Nostr notes by Jupiter Rowland

Jetzt will ich's wirklich wissen. Gibt's in ...

2026-10-28T18:00:36Z

Jetzt will ich's wirklich wissen.

Gibt's in deutschsprachigen Mastodon-Kreisen wirklich keine Qualitätskriterien für Alt-Texte? Keine Erwartungen an Alt-Texte? Ist es wirklich scheißegal, wie Bilder beschrieben werden, Hauptsache, sie werden beschrieben?

Oder ist es einfach nur verpönt, darüber zu reden?

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BildbeschreibungenMeta #CWBildbeschreibungenMeta

Link content warning: Both links in this post contain eye ...

2026-10-18T17:18:15Z

Link content warning: Both links in this post contain eye contact!

Hypergrid Business has quoted me. I think I'm famous now.

...Yeah, I've also been a guest at Inworld Review a few months ago, I know... where, by the way, I was asked to talk about the Fediverse as well...

#CWYoutubeLink #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OSgrid #HypergridBusiness #InworldReview

What we've learned from today's OSgrid meeting: If you ...

2026-09-27T20:12:10Z

What we've learned from today's OSgrid meeting:

If you ask for all grid residents to come, actually expect all of them to come. At least the active ones. Don't underestimate how many active users OSgrid has.

Also, OSgrid has a lot more than 100 active users. Maybe the avatar limit at Hurliman Plaza should be raised. But then again, maybe one of the next lessons would be just how many avatars on one sim OSgrid can handle.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OSgrid

@Jonathan And that's the issue. It has to work with languages ...

2026-08-23T15:46:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…n5ge
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@Jonathan And that's the issue. It has to work with languages switching not only mid-text, but mid-sentence, like so (taken from a very old image description of mine):
The column between the passageways in the background to the left carries a black sign with group joiners for the Metropolis Newsnet group. The sign has the octagonal red Metropolis logo with a white M in the middle and a white edge around it in the top left corner. To the right of the logo, it is labelled in white, "Metropolis Newsnet Gruppe" which is partly German and translates to "Metropolis Newsnet Group". The writing below reads, "Aktuelle Informationen um Metropolis" and "Ankündigungen, Infos, Events, Fragen und Antworten im Chat" which is mostly German and translates to "Announcements, infos, events, questions and answers in the chat". The small neon green writing at the bottom edge reads, "Klick hier und folge dem Link im allgemeinen Chat, um der Gruppe beizutreten. Im Gruppenfenster JOIN klicken.(Click here to join the Metropolis Newsnet group." The German part of this translates to, "Click here and follow the link in the general chat to join the group. In the group window, click JOIN." Right below the black sign are three clickable white panels with black writings on them, "deutsch", "français" and "english".

Granted, I wouldn't put something this long into the alt-text. But I can't exclude someone being in a situation in which a text transcript that'll go into the alt-text causes the language to switch mid-sentence.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #ForeignLanguage #Transcript #Transcripts

@Jakob Rosin Come to think of it, ideally, I'd provide ...

2026-08-23T07:56:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…rfkj
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@Jakob Rosin Come to think of it, ideally, I'd provide individual image descriptions with text transcripts in all languages that appear in the image myself.

This way, if I have a sign in French, English and German, I can add a verbatim transcript of the French text to the French description, a verbatim transcript of the English text to the English description and a verbatim transcript of the German text to the German description.

If I only provided an English description, and if I only gave translations of the French and German parts of the sign, neither French nor German readers would have a verbatim transcript of anything in the sign. French readers, for example, would get a French machine translation of my English translation of the French text instead of getting the French text itself as a verbatim transcript.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Transcript #Transcripts #ForeignLanguage

@Jakob Rosin To be honest, what I had in mind wasn't ...

2026-08-23T07:51:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…myf7
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@Jakob Rosin To be honest, what I had in mind wasn't screenshots of text although describing screenshots of foreign-language text can be tricky itself.

Here are some snippets from my first long image description. It's outdated in a way, but it provides good examples. And this image description did go into the message text (with an additional, shorter description in the alt-text).

On the ramp to the teleporter, there is a black sign that reads, "Wenn Durchgehen nicht klappt, Klicken Sie das Bild zum Teleportieren. When Walk-Through does not work, Click the Image to teleport."

The column between the passageways in the background to the left carries a black sign with group joiners for the Metropolis Newsnet group. The sign has the octagonal red Metropolis logo with a white M in the middle and a white edge around it in the top left corner. To the right of the logo, it is labelled in white, "Metropolis Newsnet Gruppe" which is partly German and translates to "Metropolis Newsnet Group". The writing below reads, "Aktuelle Informationen um Metropolis" and "Ankündigungen, Infos, Events, Fragen und Antworten im Chat" which is mostly German and translates to "Announcements, infos, events, questions and answers in the chat". The small neon green writing at the bottom edge reads, "Klick hier und folge dem Link im allgemeinen Chat, um der Gruppe beizutreten. Im Gruppenfenster JOIN klicken.(Click here to join the Metropolis Newsnet group." The German part of this translates to, "Click here and follow the link in the general chat to join the group. In the group window, click JOIN." Right below the black sign are three clickable white panels with black writings on them, "deutsch", "français" and "english".
To my best knowledge, there's no way a screen reader can switch from English to German, to English, to German, to English within one sentence. Or from English to German, to French, back to English, again, within one sentence.

Or how about these two sentences from another, even longer image description?
At the bottom of this area, "Patefacio radix" is written in medium dark grey letters, in a wide sans-serif typeface and in what is likely to be small caps. It is Latin for "open source".
The screen reader would have to switch from English to Latin, back to English, mid-sentence, not to mention that the screen reader would have to know how to properly pronounce a dead language.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Transcript #Transcripts #ForeignLanguage

I'm pretty sure that posting this will turn out completely ...

2026-08-23T07:24:44Z

I'm pretty sure that posting this will turn out completely futile. But I'll try anyway.

I'm especially asking the Mastodon alt-text enforcers: How must foreign-language text be transcribed, both by Web accessibility standards and by Mastodon's alt-text standards?

Let's assume I have some text in an image that's in a different language than the post and therefore in a different language than the image description. But I still have to transcribe it.

Now, according to image-describing rules, text must always be transcribed 100% verbatim. Word by word, character by character, exactly identical to the original in the image.

Here's the catch: Screen reader software may not be able to reliably switch the language in which they read out text in the middle of a description. They definitely cannot switch the language in the middle of an alt-text, I know that, just like they cannot navigate within alt-text.

This means that if I describe an image in English, but there's French text somewhere, a screen reader may read it out as gobbledygook instead of proper French. It may read the French text like it's English.

But even if the screen reader did read out the French text in proper French, someone who doesn't understand French won't understand the text.

This leaves me with two options:

Transcribe the foreign-language text verbatim, add a translation afterwards.
This would make the foreign-language text understandable, but it would also produce gobbledygook.Give a translated transcript of the foreign-language text that's as close to the original as possible.
No gobbledygook, but I'd break the rule of always transcribing text verbatim.
The latter option would produce weird results if applied to a sign with essentially the same text in French, English and German where the French and German texts translate into something that slightly differs from both each other and the English text. I've happened upon this before.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Transcript #Transcripts #ScreenReader #ScreenReaders #ForeignLanguage #Inclusion #A11y #Accessibility

I've just discovered a certain Mastodon account that seems to ...

2026-08-19T20:58:24Z

I've just discovered a certain Mastodon account that seems to automatically post images of Second Life avatars. It can be lucky to only have eight followers, one of them being a search engine, the others being Second Life users.

If it had more follower, it would certainly already have met the wrath of the wider Mastodon community, especially the Mastodon HOA, for breaking Mastodon's unwritten rules.

And I'm not even talking about nigh-nudity in some of the images with no warning, no image flagging, no hashtag. I'm talking about the alt-texts that are vastly below Mastodon's requirements and quality standards for alt-texts.

Granted, all things considered, the requirements for good image descriptions by Mastodon's standards have to be extremely hard and tedious to meet, at least by my personal estimations. In fact, they have to be impossible to meet on Mastodon itself due to its tiny character limit, and if this account was somewhere where it could meet these requirements, it'd probably be blocked by loads of Mastodon accounts for its excessively long posts due to the long image descriptions.

But if more Mastodon users knew it right now, it'd probably be blocked by many more Mastodon accounts than follow it.

If you post from virtual worlds into the Fediverse, you simply cannot win in the long run. You'll lose either way.

#SecondLife #Metaverse #VirtualWorld #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Mastodon #MastodonHOA #MastodonCulture

@Jakub Urbanowicz So I guess this change should be proposed to ...

2026-08-13T08:06:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…0k0r
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@Jakub Urbanowicz So I guess this change should be proposed to (streams) and Forte.

As I've said, the *keys fail rather ungracefully as they're caught off-guard.

#FediMeta #FediMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Sharkey

I've noticed that Hubzilla 11.4 handles mentions and hashtags ...

2026-08-12T16:53:27Z

I've noticed that Hubzilla 11.4 handles mentions and hashtags (closer to) the Twitter way instead of the Identi.ca way now. The @ and the # became part of the link (@Jupiter's Fedi-Memes on (streams), #Hashtag, for example).

I wouldn't cry out "pandering to Mastodon" now. I don't think this happened in the same vein as Forte giving the choice between starting an enclosed conversation and starting a microblogging-style loose thread. After all, it's vanilla Mastodon out of all microblogging applications that handles the old Identi.ca way quite gracefully. And even what didn't work as intended didn't cause a big mess instead either.

Other Fediverse applications are way less prepared for this. From the Mastodon fork Glitch to all the *keys and, I think, the *omas, not only can't they handle the Identi.ca way, but they tend to fail rather ungracefully because they don't even expect anything else than the Twitter way. Especially on Misskey, this has been recognised as a bug in 2024 already, and nothing much has happened in terms of fixing it. Of course, all the Forkeys have inherited the bug, and I think none of them has fixed it instead of waiting for upstream Misskey to fix it. I'm not even sure if Iceshrimp.NET, a complete rewrite in C#, hasn't re-implemented it.

I mean, if lots of Fediverse server applications render Hubzilla's old "#Hashtag" (with the number sign outside the link, the Identi.ca way) as its Markdown representation, "#[Hashtag](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Hashtag)", and people keep complaining, then someone has to step in and put an end to this mess. And lots of fingers were pointing at Hubzilla. While tens of thousands of Mastodon accounts blocked Hubzilla channels for their long posts, hundreds of *key accounts blocked Hubzilla channels for how completely messed up their hashtags came out.

Also, unless I'm completely wrong, the first Fediverse server application that handled mentions and hashtags the Twitter way rather than the Identi.ca way wasn't Mastodon either; it was GNU social, itself a fork of StatusNet, the software that used to power Identi.ca before its switch to pump.io.

So this wasn't a case of Hubzilla acting up on Mastodon. It was a case of Hubzilla acting up across at least half the Fediverse, Mastodon actually largely excluded.

That is, it may still worry you that Hubzilla whose foundation was laid in May, 2012, based on Friendica which is another two years older, adapted to software which came later instead of playing the "we were here first" card. A whole lot of software which came later and which was largely created independently from Mastodon (although both Mastodon and Pleroma started their lives as something akin to alternative frontends for GNU social), but still.

By the way, don't Friendica, (streams) and Forte still cause the same issue? Especially Forte that has actually started pandering to Mastodon as of late?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #GlitchSoc #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Hubzilla11 #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Mention #Mentions #MentionTag

@Cătă 🇷🇴🇺🇦🇲🇩🇪🇺 Strictly speaking, yes, ...

