dates Mastodon by almost four years.

Finally, if you want to know how Hubzilla and (streams) compare to Mastodon: I have made a number of tables that compare Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams).

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Mitra #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #ActivityPub #Zot #Zot6 #Zot8 #Nomad #NomadicIdentity #Security #FediverseSecurity #Privacy #FediversePrivacy #Permissions

@Peter Vágner @Dieguito How conversations work is not unified all across the Fediverse. Even how connections work is not unified.

Mastodon has taken over the follower/followed principle from Twitter which is always illustrated with arrows with one point. A following B is illustrated with an arrow from A to B. A being followed by B is illustrated with an arrow from B to A. A and B following each other mutually is illustrated with one arrow from A to B and one arrow from B to A.

It appears to me that Friendica has adopted this to become more compatible with Mastodon. But its several descendants, created by Friendica's own creator, starting with Hubzilla, haven't.

Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte still have the bidirectional "connection" or "contact" as the default. It's illustrated with one arrow, but with one point on each end.

Also, all three understand a threaded conversation as an enclosed contruct entirely owned by the conversation starter. Everyone on these three who has the start post on their stream always actually has the whole thread on their stream.

In fact, all three have Conversation Containers implemented. This feature was originally created in the streams repository in 2022. Forte has had it from the get-go as it started out as a fork of (streams). It was eventually turned into FEP-171b and backported to Hubzilla last year.

All three make sure that everyone who has a post on their stream also always has all comments on that post, at least those that are made after they have received the post.

This works on two basic principles:

• All comments go directly to the original poster because the original poster owns the thread.
• Those who have the post automatically receive all comments from the original poster.

In a pure Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte system, your above example would look like this:

• User 1 and User 2 are connected.
• User 1 and User 3 are connected. (This doesn't even matter.)
• User 2 and User 3 are connected.
• User 2 and User 4 are connected.

Much simpler than explaining everything with "following" and "being followed", isn't it?

Now, the conversation works like this.

• User 2 sends a public post, thus creating a Conversation Container of which they are the owner.
  User 1, User 3 and User 4 receive the post.
• User 3 comments on User 2's post.
  The comment goes from User 3 to User 2, who is the owner of the conversation, and it is automatically forwarded to User 1 and User 4 who already have User 2's post on their streams.
• User 4 comments on User 3's comment.
  The comment goes from User 4 past User 3 straight to User 2, who is the owner of the conversation, and it is automatically forwarded to User 1 and User 3 who already have User 2's post on their streams.

The only mentioning that occurs here, if any, is User 4 mentioning User 3. This is not necessary for User 4's post to reach anyone. This is only necessary to make sure on Hubzilla (which doesn't have a tree view) that User 4 is replying to User 3's comment and not to User 2's post.

On Mastodon, for comparison, everything depends on who follows whom, who mentions whom and whose instance knows whose instance.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Conversations #FEP_171b #ConversationContainers

@Alison Wilder Because if you want full-blown user rights and all the same features as a local user on all over 30,000 Fediverse instances, you need a local user account on each one of them.

This means two things:

• If you come over to the Fediverse for the first time, and you register your first account on Mastodon, you automatically also register an account on 30,000+ more instances.
• If you decide to host your own instance of whatever, and you spin it up for the first time, your instance immediately creates tens of millions of user accounts. One for everyone who has ever joined the Fediverse. Because anyone may decide to come over to your instance and use it, just like so.

For one, this is utter overkill.

Besides, this is technologically impossible. This would require all Fediverse instances to know all other Fediverse instances. With no exceptions. Like, if I start up my own (streams) instance for the first time, and half a second later, someone on the other side of the globe starts up a Gancio instance, they would immediately have to know each other. And all the other instances in the Fediverse.

And, of course, it would require a newly-launched instance to know all Fediverse users. Again, with no exception.

How and from which source are they supposed to know?

That said, there is a single sign-on system for the Fediverse. It's called OpenWebAuth. It was created by @Mike Macgirvin (creator of Friendica and all its descendants) in the late 2010s already for now-defunct Zap, a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla which, in turn, is a fork of the currently hyped Facebook alternative Friendica. It was backported to Hubzilla in 2020. Everything that came after Zap, including the still existing streams repository, got it, too.

However, first of all, OpenWebAuth is only fully implemented on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. Plus, it has client-side support on Friendica. This means that Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte recognise logins on all four, but Friendica doesn't recognise logins from anywhere.