2026-08-10T21:20:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…lau0
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@Cătă 🇷🇴🇺🇦🇲🇩🇪🇺 Strictly speaking, yes, but for the stucco rather than for the roof.

@Chao-c' BTW I had account on identi.ca, which was StatusNet ...

2026-08-02T14:50:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…enmy
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@Chao-c' BTW I had account on identi.ca, which was StatusNet powered (I believe).
It was. At least until Evan and Erin could no longer justify it running on that janky OStatus protocol. The result was the ActivityPump protocol, the pump.io software and Identi.ca's switch to pump.io with all hands on board.

Yes, and it should not be implemented in Ruby or PHP or something like that. I have seen one online discussion forum being rewritten from PHP to Rust few years ago, and the improvement in responsiveness of the web platform was amazing. (I do C, not Rust, but C is too oldschool now, and the performance penalty of Rust is minor, probably not noticeable at all)
This reminds me of how the Fediverse is all over the place in terms of programming languages. Everyone has their own Holy Grail.

Friendica and its descendants are written in PHP. They may not be the fastest (even though what bogged down early Friendica were its heavyweight federation connectors to everywhere, especially the one for Facebook that came in 2011). Mike either discarded or rewrote these when he rewrote Red. But they happily run on a run-of-the-mill LAMP stack.

Mastodon is written in Ruby on Rails. Hubzilla runs circles around it in terms of performance per account/channel, and that has to say something. The only thing that managed to top this was early diaspora*, written in Ruby on Rails for Mac with MongoDB as the database system.

The *omas are built in Elixir. Granted, they're utter featherweights, especially considering their features. They're legendary for their low server impact. Then again, Pleroma apparently is spaghetti code straight from hell. Its own devs often don't have a clue where to go look for bugs, much less how to fix them. (Miraculously, the Akkoma devs do manage to get ride of quite a number of them.)

The *keys are built in TypeScript and Vue.js. I guess one reason why Misskey is infamous for having so many forks and forks of forks is because there are tons of people who can code in JavaScript, the primary mobile programming language.

Iceshrimp.NET is a still very incomplete "rewrite" of old Iceshrimp in C#. It was largely tackled to get rid of all those nasty bugs inherited from Misskey that even Misskey doesn't manage to get rid of. I've heard quite some outcry: Iceshrimp.NET is a sell-out to Microsoft. I guess whoever uttered that didn't go check who owns TypeScript.

PieFed is a dead giveaway: Python. And PieFed makes more headlines in the Threadiverse for server politics than for its underlying technology, except that Lemmy pales in comparison.

GoToSocial is a dead giveaway, too: Go. And it was one of the first Fediverse server applications to not come with a Web UI. Those who use it for a single-user server often don't even bother installing one and use some Mastodon app or other instead. Besides, why drag around a Web UI if there are much better third-party Web UIs than whatever you could whip up?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Iceshrimp #IceshrimpJS #Iceshrimp.NET #PieFed #GoToSocial #PHP #RubyOnRails #Elixir #JavaScript #TypeScript #VueJS #C# #Python #Go

@Chao-c' The wiki reveals even different timeline: "The ...

2026-08-02T13:55:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…04zt
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@Chao-c' The wiki reveals even different timeline:
"The wiki" sounds funny to someone who has three wikis of his own on his Hubzilla channel. Anyway...

To me, it seems, that Gargon simply was not as colossal nerd, as others, and somehow managed to create cult following of sufficient number of users, which were not really techies.
Gargron simply was lucky.

I think it was in 2016 already that German tech media got interested in decentralised alternatives to corporate silos. Mastodon caught their interest, being developed in Germany and all. Pleroma didn't, in spite of being developed in Germany, too, not to mention more feature-rich than Mastodon. Friendica was developed in Germany back then already, too, but it seemed like either tech media weren't interested in alternatives to something that needed alternatives much more than Twitter, or Friendica managed to continue to fly under the radar even then.

Anyway, Mastodon got media coverage, and nothing else did.

In 2017, right-wingers started attacking furries and queers on Twitter. They had to escape somewhere. Tumblr wasn't it, having been pretty much killed by being bought out and G-rated. But someone happened to know Mastodon due to the media coverage whereas nobody happened to know Pleroma due to no media coverage at all. So those furries and queers escaped to Mastodon. "Awoo" was briefly part of Mastodon's culture in the late 2010s due to the high furry-to-non-furry rate.

From then on, Mastodon had the two advantages of past media coverage and more users. The rest was like a snowball, essentially. The more users something has, the more users something gains by inviting them.

I guess Friendica and Hubzilla, both of which already existed back then, suffered from the same choice of mindsets: "If you build it, they will come," "We'll first need to get this and that fixed before we're ready for prime time," "Can't someone else take care of that? I'm bad at advertising stuff!" Plus, of course, people who really were bad at advertising stuff to anyone who's neither a developer nor a server admin.

I was thinking about need for decentralized social media since at least 2009, as I was watching the old web to slowly loose any relevance. (My Facebook account was canceled without any explanations as soon as perhaps sometimes like 2010?).
In 2009, there already was StatusNet. Granted, it was so obscure that vastly more people knew the "lighthouse server" Identi.ca than StatusNet itself. StatusNet supported the Twitter client API, but there were vastly more mobile apps that were hard-coded to Identi.ca than such where you could choose a StatusNet server because the huge majority of those who knew Identi.ca didn't even know it was part of a network. Identi.ca held some 90% of all StatusNet users.

By the way, what killed StatusNet was when Identi.ca changed its backend from StatusNet to pump.io and its protocol from OStatus to ActivityPump, thus becoming incompatible with the rest of StatusNet. What remained was largely unable to stand alone. What kind of helped Identi.ca (OStatus as a profile sucked so badly that Evan and Erin themselves had to whip up ActivityPump) did the opposite to StatusNet. A bit later, the FSF scooped it up, forked it to GNU social and eventually merged what was left of StatusNet into GNU social. It got ActivityPub support later on, but it's gone now, too.

Also, in 2010, Mistpark was around, and so was diaspora* (or what already existed of it at that time). diaspora* had tons of advance publicity due to its crowdfunding stunt, but then the four devs didn't manage to deliver before public interest had faded away, even with Mike's help on the protocol (not even kidding here). And speaking of Mike, he built Mistpark, but almost nobody came because he did nothing in terms of advertising. Even though Mistpark of May, 2010 was more powerful than diaspora* is today. Even though Mistpark took two months for a public alpha and four for a stable point release whereas it took diaspora* years to go beyond alpha, not to mention the entire development team being replaced.

I guess you would have been a prime Friendica user candidate. Particularly, you would have been one of those who were happy on a Friendica node without the performance-hogging Facebook connector in times when everyone was seeking out and piling onto the nodes with that connector, just to see them close registration at not even 150 accounts.

I was thinking about basing it on bunch of combined RSS feeds, the publicly compatible vs. the activity stream, which is not so different from from like ActivityPub is made today, except that signing of content with public keys is more advanced concept, that what I was able to imagine.
Well, they say that ActivityPub is glorified RSS with a rubbery spec.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Pleroma #StatusNet #Identi.ca #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #OStatus #ActivityPump #ActivityPub

@Chao-c' Also, ALT text translates with the rest of the post, ...

2026-08-02T09:43:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…my30
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@Chao-c' Also, ALT text translates with the rest of the post, which can be helpful for images which contain only foreign language text.

Hubzilla is the most incompatible ActivityPub software in Fediverse. You do just lot of things wrong, to put it mildly.
You still seem to think that Gargron invented ActivityPub and the Fediverse, that Mastodon is the one and only reference implementation of ActivityPub, and that everything that doesn't work exactly like Mastodon is broken.

Here are the facts:

Mastodon was launched in January, 2016.

Hubzilla was launched in March, 2015. Counting an earlier incarnation named Red, it was created in May, 2012, when Friendica's creator re-wrote his own fork of a Friendica fork of his own.

Mastodon implemented ActivityPub in September, 2017, when the spec wasn't finalised yet.

Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub in July, 2017. Two months before Mastodon. Hubzilla was the first software to ever implement ActivityPub.

Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub strictly by the book. It has always tried to stick as close to the official W3C ActivityPub spec as possible.

Mastodon, in stark contrast, has always been stretching the ActivityPub spec until it broke. Not only that, but it has always been adding stuff outside the spec. First it did so to take over certain features from StatusNet which was its original protocol. More recently, it did so with the very intention to break compatibility with the rest of the Fediverse and make everything that isn't Mastodon look broken. And people like you keep falling for it because they think they know for a fact that Mastodon is the ActivityPub reference implementation.

The whole Fediverse has to break the ActivityPub spec just to be able to federate with Mastodon.

yes, the Hubzilla author is writing Streams, with nomadic identity, but it also means, that he understands, that Hubzilla approach is kind of dead-end.
You know nothing. Whereas I can rattle down the whole history from Mistpark in 2010 to today.

Mike Macgirvin, creator of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte created his post-Hubzilla server applications because he kept advancing the Zot protocol. And he couldn't implement these advancements into Hubzilla because they bore the chance of breaking compatibility with what already existed.

(streams) is not a completely new development, nor is it a straight Hubzilla fork.

(streams) is a 2022 fork of Roadhouse.
Which was a 2022 fork of either the third Osada or Mistpark 2020 or Redmatrix 2020.
Which were 2020 forks of Zap (or each other, but at least one of them was forked from Zap).
Which was a 2018 fork of either Hubzilla itself or the first Osada, which was a 2018 fork of Hubzilla.

Osada and Zap were created to develop Zot6. In its early stages of concept, Mike expected Zot6 to be incompatible with everything else. Mind you, he didn't see that as something bad. Advancing Zot was necessary because the then-current version of Zot was less than optimal. And Mike's vision was a decentralised, nomadic network named the "Grid", entirely based on Zot. The Grid would have been vastly superior to the existing Fediverse in every way possible.

So the issue with his early draft of Zot6 was that it was quite incompatible with non-nomadic protocols. Nomadic Zot6 content could not be translated into non-nomadic protocols like the diaspora* protocol or ActivityPub.

Thus, developing Zot6 on Hubzilla was out of question. Zot6 would have broken too much on Hubzilla. Besides, Hubzilla was bad as a platform to experiment on due to its wealth of supported protocols and other features, all of which would have had to be made compatible with Zot6.

And this is the real reason why Mike created Osada and Zap. From how I see it, and how I remember what he talked about back in the day (I was there, yes), he first forked Osada from Hubzilla. Then he ripped everything out that he didn't need, including support for all protocols except for Zot itself, ActivityPub, RSS and Atom, including the CMS stuff like articles, planning cards, notes, wikis and webpages, etc. Then he modified what was left against his early version of Zot6.

Then he discovered that a cloned Osada channel couldn't properly send content via ActivityPub.

Then, shortly afterwards, he forked Osada into Zap. He removed nomadic identity from Osada which kept ActivityPub and ActivityPub support from Zap which stayed nomadic.

The idea was to have a nomadic, cloned channel on Zap as your main channel that would only connect to Hubzilla, Osada and Zap, and to have an additional, non-nomadic channel on Osada that would serve as a "gateway" between nomadic Zap and the non-nomadic ActivityPub Fediverse.

Of course, this was highly impractical. But by 2019, Mike found a way to make Zot6 compatible with non-nomadic protocols. So, in early 2019, Mike discontinued Osada and forked a new Osada from Zap which only differred from Zap by having ActivityPub support while still being nomadic. This enabled Mike to have one development platform for Zot6 in conjunction with non-nomadic protocols and another one on which ActivityPub did not stand in the way.

Later in 2019, both Osada and Zap got stable releases. At that point, Osada and Zap were identical in code. Both had ActivityPub support. It was included into their cores now and no longer an add-on like on Hubzilla. They only had two differences. One was the branding. The other one was that Osada servers had ActivityPub activated by default, and Zap servers had ActivityPub disabled by default. Keeping Osada around was unnecessary now, so ActivityPub was activated by default on Zap, and Osada was discontinued. Zot6 was so stable that it was soon backported to Hubzilla.

Mike wasn't done yet, though. He now wanted to develop Zot8. Again, he did not want to develop protocol changes on stable production software that people potentially daily-drove.

Thus, three new forks emerged in 2020: another Osada, Mistpark 2020 (a.k.a. Misty) and Redmatrix 2020 (named after the Red Matrix, the name that Hubzilla bore from late 2012 to early 2015 between being created as Red and being re-branded into Hubzilla). Mike used them to develop Zot8. They were identical in all but brand identity.

This was fully intentional on Mike's part to confuse the hell out of the brand fetishists that were growing more and more numerous in the Fediverse. His goal was for people to declare Osada or Misty or Redmatrix the best Fediverse software and superior to everything else, just for him to tell them that Osada, Misty and Redmatrix are absolutely identical. In fact, the three remained identical to Zap in features.

Zot8 never got stable because Mike kept advancing it further and further. In early 2022, he was at Zot11. But Zot11 was so incompatible with everything else, including previous Zot versions, that Mike declared it a new protocol of its own and renamed it Nomad. In order to test-drive it, he forked Osada or Misty or Redmatrix into Roadhouse. After all, there were people who were daring enough to daily-drive production channels on Osada, Misty and Redmatrix, albeit only few. Roadhouse was still identical in features to Zap, Osada, Misty and Redmatrix.

It was now possible to crossgrade between Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse by simply rebasing the server code.

Later in 2022, he created a new fork of Roadhouse itself. The reason for this was not further protocol advancement. No, this time, it mostly had branding and licensing reasons.

First of all, he wanted to make that fork as easy for others to fork and adopt as possible. Everything he had developed so far was under the MIT license (he himself had relicensed Friendica under the AGPLv3 in 2011, but he didn't actually develop on Friendica; he developed on a fork named Free-Friendika that was still MIT-licensed and then backported the changes to the Friendica repository, and Red was a Free-Friendika fork). This new repository was released into the public domain. At first, the whole thing was never primarily intended to be installed on servers as it was, but rather to be forked as the base of something new.

At least the core and Mike's own add-ons were. What third-party add-ons from Hubzilla times were still there got to keep their maze of licenses. This was intentional on Mike's part, too. It would make it impossible for commercial players to scoop up the whole thing and relicense it into something non-free and commercial without breaking any licenses, or without pumping tons of money into their legal department to work around that maze of licenses.

Also, Mike removed any and all naming and branding from the software. He absolutely intentionally made it nameless. You've read that right. He did this for two reasons. One, whoever wanted to fork it would have to give the fork an individual name and an individual branding. Two, this was to mess with brand fanbois and brand fetishists even more: This thing had no brand to gush over to begin with.

Furthermore, Mike removed all nodeinfo code that he could possibly get away with removing. Again, this was intentional. One intention was to stop this software from automatically joining the "my Fediverse project is bigger than yours" and "my server is bigger than yours" rat races. He intentionally did everything he could to keep this software away from The Federation, Fediverse Observer, FediDB and the like.

The other intention was for the case of commercial players looking for free code to steal. If this software had really taken off and left its stats proving its popularity everywhere, some big commercial player would have been likely to try and steal this software, make it commercial and non-free and release it as their own original creation. So his intention was for them to not even be able to find it in this case. (This, by the way, was the reason why he relicensed Friendica under the AGPLv3, and why he hardly ever spoke about Free-Friendika: Now that Friendica was growing popular, he didn't want big commercial players to scoop up code of his under a license that they could change to non-free.)

This server application became the first and only one in the Fediverse with no fixed server type identifier, in fact, with none at all by default. It has one text field for the server name, just like Mastodon and Friendica and Hubzilla and the like. But it has an additional field where the server type, i.e. the identifier for the software, can be entered. If none is entered, it's derived from the server name. Mike used to have a server that identified as "Y" because, as he said, "Y is not X."

While the application itself is nameless (for it still is), the code repository did require a name of sorts. Mike named the repository "streams".

Now, the community needed something to call that nameless software when they spoke about it. So they unofficially established "(streams)", complete with parentheses that make sure that this is not actually the name of this software. Those who say, "Streams," with a capital S and no parentheses, and who use that term as if it's an official name, usually sincerely believe that this is the official name.

Mike himself uses "streams" without the parentheses because even he needs something to call his own software by. Before Forte was made, he preferred talking about the streams repository without directly mentioning the software. And he himself denied that (streams) is even a project. It's just a bunch of code that runs.

As far as I know, it was now possible to freely crossgrade between six different server applications because they were still identical in features. Only that Mike also had six server applications to take care of now.

So on December 31st, 2022, Mike discontinued Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse. Admins who ran either of these on their servers were recommended to rebase their servers to the streams repository. In this case, by the way, the old branding was kept. I've seen a server that still had "zap" as its subdomain which indicated that it was set up as a Zap server, that had Misty branding, but that actually ran (streams).

From then on, Mike dedicated his time to maintaining and developing only the streams repository. He still occasionally helped Hubzilla out, though.

In 2023, the Mitra creator and developer silverpill approached Mike. The goal was to make Mitra nomadic. I guess earlier attempts using a blockchain and crypto technology didn't come to fruition, so it had to be Mike's way which had proven itself stable for more than a decade. However, Mitra was to remain based on ActivityPub.

It was in this exchange that Mike realised that ActivityPub could indeed be used for nomadic identity if a few things were added to it. One outcome was FEP-ef61 "Portable Objects" which introduced decentralised IDs (DIDs) that would not be bound to any one server domain.

Instead of creating a whole new server application to play with, Mike simply made a "nomadic" branch in the streams repository (even though the software was already nomadic) in which he implemented support for nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Support as in (streams) understanding it while internally still using Nomad for nomadicity.

In June, 2024, Mike considered the "nomadic" branch reliable enough and merged it into the "dev" branch.

In July, 2024, Mike merged the "dev" branch into the "release" branch which caused DIDs as per FEP-ef61 to be rolled out to existing production servers. On accounts created on this new version, channels would have a DID internally. On accounts greated on any previous version, even new channels would keep the old ID system for the time being. This way, existing accounts and channels weren't messed with.

However, what had worked under supervised and restricted lab conditions completely blew up under real-life conditions. Again, I was there on (streams) with a pre-DID account and two channels on it. I still have them. (streams) channels wouldn't federate with anything anymore. It had become impossible to send anything anywhere. What Mike was facing was nothing short of an enigma because not even he knew what was going in.

So he started tinkering. In mid-August, Mike forked the streams repository into something named and branded Forte. He did so so he could rip the Nomad protocol out while still keeping the entire functionality. He had to get rid of Nomad because he had discovered that (streams) got confused juggling all the many IDs it had to deal with, so he had to weed out the Nomad and Zot6 IDs to make things easier. But he couldn't possibly have done that on (streams) proper.

This way, Mike created the very first Fediverse server software that uses ActivityPub for full nomadicity, including cloning.

By the end of August, things got back to normal. But Mike, having spent every free minute in the last few weeks to get (streams) back into working condition, was burned out. He sent an open message around in which he declared that he would completely retire from Fediverse development, and both the streams repository and Forte were up for grabs.

But nobody was found who could take over either. (streams) and Forte probably had way fewer than 100 users combined. Those few who would have been able to maintain either didn't have time. One did have time and was willing to do so, but he didn't know how to code. He eventually did start teaching himself, and he occasionally contributes merge requests, but there was no way he could take over as the only dev for either, much less both. So Mike had to go on, whether he wanted or not, albeit at a somewhat slower pace.

This is why Mike is still developing (streams) and Forte to this day.

By the way: The reason why Mike "abandoned" his old software was because he needed to invest all his time into protocol development and advancement. Mike isn't the one to constantly maintain stable server software unless he absolutely has to.

In 2011, he handed Friendica over to two new developers so that he had time to create the Zot protocol.

In 2015 already, he handed Hubzilla over to two new developers so that he had time to explore the advancement of the Zot protocol. He still contributed to Hubzilla's development.

In 2019, he wanted to hand Osada and Zap over to the community, now that they were stable, so he had time to develop Zot8. But the Osada/Zap community was so tiny that he couldn't get a new dedicated developer team together.

In 2024, he wanted to hand (streams) and Forte over to the community because fixing (streams)' huge identity bug, which led to Forte's creation, had burnt him out. He wanted to quit. But, again, he couldn't because (streams) didn't have a single user who had both the time and the knowledge to take over as the new main dev.

Consider this: Gargron was a young man when he made Mastodon. I think he was still at university. Mike Macgirvin made Friendica, he had some three decades of professional work in IT and software under his belly. Gargron was at the beginning of his career. Mike had quit and moved from the USA to the western Australian outback where he has been living as a farmer ever since. He might actually be older than Gargron's parents.

while nomadic identitity would be cool thing, currently it does not exist
Take off your Mastodon glasses and look at the Fediverse and what it actually is like.

Nomadic identity does exist. Not as a vague idea, not as a concept on paper, but as a stable, production-grade feature that has been used to its full extent for well over a decade now. Just because Mastodon doesn't have it, doesn't mean the Fediverse doesn't have it. And just because Mastodon doesn't recognise it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The Fediverse has loads of features which Mastodon users want "the Fediverse" to have. It has features which many Mastodon users have never wanted "the Fediverse" to have such as quote-posts, introduced by Mike Macgirvin on Mistpark in 2010. It even has features that are completely and utterly unimaginable for Mastodon users, and it has had even these since as early as 2010, 2012 or 2015.

Nomadic identity was invented by Mike Macgirvin in 2011 with the Zot protocol.

It was first implemented by him in mid-2012 when he rewrote Red against Zot. This means that Hubzilla itself has been offering full-blown nomadic identity since 2012, almost four years longer than Mastodon has existed.

This very Hubzilla channel that I'm commenting from right here, right now, is actually nomadic. It is cloned across two servers: hub.netzgemeinde.eu and hub.hubzilla.de. And it has been since before Elon Musk announced to take over Twitter in early 2022. When I sent you this comment, it was automatically sync'd over to hub.hubzilla.de. When you sent the comment that I'm replying to, it was automatically sync'd over to hub.hubzilla.de. The clone has actually been of great help at least once.

Unfortunately, non-nomadic software identifies cloned channels as fully separate accounts with fully separate identities. But rest assured: @Jupiter Rowland on hub.hubzilla.de is my clone. It's the live, hot, real-time, bidirectional backup of the main instance of my channel, @Jupiter Rowland on hub.netzgemeinde.eu that you're following now. They're both one and the same channel with one and the same identity, jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu, even though Mastodon is unable to see it as such. Go check both. You'll see they've got all the same content in them, including comments from others. Including your comment. How else can jupiter_rowland@hub.hubzilla.de possibly have one of your comments under a post if you've only sent that comment to jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu if it weren't for nomadic identity?