As for Mastodon, OpenWebAuth implementation was actually developed to the point of an official merge request in Mastodon's GitHub repository. As far as I know, it was rejected. Mastodon won't implement OpenWebAuth, full stop.

Besides, it doesn't give you all the same power as a local user. You can't log into Friendica, go to a Hubzilla hub and create a wiki or a webpage or a CalDAV calendar, just like so.

OpenWebAuth is only for guest permissions. Because on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, permissions are everything.

For example, let's assume you have an account and a channel on (streams). Let's also assume that your (streams) channel and this Hubzilla channel of mine here are connected. Furthermore, let's assume that I've decided to only allow my own full connections to see my profile.

If you're logged out, and you go to my profile page, you see nothing.

But then you log in. And you come back to my profile page (provided your browser is configured so that the Hubzilla hub that I call home is allowed to create cookies). My home hub recognises your login on (streams). It identifies you as you, as one of my contacts. Thus, it identifies you as someone who is permitted to see my profile.

And all of a sudden, you see my profile.

That, for example, is what OpenWebAuth is for.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Zap #Streams #(streams) #Forte #SingleSignOn #OpenWebAuth

@PaulaToThePeople It isn't just a matter of consent. Besides, for example, I do have quote-post control here on Hubzilla.

I can give permission to quote-post my posts to

• everyone in the Fediverse
• everyone on Hubzilla and (streams)
• everyone on this hub
• approved and unapproved connections
• only approved connections
• only those of my connections whom I explicitly give permission by contact role
• nobody but myself

Over on (streams), I can still give that permission to

• everyone in the Fediverse
• all my connections
• only myself + specific connections whom I grant that permission either by permission role or by individual connection settings

It's much more a matter of technology.

Mastodon is about to completely re-invent the wheel with a non-standard, Mastodon-only setting. This setting will only work within Mastodon simply because it probably won't even be documented anywhere, especially not before it's officially rolled out.

There simply is no way that every last instance of Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Calckey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, CherryPick, Catodon, Meisskey, Tanukey, Neko, dozens of other Misskey forks, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte etc. etc. will have that setting implemented before Mastodon rolls it out so that even the users on mastodon.social are perfectly safe from the first second on.

Besides, @Mike Macgirvin , creator of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte and still the only maintainer of the latter two, will never introduce proprietary Mastodon features to them. He'd rather risk (streams) and Forte becoming incompatible with Mastodon. The same goes for @Mario Vavti and @Harald Eilertsen, Hubzilla's main maintainers.

If Mastodon wants to become a perfectly safe haven against unallowed quote-posting, it has only got one choice: It must introduce something like (streams)' and Forte's user agent filter and use it to block just everything that isn't Mastodon. Like, include a hard-coded allowlist that only includes Mastodon plus what little can't quote or quote-post anyway.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Iceshrimp #CherryPick #Sharkey #Catodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate

@PaulaToThePeople @Stefan Bohacek Keep one thing in mind:

Mastodon may not have quote-posts yet. But the Fediverse has quote-posts right now. And it has had them since before Mastodon was made.

Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Calckey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, CherryPick, Catodon, Meisskey, Tanukey, Neko, dozens of other Misskey forks, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte etc. etc., they all have quote-posts. They're all fully capable of quote-posting any Mastodon toot.

None of them has introduced quote-posts to harass Twitter refugees on Mastodon. At least Friendica and Hubzilla have had quote-posts since long before Mastodon was even made.

You will be able to choose whether your posts can be quoted at all.

At least by Mastodon users.

But since this will be Mastodon re-inventing the wheel with brand-new, proprietary, Mastodon-only technology, everything I've listed above will still be able to quote-post anyone and anything on Mastodon with zero resistance.

To quote-post myself and the guy who invented Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte:

Jupiter Rowland schrieb den folgenden Beitrag Sat, 20 Jul 2024 01:29:11 +0200 I think I've just chased someone out of the Fediverse.

That someone was afraid of Mastodon being "screwed over" by becoming quote-post-able.

I've told him the truth: Mastodon has been quote-post-able for as long as it has been around. Mastodon became quote-post-able the very moment it was launched.

That's because when Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated with Friendica which is from 2010, which had been around for almost six years at that point, and which has had quote-posts from its own inception AFAIK. Mastodon also immediately federated with Hubzilla which has had quote-posts since its own inception, since it had been forked from Friendica, and that was in 2012.