Even nomadic identity via ActivityPub is available as a stable, production-grade feature in stable, production-grade software right now as we speak. Forte was the first to be fully nomadic via nothing but ActivityPub, as of mid-August, 2024. Tootik, based on Gemini instead of the World Wide Web, is fully nomadic at server level, too. Mitra is fully nomadic by means of the Minimitra client.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #ActivityPub #Zot #Zot6 #Zot8 #Nomad #Friendica #Red #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Mistpark #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Redmatrix2020 #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Tootik #Mitra #Minimitra #NomadicIdentity

@Mitch Conner @silverpill Exactly this exists on Hubzilla, ...

2026-07-31T23:01:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…mn4q
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@Mitch Conner @silverpill Exactly this exists on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. With even more options, actually. Hubzilla calls them "privacy groups", (streams) and Forte call them "access lists".

Now it comes: You can not only post to one specific such group/list. You can also post to several ones. Or to any combination of privacy groups/access lists and single contacts.

Better yet: You can even exclude single contacts or the members of certain privacy groups/access lists. You can post to the members of privacy groups Foo and Bar, except if they're also in privacy group Baz, and except for Alice, and in addition, you can post to Bob and Carol.

In addition, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte don't just define who receives the post. They don't simply flag it a DM either. They flag it "restricted" and only grant the recipients permission to read the post, read any comments and interact with anything in the conversation. In practice, this also means that those who have these permissions can not only interact with the original poster, but just as well with each other, because it isn't a DM.

Anything that doesn't understand these permissions, e.g. Mastodon, do understand it as a DM. This limits their possibilities to interact, but it's the safe way.

And yet, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte still have private and/or secret groups with moderation (like Facebook groups) on top of all this. (streams) and Forte even optionally have two levels of non-moderator users.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #PrivateGroups #Permissions #PrivacyGroups #AccessLists

@william ⁂ maggos @silverpill Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are ...

2026-07-31T22:50:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…pdks
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@william ⁂ maggos @silverpill Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are much closer to Facebook-style social networking than to Twitter-style social media. In fact, they're descendants of Friendica, the first decentralised dedicated Facebook alternative. (Let's set aside that Hubzilla is usually referred to as something like a "social CMS" for a moment.)

They have multiple ways of rendering groups private, all of which go beyond Mastodon's way of making something private by limiting the receiving actors.

For starters, private groups only grant their own members permission to receive any content from the group. Also, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group stream. Furthermore, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group channel profile and its contacts. On Hubzilla, these are all separate options.

On top of all this, they can hide groups from directories. That way, these groups can be made known only by hearsay and/or personal contact to interested users. This doesn't necessarily make them private; it makes them secret.

All these options are available for normal, non-group-actor channels as well, by the way.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #PrivateGroups

@elle @silverpill Out of curiosity, what about pure PHP ...

2026-07-30T07:51:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…a63t
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@elle @silverpill Out of curiosity, what about pure PHP applications that only use a wee bit of JavaScript for the UI?

@Truth & Answers I've just come across a toot from a ...

2026-07-25T13:46:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…2fzt
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@Truth & Answers I've just come across a toot from a Mastodon user who demanded that everyone who posts, quote, "on Mastodon," end quote, limit their posts to 500 characters.

This was far from being the first time I've read this very demand or similar demands. It just was the most recent time.

Where this comes from? Well, it has two sides.

The Mastodon side
One side are Mastodon users. Not all of them, but most of them. Literally all of them were on-boarded onto Mastodon with the notion that Mastodon is its own enclosed network with nothing else in it. Those who pull them on board either think it's easier for them to understand if they aren't told about the non-Mastodon Fediverse, or they don't know about the non-Mastodon Fediverse themselves.

Some of these newbies think Mastodon is the network because they've never heard of the Fediverse. Others think the Fediverse is Mastodon and nothing else.

My estimation, and not only mine, is that more than 50% of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse consists of nothing else than Mastodon. A great deal of the rest thinks the Fediverse doesn't extend beyond Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube. Not much anyway.

It doesn't help that Mastodon, unlike other Fediverse server applications such as Misskey, the Forkeys, Friendica, (streams) or Forte, does not tell its users which server app a message came from. It doesn't help either that Mastodon "sanitises" away quite a few things that'd make non-Mastodon messages a dead giveaway. So the huge majority of Mastodon users believe that if they see it on Mastodon, it came from Mastodon.

So these people are dropped into a network which they think is nothing but a purist, minimalist microblogging service with no more than 500 characters, and whose only differences from Twitter are the name, that it isn't just one website, that it isn't owned by Elon Musk, and that it isn't overrun by fascists.

They get used to it. They get used to only having a maximum of 500 characters. They get used to the CW field being the CW field. They get used to Mastodon's entire culture which they see as the be-all, end-all of online culture.

And then they come across a message with a whole lot over 500 characters for the first time. Something which, to their best knowledge, shouldn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse. Something which mustn't exist in the Mastodon Fediverse.

Some don't have any idea how it could be possible to "toot" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon", and they ask how one can do that. Others believe that all these "long toots" come from hacked Mastodon servers. Either way, they often demand that these Mastodon users adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and act like all good Mastodon users shall act. Including not "tooting" more than 500 characters "on Mastodon".

Both are being told that these "toots" aren't "toots" because they don't come from Mastodon. That the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon. That there's other server software in the Fediverse that has always been able to post way more than 500 characters.

That changes nothing for them. They still demand everyone in the Fediverse adhere to Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules and only to these, and that everyone in the Fediverse use whatever they use exactly like vanilla, unmodified Mastodon.

And they feel absolutely justified. According to their gospel, Gargron invented the Fediverse when he created Mastodon. And everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon (once they discover that there is such stuff) has either been designed as an add-on glued onto Mastodon (Pixelfed, PeerTube), or it's an evil, savage intruder (everything that's capable of largely doing the same thing as Mastodon without being Mastodon).

The Fediverse is to Mastodon users what the ancient world was to the Romans. Mastodon is the Roman Empire. Literally the only place that has got something like culture. A few places have voluntarily joined the Roman Mastodon Empire. All the rest consists of primitive, savage, culture-less barbarians whose lands need to be conquered by force to bring them culture.

The non-Mastodon side
The other side are the non-Mastodon users. This sounds harsh, but while Mastodon users act by faith and belief, non-Mastodon users act by knowledge. It's them who know what the Fediverse really is. That there has never been a point in history at which the Fediverse has only been Mastodon. And that culture does exist outside of Mastodon. Only that these cultures are different from Mastodon's culture, largely because they're geared towards the technical capabilities of the underlying software.

To non-Mastodon users, the Fediverse feels like the New World when the European conquerors and settlers arrived. They demanded the natives adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianty or face death. The natives actually already had cultures. Cultures that suited them and their surroundings much more than the culture lived in European cities. But the Europeans didn't acknowledge the natives' cultures as such, nor did they care.

From non-Mastodon users' point of view, Mastodon users act to them like the Europeans acted to the natives in their colonies-to-be.

A very good example, also because it's such an extreme example, has to be Friendica. In case you don't know, Friendica (https://friendi.ca; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica; https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica) is a free, open-source, decentralised, federated Facebook alternative that first came out as early as May, 2010. Friendica developed a wholly different culture from Mastodon's because it's vastly different from Mastodon.

Mastodon's culture was mostly coined in mid-2022 by those who escaped from Elon Musk's announcement to buy out Twitter in February/March, 2022.
Friendica's culture was coined by its early users in 2010 already.

Mastodon users are mostly used to living in a Mastodon-only network with no connection to anything that isn't Mastodon. They believe that Mastodon and the Fediverse were designed as such, and that Friendica is an illegitimate intruder.
Friendica users are used to being able to connect to everything that moves, including Mastodon, including the whole Fediverse, no matter which iteration of the Fediverse, including diaspora*, and the some. That's because Friendica was designed from the ground up to be able to connect to a whole lot of stuff. It's part of its concept.

Mastodon users believe that Mastodon was there before anything.
Friendica users know that Friendica was there long before Mastodon, even before diaspora*, and that Friendica still wasn't the first.

Mastodon users are used to only having 500 characters. They still consider that a lot in comparison with Twitter's 280 characters.
Friendica users are used to not having any character limit whatsoever. Friendica's actual technical character limit is imposed by the maximum size of the message text database field, and that's over 16.7 million characters.

Mastodon users are used to chopping long posts into threads. It's what they expect. Actual long posts irritate them.
Friendica users are used to posting long post in one piece. It's what they expect. One and the same post being chopped up into itty-bitty bits irritate them.

Mastodon users are used to putting CWs in a dedicated CW field.
Friendica users are used to the self-same text field actually being a summary field (Friendica calls it "abstract"). While Mastodon got that field in 2017 as a pull request from a user, Friendica had it from the get-go, i.e. since 2010. And Friendica actually adopted it from Evan Prodromou's decentralised Twitter alternative StatusNet from 2008 with which Friendica was able to federate with from the get-go as well.

Mastodon users "know" that Gargron invented the CW field.
Friendica users actually do know for a fact that they've had the same field as a summary field since long before Mastodon was even made. There are still enough Friendica veterans around from before 2016.

This also means that Mastodon users are used to poster-side CWs which all readers get just the same.
Friendica users are used to CWs being automatically generated on the reader's side, individually for each reader, by an optional text filter.
In fact, Mastodon can do the same. But nobody knows, it came way too late to become part of Mastodon's culture (Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022), it's too tedious to use, it probably isn't supported by that many phone apps, and next to nobody uses Mastodon's Web interface. In the meantime, Friendica has had this feature for some twelve years longer, and it's only an on-off switch and one editable keyword list.

Mastodon users are used to only having up to four images and to images always only being file attachments dangling below a post.
Friendica users are used to being able to embed a virtually unlimited number of images to a post. And to actually embed them, as in, with text above the image and text below the image and another image below that text and more text below that image. Theoretically, they could insert tiny images into lines of text. By the way, Mastodon refuses to display embedded images. It also rejects any file attachments beyond the first four. And up to version 4.0 from October, 2022, it didn't support any kind of text formatting and "sanitised" all message texts down to plain text.

This also means that Mastodon users are used to only having plain text or mucking around with Unicode characters for bold type and italics.
Friendica users are used to being able to not only see, but also post all sorts of text formatting that HTML is capable of.

Mastodon users are often deadly afraid of quote-posts because they only know quote-posts as a means of harassment and dogpiling on Twitter.
Friendica users, their entire culture being entirely unfazed by whatever has ever happened on Twitter, are absolutely used to always having had quote-posts at hand and to using quote-posts as a means of forwarding content. They had what Mastodon calls "quotes" years before they had what Mastodon calls "boosts" (and what many Mastodon users refer to as "retoots").

Mastodon users are used to conversations being loosely tied together from toots and to having to visibly mention all those whom they want to receive a reply.
Friendica users are used to having enclosed threaded conversations with only one post and otherwise only comments. They're also used to everyone in the conversation, i.e. everyone who has received the original post, automatically receiving every single last comment. They're used to always seeing the entire thread immediately as opposed to single-message piecemeal.

Mastodon users are used to shouting into the void with hashtags attached if they want to talk about a certain topic. It's the only way for them to do so.
Friendica users are used to having groups. Oh, and full-text search.

The conflict
It should be obvious that these two types have a very high chance of not getting along, especially if the Mastodon user is fairly new and not used to there being stuff in the Fediverse that's nothing like Mastodon.

Mastodon users keep demanding that everyone else in the Fediverse live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules and only by these.