Mastodon has never been un-quote-post-able.

Right now, there are dozens of Fediverse server apps whose users can quote-post Mastodon toots with no resistance.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate
Mike Macgirvin schrieb den folgenden Beitrag Sat, 20 Jul 2024 03:18:39 +0200 The closest you'll ever get to making Mastodon un-quote-postable is to post privately. Not unlisted. Private. Most fediverse software will honour this today; and it doesn't require yet another "pretend permission". Like unlisted.

And Mike should know. He brought things to the Fediverse like actually working permissions. Including permissions on two levels to quote-post any content on a channel. Readily available right now at least on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

Also, this is what people on Friendica and its descendants have been using quote-posts for since 2010.

You will be notified when someone quotes you.

You already are when someone on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte quote-posts one of your posts.

As for Pleroma, Misskey and their forks, you aren't notified right now, and I've got my doubts that you will be after this change.

Also, "quote" and "quote-post" are two different things. Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte can do both. "Quote" is what I'm doing right here. Whether or not you're notified depends on whether or not you're mentioned.

And blocking quotes is even less possible. A quote only consists of a pair of BBcode tags plus the quoted text in-between. And on Friendica and all its descendants, you don't work with a WYSIWYG editor by default, but you have to get your hands dirty on raw markup code.

You will be able to withdraw your post from the quoted context at any time.

Again, probably not if someone on Pleroma, Misskey or one of their forks quote-posts you.

And definitely not if someone on Friendica or one of its descendants quote-posts you.

The difference is that a quote-post on Pleroma, Misskey or one of their forks is actually a reference to the original. On Friendica and its descendants, a quote-post is an automatically generated dumb copy of the original.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Iceshrimp #CherryPick #Sharkey #Catodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate

@JustBob Discord has completely warped the term "server" for entire generations of Internet users. On Discord, "server" means "chatroom".

In the Fediverse, "server" doesn't mean "chatroom". It means "server". A computer.

For example, a rack computer with no screen and no keyboard and no mouse bolted into a server rack at a data centre.

Or an old laptop that someone had lying around or a Raspberry Pi mini-computer running at someone's home, connected to their landline.

On each one of these, a big or small Twitter can be running (Mastodon).

Or a wholly different Twitter (Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Calckey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon, Meisskey, Tanukey, Neko...).

(Here's the first important new thing for you to learn about the Fediverse: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon.)

Or a Facebook with a side of a blog and a cloud server (Friendica, (streams), Forte).

(Here's the second important new thing for you to learn about the Fediverse: The Fediverse is not only short-form microblogging. Look at this comment. Look at what I've done. Embedded links. Bold type. Impossible on Mastodon. But possible elsewhere in the Fediverse.)

Or a Facebook meets WordPress meets Google Cloud Services meets even more stuff on top (Hubzilla; this is where I am).

Or an Instagram (Pixelfed).

Or a YouTube (PeerTube).

Or a Twitch (Owncast).

Or a Reddit (Lemmy, /kbin, Mbin, PieFed).

Or a Goodreads (BookWyrm).

Or whatever. There are over 150 different server applications in the Fediverse.

mastodon.social, where you are, is only one of over 10,000 big and small Twitters of the same kind (Mastodon).

If Mastodon was like Discord, all 10,000+ Mastodon servers would run in one and the same gigantic data centre in the USA, owned by Mastodon, Inc. And they would all be property of Mastodon, Inc.

If the Fediverse was like Discord, all 30,000+ Fediverse servers would run in one and the same gigantic data centre in the USA, owned by Mastodon, Inc. And they would all be property of Mastodon, Inc. Also, they would be fully identical in functionality.

But as I've said above: They're all running on their own separate machines. With their own separate owners.

And the different server applications have different developers, and they are being developed independently from one another.

Okay, now comes the kicker: These server applications are not walled up against one another. Not only are all instances of the same server applications (e.g. Mastodon) connected to each other, but all instances of one server application are also connected to all instances of all the other server applications.

Imagine you're on Twitter. But your new friend is on Facebook. You can't follow a Facebook user on Twitter, and you can't follow a Twitter user on Facebook.

In the Fediverse, you can. You can be on Twitter. And follow a Facebook user. Directly from Twitter. Without a Facebook account.