Mastodon users who have joined in 2026 keep ordering Friendica veterans who have joined in the early 2010s (before there was any Mastodon) to act like they're on Mastodon.

They demand these Friendica veterans fully adopt Mastodon's culture (which isn't even geared towards Friendica's set of features).

They indirectly demand these Friendica veterans give up their own culture (because they cannot comprehend that there can be any other culture in the Fediverse than Mastodon's, as in, that what Friendica has is a culture, even though it's different from Mastodon's).

They directly demand these Friendica veterans give up some 40% of the features they've been using for a decade and a half and indirectly demand they give up another 40% of these features.

They demand these Friendica veterans stop posting more than 500 characters at once.

They demand these Friendica veterans put CWs into their abstract field. (Again, they think that Gargron has invented this field from scratch as a CW field,)

They demand these Friendica veterans use their abstract field only for CWs.

They demand these Friendica veterans stop "spamming" hashtags that clearly aren't there for content discovery. (They cannot comprehend that these hashtags are there to trigger automatic reader-side CWs because the entire concept is completely alien to them.)

And so forth.

These Friendica veterans have been in the Fediverse for about a decade and a half. And suddently, these Mastodon newbies appear and tell them how to use Friendica.

Of course, these Mastodon newbies don't know a thing about Friendica. They think the Friendica veterans are Mastodon users, and they're telling them how to use Mastodon.

So the Friendica users tell them, no, they aren't on Mastodon. They're on Friendica which has got absolutely nothing to do with Mastodon.

Then the Mastodon newbies will believe that someone has created this weird Friendica thing after Mastodon was made (it can't possibly be any other way, right?9 and illegally hacked this Friendica thing into the Mastodon Fediverse. And whoever made Friendica omitted to make Friendica just like Mastodon.

Okay, now the Friendica users tell them that Friendica was launched in 2010, how long before Mastodon that was, and that they themselves have been around for much longer than Mastodon, too.

Now, either the Mastodon newbies will fail to comprehend that there can be anything in the Fediverse made before Mastodon if Gargron has invented the very technology. Or they think that the Fediverse was still created with Mastodon, and that Friendica still illegally intruded into the Mastodon Fediverse.

Either way, the Friendica veterans will have to adapt and act entirely by Mastodon's standards. This is the Mastodon Fediverse, Mastodon is the biggest software (if only by monthly active users, by the way), Mastodon has defined "the Fediverse culture", and thus it's the Mastodon users and only the Mastodon users who get to say how people have to act and behave in the Fediverse.

And then the Mastodon users wonder how there's so much Mastodon hatred on Friendica (and there actually is). How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users trying to force them to use Friendica like Mastodon. How Friendica users complain about Mastodon users chopping long posts into small bits. As if they had a choice. How Friendica users complain about CWs in whatever that abstract field is supposed to be. And so forth.

How dare the Friendica users complain? The Mastodon users are the good guys! It's them and only them who have a culture, who have rules, who know how to use the Fediverse!

By the way: It gets even worse between Mastodon and Lemmy.

Mastodon's culture is an idealised version of pre-Musk Twitter's culture with bits of Tumblr's SFW culture mixed in. That's because just about everyone on Mastodon originally came from Twitter, and most of them escaped from Elon Musk. They want Mastodon (and the Fediverse) be a better Twitter. It helps that Mastodon is still trying hard to be a Twitter clone.

Lemmy's culture, on the other hand, is a carbon copy of Reddit's culture. Lemmy is a Reddit clone that shares next to no features at all with Mastodon except for ActivityPub support. Next to all Lemmy users are former Redditors who left Reddit when Reddit started charging $20,000,000 for its client API, effectively killing off all third-party Reddit apps. They saw no reason in changing their culture because it wasn't the culture that drove them away. Hardly any of them were on Twitter, and almost none of them have ever been on Mastodon. Many think the Fediverse is Lemmy. Of the rest, many think the Fediverse is Lemmy with a side of PieFed.

Mastodon lives on hashtags even more than Twitter. Lemmy has zero support for hashtags because Reddit doesn't have any either, and neither does Hacker News.

Mastodon requires mentions to get replies to their recipients. One visible mention per recipient. Lemmy doesn't need mentions for this at all. Mentions on Lemmy only serve to, well, mention someone. Just like on Reddit.

And so forth.

It's actually easy to spot threads on Lemmy that were started by Mastodon users: The title is in the post text, or there's no title at all because the Mastodon users did as they always do: mention in the first line, then a new line because that looks prettier. Of course, there's a mention in the post text. And there's a bunch of hashtags strewn across the post text even though they don't even work. If you're very lucky, the hashtags are at the bottom, but most Mastodon users don't waste any of their 500 characters on that.

I hope you get a rough idea how much headbutting there is between Mastodon users who think that the Mastodon users rule supreme over the whole Fediverse and Lemmy community owners who do rule over the Lemmy communities which these Mastodon users have just posted into.

Countermeasures
Both sides are actually taking countermeasures. The non-Mastodon side is more effective at it, though.

On Mastodon's side, there are very few single users who block every single non-Mastodon server they come across.

Countermeasures on the non-Mastodon side vary. They start with single users who block each Mastodon user who doesn't behave like they want them to behave, e.g. they block everyone who chops a long post into a thread at first trike.

Then there's Hubzilla, reworked from a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator. Hubzilla has always been based on its own protocol, Zot6 (Friendica's creator calls it an older version of Nomad). ActivityPub support is optional, on by default on new servers and off by default on new channels. The current devs won't change anything about that. Not only doesn't Hubzilla's technology allow for moving it to ActivityPub as its base protocol, but ActivityPub being optional is seen as a last-resort "drawbridge" for those to whom Mastodon has become unbearable.

Nowadays, Friendica's creator is working on two other applications in the same family. (streams) is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, and Forte is a fork of (streams). Both have an admin-side user agent filter. It can block entire Fediverse applications without having to hassle around with a URL list. It was mainly created and advertised as a means to permanently lock Threads out, even if Threads should change URLs. But it's also being advertised as being capable of blocking all of Mastodon, all present and future servers. Mastodon being intentially made barely compatible with the rest of the Fediverse is only one reason for this.

(streams) and Forte also have another admin-side filter which, when turned on, locks everything out that doesn't support enclosed threaded conversations. That's because server applications like Mastodon mess with the way that (streams), Forte and their ancestors handle conversations. Granted, when this is activated only to get rid of Mastodon, it causes quite a bit of collateral damage.

Generally, (streams) and Forte are very similar. The main difference is that Forte is entirely based on ActivityPub whereas (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad with ActivityPub still being optional. The reason why (streams) is kept around is for there to still be one of these applications with the same protocol-level "drawbridge" as Hubzilla. And in fact, the most important (streams) group used to have ActivityPub off with the intention to keep Mastodon out.

I guess there are still Mastodon users who absolutely defend and support Mastodon's way being forced upon the non-Mastodon Fediverse, and who are irritated or upset about non-Mastodon users being very defensive of their own non-Mastodon ways and refusing to adopt Mastodon's (allegedly much superior) culture instead of embracing it.

And I guess there are Mastodon users who feel absolutely entitled to get to every last Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte user unhindered and force them to use Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte exactly like Mastodon in every way possible.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lemmy #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

Yeah, I get it. Mastodon and its users rule supreme over the ...

2026-07-25T08:53:54Z

Yeah, I get it.

Mastodon and its users rule supreme over the Fediverse. After all, the Fediverse was invented by Gargron. It started when Mastodon started, and everything that isn't Mastodon just latched onto Mastodon and its Fediverse.

Mastodon users are the only civilised users in the Fediverse, the only ones with something like a culture. The Fediverse culture is Mastodon's culture as defined in the spring of 2022. All those who don't live by Mastodon's culture are uncivilised, uneducated, savage barbarians. And it isn't just the Mastodon users' right and privilege to educate them and shape them into good Mastodon users, it's their duty.

Even when it turns out that these barbarians aren't even on Mastodon, that they're on something that's very much not Mastodon, they can't possibly have a culture of their own. After all, they don't live by Mastodon's culture, and if it isn't Mastodon's culture, it isn't culture at all. Not even if it predates Mastodon's current culture by over a decade like Friendica's culture does.

Of course, this also means that when non-Mastodon users come and give Mastodon users unsolicited "advice" or recommend them to use Mastodon in a certain way that goes against Mastodon's culture, the Mastodon users are fully justified to silence them by any means available.

What this means:
When a Mastodon user uses "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" mutually synonymously, it's the right thing to do because that's part of Mastodon's culture. And it makes things easier to understand.

When a non-Mastodon user explains that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, and that "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" do not mean the same, it's evil and intrusive and deeply disturbing.

When a Mastodon user refers to any message in the Fediverse as a "toot", it's the right thing to do because that's part of Mastodon's culture.

When a Misskey or Forkey user talks about "notes", it's irritating. When a Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte user distinguishes between "posts" and "comments", it has even less of a place in the Mastodon Fediverse.

Features that only Mastodon has are actually mandatory for the whole Fediverse. Any Fediverse server software that hasn't got these features implemented in exactly the same way as Mastodon is broken.

Features in non-Mastodon Fediverse server software that Mastodon doesn't have are wrong and evil and not allowed to be used.

Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to limit their posts to no more than 500 characters. It especially disturbs those who refuse to move away from the official Mastodon phone app.

Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to tell Mastodon users to not cut their long posts into threads.

Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to put content warnings into their summary/abstract field.

Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to only use their summary/abstract field for content warnings. After all, that's what Gargron invented that field for.

Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to tell non-Mastodon users that it was Evan Prodromou who invented that field as early as 2008. That he invented it as a summary field. That it was actually a Mastodon user who repurposed that field for CWs in 2017, the year after Mastodon was launched. Gargron only let it pass.

Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to use that field for anything else than CWs.

Non-Mastodon users are not allowed to add hashtags instead of CWs so that reader-side CWs can automatically be generated by filters. Even though Mastodon itself has literally introduced this very feature with version 4.0 in October, 2022.

Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to tell non-Mastodon users to not only write alt-texts for all the images they post, but to write them nicely long and detailed. After all, they've got 1,500 characters for alt-texts.

Misskey and Forkey users are not allowed to tell Mastodon users to limit their alt-texts to no more than 512 characters because that's the maximum that Misskey and the Forkeys accept, and on top of that, due to a bug, they delete all alt-texts longer than that. From a Misskey/Forkey point of view, writing long alt-texts is like not writing any alt-texts at all. But the Misskey/Forkey point of view is invalid in Mastodon's culture.

Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to toot to Lemmy any way they want, and that's the Mastodon way. If it doesn't work properly on Lemmy, then Lemmy is broken.

Lemmy users, even Lemmy moderators, and other users of Fediverse software that supports groups are not allowed to tell Mastodon users how to post to Lemmy in a way that Lemmy understands.

Mastodon users are allowed, justified and expected to even tell Lemmy users to limit their "toots" to no more than 500 characters and use hashtags, but not too many of them.

Lemmy users and even Lemmy moderators are not allowed to tell Mastodon users to stop spamming Lemmy with mentions and with hashtags that don't work on Lemmy anyway, also because both highly irritate the Lemmy users. Almost all of them came straight from Reddit after their third-party apps were killed, and almost none of them have ever been on Twitter or Mastodon.

Mastodon users and Mastodon admins are allowed and justified to block any and all non-Mastodon servers because they misbehave by Mastodon's standards.