Only that they aren't named Twitter and Facebook in the Fediverse. Twitter is named Mastodon or Pleroma or Akkoma or Misskey or Calckey or Firefish or Iceshrimp or Sharkey or Catodon or... There are dozens of Twitter alternatives in the Fediverse. Well, and Facebook is named Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte.

You can be on Mastodon. And you can follow Friendica accounts. From Mastodon. Without a Friendica account.

This comment is a very good example. You are on Mastodon, created by @Eugen Rochko in 2016 as an alternative to Twitter that aimed to be as close to Twitter as possible.

The server that you're on, mastodon.social, is owned by Mastodon, Inc. and running on one or multiple rack servers in San Francisco, California, USA owned by Fastly.

I am on Hubzilla, created by @Mike Macgirvin in 2012 by forking his own Friendica from 2010, and currently mainly maintained by @Mario Vavti and @Harald Eilertsen. Hubzilla has got nothing to do with Mastodon whatsoever. It started out as an alternative to Facebook, but not a clone, rather better than Facebook, with full-blown long-form blogging capability and a built-in file storage, and it has been enhanced greatly in functionality even beyond that.

The server that I'm on, Netzgemeinde, is owned and administered by @Mark Nowiasz, who has no affiliation with the Hubzilla developers, and running on a rack server in Nuremberg, Germany owned by Netcup.

And yet, you can see this comment coming from Hubzilla on Mastodon.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Server #Instance #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Iceshrimp #Sharkey #Catodon #Meisskey #Tanukey #Neko #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Pixelfed #PeerTube #Owncast #Lemmy #/kbin #Mbin #PieFed #BookWyrm #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

@Georgiana Brummell

What are the differences between Diaspora, Pleroma, Hubzilla, Hometown, and Glitch? How do they compare to Friendica as far as features?

As for Hubzilla vs Friendica, I've made a series of tables that compare Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams). I've made them for those who are looking for a Facebook alternative in the Fediverse, but who only know Mastodon first-hand and Friendica from hearsay. But these tables are useless for blind or visually-impaired users, and I can't change that because it's in the nature of tables. Also, I don't have all data for Friendica yet. (In case someone sighted comes across this comment and wants to see the tables: Here they are).

So I'll try to do a Hubzilla vs Friendica comparison here. Hold on and take some time, for this will be very, very, very long. 42 lines of comparison with over 10,000 characters.

Friendica was created by Mike Macgirvin in 2010.
Hubzilla started out as a Friendica fork by Mike Macgirvin himself in 2012, originally named Red (from spanish la red = the network), then renamed Red Matrix. It was repositioned, reworked, massively extended beyond Friendica's features and renamed Hubzilla in 2015.

Friendica has native Android apps, a closed beta native iOS app and support for Mastodon apps, even though Mastodon apps only cover 20% of Friendica's features at most. Hubzilla doesn't have any mobile apps, at least none for iOS, none in the Google Play Store, none that could be installed on a new Android device and none with a fully native mobile user interface.

Hubzilla also also doesn't support Mastodon apps and never will. That's mainly because a Mastodon app can't cover over 90% of Hubzilla's features, including features which you need all the time such as file upload, image embedding, handling of connections and permission controls, simply because Mastodon doesn't have these features. Hubzilla would require its very own apps, and due to Hubzilla's immense complexity and wealth of features, a fully-featured, dedicated Hubzilla app would be absolutely gargantuan and just as complex as Hubzilla itself.

On Friendica, ActivityPub federation is available from the get-go. On Hubzilla, ActivityPub federation is optional, and on newly-created channels, it is off by default.

Friendica can integrate Bluesky and Tumblr accounts. Hubzilla can't.

On Friendica, your account is your identity. Your identity is firmly tied to your account. On hubzilla, your identity is independent from your account. It resides in a container called a "channel", of which you can have multiple, fully independent ones on the same account. This also allows you to switch back and forth between channels or identities without logging out and back in.

Friendica has limited capabilities of moving your identity to another instance. Hubzilla has nomadic identity. For one, this makes it possible to relocate an entire channel with all posts, all comments, all private messages, all connections, nearly all settings, all files in your file space etc. etc. to another instance. Besides, it makes it possible to clone a channel to one or multiple other instances. This gives you live, hot, real-time, bidirectional backups of your channel, and you can log into and use any of them. That way, your channel is much more resilient against instance shutdown.

If you delete a Hubzilla channel, you cannot create a channel with the same short name on the same Hubzilla hub unless the admin fully deletes your channel from the database.

If you delete a clone of a Hubzilla channel, you cannot clone the same channel back to the same hub unless the admin fully deletes your channel from the database.

Friendica has client-side support for OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on. Hubzilla has full support. This means that Friendica logins are recognised by instances with full OpenWebAuth support, but Friendica itself doesn't recognise logins elsewhere. Hubzilla logins are recognised the same, and Hubzilla does recognise logins elsewhere.

Friendica has some basic permission control. On Hubzilla, it is much more advanced and fine-grained.

On Friendica, you can set your profile to private. On Hubzilla, you can give permission to see your profile to anybody on the internet, anybody in the Fediverse, anybody on Hubzilla or (streams), anybody on your hub, unapproved and approved connections, approved connections, only those you specifically allow by contact role or only yourself.

On Friendica, you can set your list of connections to private. On Hubzilla, you can give permission to see your connections to anybody on the internet, anybody in the Fediverse, anybody on Hubzilla or (streams), anybody on your hub, unapproved and approved connections, approved connections, only those you specifically allow by contact role or only yourself.

On Friendica, you can set your timeline to private; as far as I know, this happens along with setting your profile to private. On Hubzilla, you can give permission to see your stream to anybody on the internet, anybody in the Fediverse, anybody on Hubzilla or (streams), anybody on your hub, unapproved and approved connections, approved connections, only those you specifically allow by contact role or only yourself.

I don't know if Friendica can give specific permissions to specific connections. Hubzilla has so-called "contact roles". Each contact has a contact role that grants or denies 17 different permissions. Permissions granted channel-wide from the channel role are inherited by all contact roles. Two of these permissions are for your contacts to send you their posts and for your contacts to send you private messages.

On Hubzilla, you can keep both everyone and specific contacts from sending you repeats/boosts/reposts/renotes with a line of filter syntax in a filter blacklist.

On Hubzilla, you can send any of your posts as public, only to yourself, to all members of a privacy group (which is similar to a circle on Friendica), to whoever is assigned a certain non-default profile, to one specific group/forum or to a custom selection of contacts. You can also define your default post audience, either one of your privacy groups, or your posts are public by default.

Hubzilla has three levels of reply control. At channel level, you can give permission to reply to your posts to anybody on the internet, anybody in the Fediverse, anybody on Hubzilla or (streams), anybody on your hub, unapproved and approved connections, approved connections, only those you specifically allow by contact role or only yourself. In addition, you can choose to let comments in from those who are not permitted to comment on your posts, preview them and then manually decide whether or not you accept each comment.

Reply control at per-contact level means that you can use contact roles to grant or deny permission to reply to your comments to certain connections.

Reply control at per-post level is optional and off by default. It lets you disallow comments on individual posts of yours entirely.

Likewise, there is quote-post control at channel level and at per-contact level.

On Friendica, you can report posts to the admin. On Hubzilla, you can't. This feature is currently being discussed.

I don't know about Friendica, but Hubzilla has a channel-wide filter with a whitelist and a blacklist, and optionally, it has an individual filter for each connection with a whitelist and a blacklist.

Hubzilla allows regular expressions in filter lines, but only for normal keywords, not in lines with filter syntax.

Hubzilla's filter syntax can recognise posts, comments and private messages. This is of very limited usefulness, however: If you want to whitelist certain keywords for posts, but let all comments and all private messages through, you'd have to use filter syntax in a whitelist. But in whitelists, keyword lines are connected with "or" whereas filter syntax lines are connected with "and" which means that you cannot combine keywords with filter syntax. There is also filter syntax for keywords, but these lines are connected with "and" in whitelists, too, and each line can only contain one keyword with no regular expression.

On Friendica, summaries or Mastodon-style content warnings are created with a pair of BBcode tags, either [abstract][/abstract] or [abstract=apub][/abstract]. This works for posts, comments and private messages. Hubzilla has a dedicated summary field for posts, but none for comments. In theory, it also has the BBcode tag pair [summary][/summary], but in practice, it is broken.

Friendica optionally offers Markdown for text formatting in addition to BBcode. Hubzilla only offers BBcode.

Friendica doesn't have or support polls. Hubzilla has full support for basically unlimited polls.

Friendica calls reposting "sharing" and quote-posting "quoted sharing". Hubzilla calls reposting "repeating" and quote-posting "sharing".