(streams) and Forte admins are not allowed to block the entirety of Mastodon, all present and future servers, by user agent (which, by the way, they're totally capable of) because it misbehaves by their standards. Mastodon doesn't misbehave, and the Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte standards are all wrong if they differ from Mastodon's standards.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #Sharkey #CherryPick #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lemmy #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ Das versteht nicht zufällig auch ...

2026-07-16T05:01:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…mdwc
_________________________

@Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ Das versteht nicht zufällig auch Reports von Mastodon, oder?

Bisher glauben Mastodon-Nutzer nämlich, die Admins von Hubzilla-Hubs sind entweder gleichgültig oder zu faul, um sich um solche Meldungen zu kümmern. Sie wissen nicht, daß sie es nicht mit Mastodon-Admins zu tun haben, und noch weniger, daß Mastodon-Reports auf Hubzilla nicht ankommen.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla

@silverpill @Mario Vavti infosec.exchange doesn't appear to ...

2026-07-05T06:51:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…huuw
_________________________

@silverpill @Mario Vavti infosec.exchange doesn't appear to list any Hubzilla hubs as blocked.

That is, I hope that the visible blocklist on Mastodon servers is always in sync with the actual blocklist and not maintained separately, i.e. that shadow-blocking servers isn't possible.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta

@Roland Häder So how do they think it can be enforced ...

2026-06-19T18:22:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…620g
_________________________

@Roland Häder
So how do they think it can be enforced everywhere?
Just like they try to enforce anything everywhere.

They'll simply tell you to do it.They'll lecture you about it.They'll call you out if you don't do it.Once they've caught you not doing it repeatedly, they'll insult you as ableist.They'll block you. Before they block you, they'll announce in public that they'll block you because you're an ableist swine who refuses to add alt-text to his images, and they'll mention you so that you can see it.
If you're only here to get and stay in contact with a select few people, none of whom are on Mastodon, you might not care.
But if you need a certain amount of reach especially on Mastodon, this is bad.
I've seen all the above actually happen.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@eshep I've not yet seen any posts, attacking or otherwise, ...

2026-06-19T18:05:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…527a
_________________________

@eshep I've not yet seen any posts, attacking or otherwise, taking this stance
Not yet.

Right now, this feature is only available in a development version of Mastodon and only on mastodon.social. Next will be the daredevil servers that run development code to be ahead of release in features.

But eventually, a new stable release will be rolled out with this feature. More and more servers will be upgraded to this new version with this feature. Once typical activist servers like beige.party introduce it, my prediction will come true.

I have family who have varying levels of blindness who consume media from all over the internet. All of them have been quite thrilled about the state of these new robot assistants we all now have such easy access to.

Specifically assigned "alt-text" is never necessary.
People who aren't sighted are usually happy about image-describing AI because it's better than nothing, and without image-describing AI, they've got literally nothing.

In fact, however, image-describing AI is just barely better than nothing, if at all. It describes stuff that doesn't matter. It doesn't describe stuff that does matter. Most importantly, it's unreliable and inaccurate. It hallucinates and describes stuff wrongly. However, people who aren't sufficiently sighted don't know. They can't verify whether what the AI says is true because they can't see the image well enough to be able to compare it with the description.

100% hand-written alt-text is always more reliable, more accurate and more fit for the context than AI-generated alt-text will ever be.

I know from first-hand experience. I've tasked an image-describing AI with describing an image which I've described manually with no AI help first, and then I've analysed the AI description and compared it with both the actual image and my descriptions. I've even done that twice. The results were abysmal.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon

So there's a new attack vector for Mastodon users against ...

2026-06-19T08:38:57Z

So there's a new attack vector for Mastodon users against non-Mastodon users in the making.

Mastodon is rolling out alt-texts for what we on Hubzilla call the profile photo and the cover photo. It won't be long until it becomes mandatory in Mastodon's culture to have alt-texts for both these pictures. Regardless of how new this feature is and how many other features that were introduced between March, 2022 and now have not made it into Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules, by the way.

At this point, Mastodon's alt-text activists will start attacking anyone and everyone whom they catch without alt-texts for these two pictures. At least they'll lecture them about the importance of alt-texts. Or they'll block them outright.

What they won't realise:

Not everyone in the Fediverse is on Mastodon. Just because you see something on your Mastodon Web UI or in your Mastodon app, doesn't mean it's on or from Mastodon itself.In fact, that particular user might not be on Mastodon.Just because Mastodon rolls out a new feature, doesn't mean everything in the Fediverse rolls out the same feature at the same time. This means that there's a whole lot of Fediverse server software that does not offer alt-texts for profile pictures, and that probably won't offer them for quite a while or ever.Also, Mastodon's culture is not and will never be the culture of the whole Fediverse. Sorry, Mastodon fundamentalists, but some software has been here before Mastodon, its culture is older than Mastodon itself, and it's technologically incompatible with Mastodon's unwritten rules.
Here on Hubzilla, where I'm posting from right now (in case you really thought I'm on Mastodon just like you), there is no such thing as a dedicated field for alt-texts anywhere. Even if you want to post pictures, there is no alt-text entry mask, and there is no alt-text database field for the images.

Instead, both images and alt-texts are handled like on a blog: You embed the image somewhere in the post text using markup code. In a sense, you program the image into the post. And if you want the image to have alt-text, you have to program the alt-text into the image-embedding code. If you're afraid of coding, Hubzilla is not for you.

But if there's no entry mask and no database field for alt-texts in posts, there won't be either for the profile images either. That is, unless Hubzilla adopts the alt-text field from (streams) and Forte where alt-texts can be added to uploaded images in the Photo app so that they're automatically inserted whenever you embed an image in a message. Using that alt-text field for profile images should be trivial then.

If you want or need the images in my profile described: I don't have a description for my profile photo. For my cover photo, I actually have two. They're both in this post: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/display/c796febd-8ce2-472b-a46b-23fdf6b16f18. One is in the alt-text which you probably can't open when you're on a phone; the alt-text is 1,500 characters long, a bit over 1,400 of which are visual description. The other one is in the post text itself. But you'd better have a lot of time at your hand because it's over 60,000 characters long, and it'll probably take you a few hours to read it.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #MastodonCulture #FediverseCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@silverpill @elvecio I've updated the page. There was even ...

2026-06-15T20:39:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…4846
_________________________

@silverpill @elvecio I've updated the page. There was even more on it that was outdated.

@DopeGhoti @Andrew How many characters would be sufficient for ...

2026-05-18T22:11:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…5wwz
_________________________

@DopeGhoti @Andrew How many characters would be sufficient for Mastodon to not count as ableist anymore?

If you say, 1,500, who or what says that 1,500 characters are sufficient to describe any and all images, but a lower limit is not?

For comparison, look at my cover photo. The one with the weird building. I have a post with just about the same image in it; here's the link.

In this post, the image has two separate image descriptions. One is in the alt-text. The alt-text is exactly 1,500 characters long, a bit over 1,400 of which are image description. And that's the short description. It doesn't even have room for any text transcripts. It actually isn't much more than an "alibi description". It's only there because many people on Mastodon demand there be a 100% accurate and sufficiently detailed image description in the alt-text of each image in the Fediverse.

Only that "sufficiently detailed" isn't always possible even in 1,500 characters.

That's why there is an additional long description in the post text. It's sufficiently detailed, as in, fully detailed. An image like this requires a fully detailed description. It comes with transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image, and it comes with all explanations necessary to understand the image and the description. It's over 60,000 characters long.

Yes, over 60,000 characters in one post. Your character limit is 500. Mine is over 16 million.

Oh, and yes, it's guaranteed to be 100% hand-written. It took me two full days, morning to evening, to research for and write the long description with literally absolutely no help from any AI whatsoever. In fact, I've described details that no AI on the planet will ever be able to see in the image.

So ideally, all Fediverse server platforms should have two image description fields for each profile image, one being the alt-text behind the image, one being a long description next to the image. The latter should not have an arbitrarily-chosen character limit.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@PepeCyBs Welt Das hat alles gleich mehrere Gründe. Zunächst ...

2026-05-18T21:15:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…zjgv
_________________________

@PepeCyBs Welt Das hat alles gleich mehrere Gründe.

Zunächst einmal wollen diese Institutionen eigentlich "nur" von 𝕏 weg. Sie brauchen "nur" einen Twitter-Ersatz. Da nehmen sie dann den nächstbesten, nächstgrößten. Auch deshalb gehen viele nach Bluesky: Das ist inzwischen bekannter, das hat mehr Nutzer, das verspricht mehr Reichweite. Ins Fediverse kommen sie höchstens, wenn sie dann einen Twitter-Ersatz-Ersatz brauchen.

Dann ist das Fediverse jenseits von Mastodon viel zu unbekannt. Selbst auf Mastodon glaubt eine Mehrheit, das Fediverse wäre ein reines Mastodon-Netzwerk. Vom Rest wissen viele höchstens noch von Pixelfed und PeerTube und glauben, das wären so etwas wie Instagram- bzw. YouTube-Add-ons für Mastodon.

Außerhalb von Mastodon ist aus dem Fediverse überhaupt nur Mastodon bekannt. Jeder Fediverse-Neuling wird direkt nach Mastodon geholt und erfährt vorher kein bißchen darüber, daß das Fediverse noch mehr bietet als Mastodon. Leute wie @pade kämpfen mit regelrechtem Feuereifer dafür, daß Leute, die noch nicht im Fediverse sind, "der Einfachheit halber" nur von Mastodon erfahren und ihnen gegenüber das Fediverse mit Mastodon gleichgesetzt wird.

Wer dann doch von anderen Fediverse-Serveranwendungen erfährt, begreift damit häufig noch nicht, daß die auch alle miteinander und auch mit Mastodon verbunden sind. Das habe ich ja Anfang letzten Jahres erlebt, als es einen kleinen Facebook-Exodus gab und Leute, die schon auf Mastodon waren, sich zusätzlich ein Friendica-Konto zulegten, um mit denjenigen ihrer Freunde in Verbindung zu bleiben, die von Facebook nach Friendica umzogen. Es war für sie völlig unvorstellbar, daß Mastodon und Friendica miteinander verbunden sind. Als sie dann davon erfuhren, in einem gewagten Experiment versuchten, mit ihrem Mastodon-Konto ihrem Friendica-Konto zu folgen, und das dann wider Erwarten sogar funktionierte, fielen sie komplett vom Glauben ab.

Letztlich sind Organisationen, Institutionen und andere Gruppierungen sehr viel schwerfälliger als einzelne Privatpersonen. Es ist für sie schon ein riesiges organisatorisches Unterfangen, überhaupt nach Mastodon zu gehen und dort ein Konto zu bespielen. Bis sie auch nur von der Existenz und den Möglichkeiten von Friendica oder Hubzilla erfahren, vergeht sehr, sehr viel mehr Zeit als bei privaten Mastodon-Nutzern, von denen viele ja auch noch nie von Friendica und fast gar keine von Hubzilla gehört haben.

Somit zieht auch nicht das Argument, daß sie "erstmal" nach Mastodon gehen und "dann später mal" sich was anderes angucken. Das wird nie passieren. Dafür sind sie zu träge und die Entscheidungswege zu lang.

Es gibt übrigens genau eine politische Partei, die im Fediverse ist, aber nicht (nur) auf Mastodon. Und das ist die deutsche Piratenpartei. Die hatte schon ihren eigenen Friendica-Node, als es Mastodon noch gar nicht gab, und hat ihn heute noch. Und natürlich gibt es kaum Piraten, die den nutzen, weil auch die Netzaffinität der allermeisten Piraten nicht über "Fediverse = Mastodon" hinausgeht.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NichtNurMastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla

@yigru_zeltil My suggestion would be to use your Hubzilla channel ...

2026-05-18T20:48:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…gnfs
_________________________

@yigru_zeltil My suggestion would be to use your Hubzilla channel to join the @Hubzilla Support Forum and ask there.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla

(Ausnahmsweise auch mal auf Deutsch. Die englische Version ist ...

2026-05-17T16:03:51Z

(Ausnahmsweise auch mal auf Deutsch. Die englische Version ist hier.)

Bildbeschreibungen sind wichtig im Fediverse, zumindest wenn eure Posts möglicherweise auf Mastodon landen werden. Aber geht es nur um Bildbeschreibungen ganz allgemein? Geht es nur darum, überhaupt Bildbeschreibungen zu haben? Oder geht es auch um die Qualität der Bildbeschreibungen?

Blinde oder sehbehinderte Nutzer sagen, daß alles besser ist als nichts. Aber seien wir mal ehrlich, der Dateiname der Bilddatei als Alt-Text ist nutzlos. Eine Kopie des Post-Texts im Alt-Text auch; mindestens eine Handy-App für Mastodon macht das scheinbar automatisch. Irgendwelcher Kauderwelsch, der in den Alt-Text reingeschrieben wird, damit da irgendein Alt-Text steht, ist auch nutzlos.

Also schreibt ihr eine kurze Bildbeschreibung für euren Alt-Text. Das sollte viel besser sein als nichts.

Und dann werdet ihr kritisiert und sanktioniert, weil eure Bildbeschreibung nicht detailliert genug ist.

Weil ihr eine längere Bildbeschreibung nicht schreiben könnt oder wollt, überlaßt ihr das einer KI.

Und dann werdet ihr kritisiert und sanktioniert, weil eure Bildbeschreibung offensichtlicher KI-Slop ist. Die KI ist ungenau, sie halluziniert, sie identifizert Sachen falsch, und sie läßt immer noch Details aus.

Okay, also setzt ihr euch hin und steckt einen Haufen Zeit und Aufwand in eine handgeschriebene Bildbeschreibung, die gleichermaßen akkurat und detailliert ist. Zumindest glaubt ihr das.

Und es könnte immer noch jemand kommen und euch kritisieren und/oder sanktionieren, weil ihr bestimmte Details ausgelassen habt.

Wenn ihr eure Bildbeschreibung nicht zu deren Zufriedenheit in Ordnung bringt, dann werdet ihr als ableistisch beschimpft und blockiert mit öffentlichem Trara, damit möglichst viele andere Nutzer euch auch blockieren mögen.

Nun entwickeln sich die Mindestanforderungen für Bildbeschreibungen über die Jahre immer weiter. Was heute wichtig ist, war vor zwei Jahren nicht unbedingt wichtig. Was heute unwichtig ist, kann in zwei oder fünf Jahren durchaus auf einmal wichtig sein. Heute schon kritisieren Alt-Text-Aktivisten Bildposts, die schon etliche Jahre alt sind, aufgrund von deren Bildbeschreibungen, die sie als suboptimal ansehen. Das bedeutet, daß die Bildbeschreibungen, die ihr heute schreibt, noch so lange gut genug bleiben müssen, wie eure Bilderposts verfügbar bleiben. Falls nicht, viel Spaß dabei, durch alle eure alten Bilderposts zu gehen, sie alle zu editieren und bei allen die Bildbeschreibungen an die aktuellen Mindestanforderungen anzupassen.

Es gibt nur eine Möglichkeit, langfristig vor Mastodons Alt-Text-Polizei sicher zu sein: Als allererstes müßt ihr euch aufschlauen über die vielen Regeln und Richtlinien für Alt-Texte und Bildbeschreibungen, und darüber gibt's dutzendweise englischsprachige Websites. Man kann unmöglich im voraus wissen, welche dieser Regeln von irgendjemandem bei der Alt-Text-Polizei irgendwann in der Zukunft für zwingend erforderlich erklärt werden, also solltet ihr sie jetzt schon bis aufs i-Tüpfelchen einhalten. Wenn zwei davon sich gegenseitig widersprechen, müßt ihr natürlich wissen, welche davon ihr einzuhalten habt.

Ihr müßt auch wissen, daß die Anforderungen und Qualitätsstandards für gute Alt-Texte und Bildbeschreibungen auf Mastodon ganz andere sind als im ganzen Rest des Web. Was fürs Web gut genug ist, ist nicht zwingend auch gut genug für Mastodon.

Zu guter Letzt müßt ihr euer Publikum kennen. Und normalerweise kann jeder irgendwo im Fediverse oder sogar im Web euer Publikum sein. Es gibt nur ganz wenige Orte im Fediverse, wo ihr steuern könnt, wer in der Lage sein wird, euer Zeugs zu lesen, und Mastodon gehört nicht dazu. Ihr müßt euer Publikum kennen, und ihr müßt zumindest einschätzen können, was euer Publikum über den Inhalt eures Bildes weiß, was es nicht weiß und was es wissen muß. Wenn euer Publikum nicht zwingend weiß, was etwas ist, erklärt es, aber bitte im Post-Text und nicht im Alt-Text! Wenn euer Publikum nicht zwingend weiß, wie etwas aussieht, das aber vielleicht wissen will, dann beschreibt es.

Bei meinen eigenen Bildern ist meine Strategie, für jedes Bild zwei Beschreibungen zu schreiben. Die eine ist die kurze Bildbeschreibung; die kommt in den Alt-Text. Die werde ich in Zukunft auf maximal 512 Zeichen beschränken, weil Misskey und seine Forks Alt-Texte, die länger als 512 Zeichen sind, löschen. Die andere ist die lange Bildbeschreibung; die kommt in den Post-Text. Die lange Bildbeschreibung ist volldetailliert, sie enthält alle Erklärungen, die zum Verständnis des Bildes und seiner Beschreibungen nötig sind, und sie enthält Transkripte von jedem einzelnen Stück Text, das es irgendwo innerhalb der Grenzen des Bildes gibt, egal, ob auf dem Bild lesbar oder nicht.

Memes zu posten, ist ein Stück weit einfacher. Es gibt nur eine Bildbeschreibung, die hoffentlich kurz genug für den Alt-Text ist. Aber trotzdem habe ich einen ganzen Haufen Sachen zu erklären, und weil ich mich nicht immer auf Links wie nach KnowYourMeme verlassen kann, muß ich oft selbst eine ganze Menge Erklärungen in den Post schreiben.

Idealerweise ist das Schlimmste, was mir passieren kann, daß ich dafür kritisiert werde, daß mein Alt-Text die 200-Zeichen-Marke oder mein Post die 500-Zeichen-Marke überschreitet, oder daß ich für das Letztere blockiert werde. Das Risiko, daß das passiert, reduziere ich mit einer Zusammenfassung, die eine Langer-Post-Inhaltswarnung mit der ungefähren Länge des Post enthält, und den Hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong, #CWLongPost, #LangerPost und #CWLangerPost, die dann gefiltert werden können.

Aber ich hoffe, daß keiner sagen kann, ich hätte mich nicht genug angestrengt.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Zeichenlimit #Zeichenlimits #ZeichenlimitMeta #CWZeichenlimitMeta #500Zeichen #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BildbeschreibungenMeta #CWBildbeschreibungenMeta

Image descriptions are important in the Fediverse, at least if ...

2026-05-17T16:02:27Z

Image descriptions are important in the Fediverse, at least if your posts have a chance to reach Mastodon. But is it only about having image descriptions in general? Is it only about having image descriptions at all? Or is it about image description quality as well?

Blind or visually-impaired users say that anything is better than nothing. But seriously, the image file name as the alt-text is useless. So is a copy of the post text as the alt-text; at least one mobile app for Mastodon seems to do that automatically. So is some gibberish written into the alt-text, just so that there's some alt-text.

So you write a short image description for your alt-text. That should be much better than nothing.

But then you're criticised and sanctioned because your image description lacks detail.

Since you can't or don't want to write a longer description, you leave that to an AI.

But then you're criticised and sanctioned because your image description is obvious AI slop. The AI is inaccurate, it hallucinates, it misidentifies things and it still leaves out details.

Okay, so you sit down and put quite some time and effort into a hand-written image description that's both accurate and detailed. At least you think so.

And still, someone may come and criticise and/or sanction you for having left out certain details.

If you don't fix your image description to their satisfaction, you're insulted as ableist and blocked very publicly so that as many other users as possible block you, too.

Now, minimum quality standards for image descriptions are evolving over time. What matters now didn't necessarily matter two years ago. Things that don't matter now may matter in two years or in five years. Even today, alt-text activists criticise image posts that are several years old for image descriptions that they consider less than optimal. This means the image descriptions that you write today must be good enough for as long as your image posts stay available. If they aren't, have fun going through all your old image posts, editing them and upgrading the image descriptions to the latest minimum requirements.

There's only way to be safe from Mastodon's alt-text police in the long run: First of all, you must educate yourself about all the rules and guidelines of alt-texts and image descriptions, and there are dozens of websites about these. You can't know beforehand which ones of these rules will be declared mandatory by someone from the alt-text police in the future, so you'd better follow them to a tee already now. Of course, when two rules contradict each other, you must know which one to follow.

Also, you must know that the requirements and quality standards for good alt-texts and image descriptions on Mastodon are different from the entire rest of the Web. What's good enough for the Web isn't necessarily good enough for Mastodon.

Lastly, you must know your audience. And normally, your audience can be anyone anywhere in the Fediverse or even on the Web. There are only very few places in the Fediverse where you can control who will be able to read your stuff, and Mastodon isn't one of them. You must know your audience, and you must at least be able to estimate what they know about the contents of your image, what they don't know and what they need to know. If your audience doesn't necessarily know what something is, explain it, but please do so in the post text and not in the alt-text! If your audience doesn't necessarily know what something looks like, but it may want to know, describe what it looks like.

As for my own images, my strategy is to write two image descriptions for each image. One is the short image description; it goes into the alt-text. I'm going to limit that to a maximum of 512 characters because Misskey and its forks delete alt-texts that are over 512 characters long. The other one is the long image description; it goes into the post text. The long image description is fully detailed, it contains all explanations necessary to understand the image and its descriptions, and it contains transcripts of every last bit of text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable in the image or not.

Posting memes is a bit easier. There is only one image description that's hopefully short enough to go into the alt-text. But I still need to explain a whole lot of things, and as I can't always rely upon links to websites like KnowYourMeme for explanations, I often have to write a whole lot of explanations into the post.

Ideally, the worst that could happen to me is being criticised for my alt-text exceeding 200 characters or my post exceeding 500 characters or being blocked for the latter. I reduce the chance for that to happen with a summary that includes a long post content warning with the rough length of the post and the hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost that can be filtered. I almost always add hashtags for folks to filter.

But I hope that nobody can say I haven't tried hard enough.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

Eye contact is not limited to full facial portraits of people ...

2026-05-15T19:17:11Z

Eye contact is not limited to full facial portraits of people looking directly into the camera.

Eye contact is not even limited to looking directly into the camera at all.

Eye contact is whenever there is at least one eye anywhere in the image. No matter where it is. No matter how small the eye and how big the image is.

Ask autistic people, and they'll likely confirm. And they'll also likely confirm that it triggers them.

In fact, eye contact is even when you, as a neurotypical person, cannot even see the eye because it's less then a pixel.

Imagine an image of 20 megapixels. Now imagine there's a person somewhere in the image, only four pixels high and about one pixel wide. This means the head is half a pixel high and a third of a pixel wide.

Even if the person is looking directly at the camera, this still means that each individual eye is 1/15 of a pixel wide and maybe 1/30 of a pixel high. That's 1/450 or a bit over 0.2% of a pixel. That's about 1/9,000,000,000 or a bit over 0.000,000,01% of the whole image. If the person is looking directly at the camera.

Nonetheless, this may trigger some autistic people even if the person is not even looking into the general direction of the camera.

It doesn't even have to be a person. It may just as well be an animal or a fantasy creature or a robot or a sculpture or a stylised face or even only a single stylised eye.

I've actually had all this confirmed by @Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta 사요한🦣 who knows enough actually diagnosed autistic people to know.

So it doesn't matter how big or infinitely small the eye is. It doesn't matter where it's looking. If there's at least one eye in your image, it counts as eye contact.

If you, as the user who posts the image, know for certain that there is at least one eye in the image, you're obliged to

have the image automatically blanked or blurredmake sure that Mastodon will blank the image, tooadd the content warning "CW: eye contact" to your postadd the hashtags #EyeContact and #CWEyeContact to your post, especially the former which some people out there may have filtered
You're only excused not to do so if you yourself honestly don't know that there is at least one eye in the image.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #EyeContactMeta #CWEyeContactMeta #Autism #Autistic #Neurodivergent #Neurodivergence #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility

@craftxbox No, it's about more than every other Mastodon user ...

2026-05-10T08:50:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…taez
_________________________

@craftxbox No, it's about more than every other Mastodon user thinking that the Fediverse equals Mastodon.

Most of the rest still think (or they think they know):

The Fediverse started with Mastodon. Gargron has invented the Fediverse.Everything that isn't Mastodon is either designed as a Mastodon add-on (Pixelfed, PeerTube etc.), or if it clearly isn't that, it's an intruder into the Mastodon Fediverse.If Mastodon doesn't have a feature, the Fediverse doesn't have that feature. This also means that if they succeed at keeping Mastodon from introducing a feature that they don't want, the whole Fediverse will never have it.
There are Mastodon users who wish for "the Fediverse" (they mean Mastodon because that's all they know) to introduce some feature, blissfully unaware that this feature is all over the Fediverse outside of Mastodon.

There are Mastodon users who "know for a fact" that Mastodon has just introduced quote-posts to the Fediverse, including an opt-out that works Fediverse-wide. They're blissfully unaware that a) Friendica and Hubzilla have been able to quote-post literally every single last public Mastodon toot since Mastodon's launch in 2016, and b) they both still are, opt-out or not.

And then there are those who spend two years or more thinking the entire Fediverse is a 500-character microblogging service, and who shit brix in sheer terror and hammer on the block button in sheer panic whenever a "toot" with more than 500 characters shows up in their timeline.

And, of course, those who try hard to force Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules, both of which are geared towards Mastodon and Mastodon only, upon users of server applications that are very very much not Mastodon. Because they think that Mastodon culture = Fediverse culture. And who, at the same time, fight everyone who suggests they do something that isn't inline with their perception of Mastodon's culture and rules.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

When you see it, you'll shit brix: The Hubzilla timeline. The ...

2026-05-10T07:16:15Z

When you see it, you'll shit brix: The Hubzilla timeline.

The "it" that you're supposed to see is:

The Fediverse did, in fact, not start with Mastodon.
There was something in the Fediverse before Mastodon: Mistpark was there almost 6 years before Mastodon, Hubzilla was there 10 months before Mastodon.
Mastodon came into an already existing Fediverse with servers and users and content and a culture.
The Fediverse has never been only Mastodon. And it will never be.
The Fediverse had quote-posts almost 6 years before Mastodon.
(Accurate implication: The non-Mastodon Fediverse can quote-post any public Mastodon toot with no problems, and it has always been able to do so, for as long as Mastodon has been around.)The Fediverse had groups almost 6 years before Mastodon which still doesn't even support groups.The Fediverse had better lists than Mastodon lists almost 6 years before Mastodon.The Fediverse had reply control almost 6 years before Mastodon where people are still waiting for some kind of reply control.The Fediverse had permissions almost 6 years before Mastodon where the concept of permissions is completely unknown.And if you've really paid attention:

The Fediverse had no character limit to worry about almost 6 years before Mastodon came along with only 500 characters.
The Fediverse had 16,777,215 characters almost 6 years before Mastodon had 500 characters.The Fediverse had full rich-text formatting almost 6 years before Mastodon.
The Fediverse could generate bold type, italics, underline, code blocks, bullet-point lists etc. without any Unicode trickery. Almost 6 years before Mastodon was there. And more than 12 years before Mastodon could even only display that stuff.
Although it should be blatantly obvious: This here is not a Mastodon toot. This post comes from Hubzilla directly to your Mastodon apps.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Mistpark #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseCulture #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #Lists #ReplyControl #Permissions #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #TextFormatting #RichText #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

Interestingly, we stayed in-world yesterday until well past 22:00 ...

2026-05-06T05:58:52Z

Interestingly, we stayed in-world yesterday until well past 22:00 when DENIC had already fscked up.

Either OpenSim doesn't muck around with domains unless you log in or go Hypergridding.

That, or our grid domain is not DNSSEC-signed. After all, the grid website doesn't have any SSL encryption yet either. And we did have visitors coming in from the Hypergrid past 21:00.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Hypergrid #DENIC #DNSSEC

Tomorrow is my sixth rezday, @Juno Rowland's fifth rezday and ...

2026-04-29T21:21:09Z

Tomorrow is my sixth rezday, @Juno Rowland's fifth rezday and also International Jazz Day.

A pity that there doesn't seem to be any good opportunity to celebrate either. Today's event at the Moka Efti may pretty well have been the only DJ event with a focus on jazz in all April.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #VirtualEvent #Rezday #InternationalJazzDay #JazzDay

@HG Safari will take us to (virtual) Tromsø in the Wolf ...

2026-04-21T19:22:22Z

@HG Safari will take us to (virtual) Tromsø in the Wolf Territories tomorrow evening. One of the things that place is known for is that its EEP daycycle is automatically sync'd with real-life Tromsø.

This was the first time that I've checked a real-life weather report before visiting a virtual location. And it won't stay the only time.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #HGSafari #WolfTerritories #WolfTerritoriesGrid #WTGrid #WolfGrid #EEP #Norway #Tromsø

But wait, there's more: Even if a Hubzilla channel, upon ...

2026-04-21T12:53:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…ywy4
_________________________

But wait, there's more: Even if a Hubzilla channel, upon confirming your follow request, "follows" you back, it doesn't necessarily actually follow you back, as in, let your toots and boosts in.

Chances are that the Hubzilla channel uses its permissions system to keep your toots and boosts out. Replies are allowed. DMs are allowed. But anything that isn't either is kept out.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Permissions #Contacts

Okay, so you're on Mastodon. You've sent a follow request ...

2026-04-21T12:52:26Z

Okay, so you're on Mastodon. You've sent a follow request to what you think is another Mastodon account.

Upon confirming your follow request, they've also sent you a follow request. They're obviously curious about what you toot and what you boost.

But:

They aren't on Mastodon. You think they are. But they aren't. They're on Friendica or Hubzilla.

They didn't decide to follow you back. It was their software, Friendica or Hubzilla, that absolutely has to follow you back in order to let you follow someone on it.

See, 𝕏 and Mastodon have "followers" and the concept of "following". Connections that always go one way. Even if there's a "mutual", it's two connections. One that goes one way, one that goes the other way.

Friendica and Hubzilla only have "mutuals", but not as two separate connections in one way each like Mastodon mutuals, but as one connection that goes both ways. Like "friends" on Facebook. They call them "contacts".

Friendica and Hubzilla don't understand one-way "following". They understand Mastodon follow requests as requests to create a two-way connection. And when the request is confirmed, they create a two-way connection.

Mastodon, on the other hand, doesn't understand two-way "contacts". When Friendica or Hubzilla approves a two-way connection, Mastodon understands it as confirming a one-way follow request plus, independently, deliberately, intentionally, sending a follow request back.

However, the follow request you get from a Friendica account or Hubzilla channel that you've just followed was not sent deliberately or intentionally. It was fully automated. It was to turn your follow request into the kind of two-way connection that Friendica and Hubzilla understand.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Connections #Followers #Contacts

@hosh The alt-text police of the Mastodon Home Owners' ...

2026-04-21T07:42:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…fprn
_________________________

@hosh The alt-text police of the Mastodon Home Owners' Association (Mastodon HOA) have a tendency to be overzealous. And they don't talk to each other. They all act for themselves as lone wolves with exactly no coordination amongst each other whatsoever. You never know what kinds of rules they whip up for themselves.

Chances are that they only let image descriptions count that come directly with the image. If they acknowledge an image description outside the alt-text, it must be in the post itself. Not as an external link, but the description text itself.

Besides, at least some in the Mastodon HOA have problems with external links. And I don't just mean that they don't trust embedded links whose URL they can't see in plain sight, the kind that Hubzilla can create and Mastodon can't (not that Hubzilla couldn't fake a plain-sight link by embedding a different URL than the visible).

I don't mean either that probably a majority of Mastodon users don't even recognise embedded links without a visible URL as such because they don't know that such a thing can exist in the Fediverse, because Mastodon can't make them.

No, what I mean is the notion that external links for explanations are inherently bad from an accessibility point of view. "Mastodon" (as in how Mastodon users experience the Fediverse, i.e. the Mastodon Web UI or any of the popular mobile phone apps) is sufficiently accessible. But the Web outside of "Mastodon" (same definition again) may not be accessible enough.

A few years ago, I've literally read a Mastodon toot in which someone said that explanations must not be linked to. Linked websites have a risk of not being accessible. Explanations must always be directly in the same post. Apparently, they thought that everything and anything can be explained and broken down until everyone understands it within 500 characters.

This is also why Mastodon users tend to explain their images in the alt-text. It's only there where they have at least halfway enough characters for an explanation, 1,500 per image as opposed to usually only 500 in the post text. (On Mastodon, much unlike Hubzilla, the alt-text is a separate database field that exists separately for each of the up to four images per message.)

That is, explanations must never go into the alt-text because there are people who cannot open alt-texts to read them. But nobody on Mastodon knows that.

It should be obvious that what counts for explanations counts for visual descriptions just as well.

And in fact, regarding Hubzilla articles, they're actually right. I've once pointed an actually blind screen reader user to an article on my Hubzilla channel. She said she couldn't even navigate the Web interface. She literally couldn't get to the text body of the article to have it read out by her screen reader.

Hubzilla's Web interface, no matter which app is opened, is not accessible. It does not work with screen readers. It's largely still stuck in 2012 when nobdy made any ruckus about the accessibility of hobbyist Web projects.

The only reason why at least some blind or visually-impaired users can read our Hubzilla posts and comments and DMs is because they're all on Mastodon, and they read our content either on Mastodon's Web UI or a Mastodon app that supports screen readers. But they do not read our content at the source. Because they can't.

I actually took into consideration linking to my long image descriptions. But my idea was not to link to a Hubzilla article, nor to a Hubzilla wiki or a Hubzilla card. No, my idea was to write a plain HTML document, upload it to my file space and link to that.

I've dropped that idea for various reasons:

Generally, still, external links are frowned upon.I don't know if plain HTML is accessible without a CSS. And I can't add a CSS