On Hubzilla, you can optionally be notified when a stranger mentions you out of the blue outside any conversation on your stream.

On Friendica, you can make a group restricted or private. On Hubzilla, you can give a group or a forum privacy, too, but by choosing the "Custom" channel role instead of the "Community forum" channel role, and you have to adjust the level of privacy by hand. The advantage is that you have fine-grained control over what exactly you want to be private in your group or forum.

Private Friendica groups can be joined by users on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and probably also Forte. Private Hubzilla groups or forums can only be joined by users on Hubzilla, (streams) and maybe Forte.

Friendica has a central directory of users, groups etc., the Friendica Directory. Hubzilla doesn't have such a thing.

Friendica nodes have their own directories; I'm not sure if they only list Friendica accounts or accounts and channels of everything that uses ActivityPub, or if they even include diaspora* users. Hubzilla hubs have such directories, too, but they only list Hubzilla and (streams) channels because they can only list what uses the built-in and permanently activated Nomad protocol.

In your Hubzilla directory, you can hide channels that are flagged not safe for work.

Hubzilla has an option that gives those who are permitted to see a post the permission to also see any media embedded in the post, regardless of the permissions set for the respective media in your file space. This was introduced due to the wide-spread issue of people uploading images and setting them or the directores the images are in to private, then embedding them into public posts and the audience of the posts not seeing the images.

On Hubzilla, you can give guest access tokens to people whom you want to access certain files or directories in your file space.

The file space built into your Hubzilla channel can be accessed via WebDAV.

Hubzilla also has a built-in CalDAV calendar server which can use the event calendar as a simple frontend and an optional headless CardDAV addressbook server.

Hubzilla optionally has "articles", long-form text posts with the same full text formatting capabilities as normal posts, but which don't federate.

Hubzilla optionally has "cards", basically planning cards with the same features as articles plus a few extra features.

Hubzilla optionally has multiple wikis per channel with multiple pages per wiki. Wikis can be set up to use either BBcode or Markdown as their markup language with a few wiki-specific additions in both cases.

Hubzilla optionally has simple, static webpages which can be formatted with either BBcode, Markdown or plain HTML. Hubzilla's own official website hubzilla.org is a webpage on a Hubzilla channel.

I think that's about it.

As for diaspora*: Forget it. For one, it does not support ActivityPub, and it does not federate with most of the Fediverse. The diaspora* developers staunchly refuse to add any other protocols to diaspora*, especially ActivityPub. One has actually said that you don't implement ActivityPub, you implement Mastodon. And the diaspora* developers don't want to make themselves dependent on Mastodon.

Besides, diaspora* is withering away. Around December 29th, a number of major diaspora* pods shut down. According to one source, diaspora* lost over half its user accounts in three days. And the closure of diasp.org, one of the biggest pods, is scheduled for April 1st now.

Quote:

Are there any other networks I should know about?

End quote.

From the same creator as Friendica and Hubzilla, there is something he created in 2021 at the end of a long and somewhat complex line of forks. It is officially and intentionally nameless, brandless, not a project and released into the public domain. Colloquially, it is named (streams) in parentheses after the name of its code repository. You can find the latter with an extensive readme here. It is slimmed down in features from Hubzilla, and it doesn't offer nearly the connection and federation options of Friendica and Hubzilla. But it is easier to handle while still having a steeper learning curve than Friendica, and especially its permission system is both another bit powerful and significantly easier to use than Hubzilla's.

(streams) has no mobile apps and no compatibility with Mastodon apps either for the same reasons as why Hubzilla doesn't isn't compatible with Mastodon apps.

(streams) is included in my comparison tables, too. If you want me, I can rattle down another comparison with Friendica like the one with Hubzilla above.

In August, 2024, Mike made another fork based on (streams) named Forte. It's basically (streams), but with a name, with a brand identity, as a project, released under the MIT license and with no support for the Nomad protocol anymore. It does everything using only ActivityPub. This also means that it relies entirely on ActivityPub for nomadic identity. Since especially this is still highly experimental, Forte itself has not officially been released yet, it is not recommended as a reliable daily driver, nor does it have public, open-registration instances.

Quote:

Finally, will the interface of the page on Friendica change depending on my instance?

End quote.

As far as I know, different Friendica nodes have different default themes, especially now that the Facebook-like Bookface theme may be officially included into Friendica.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #diaspora* #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte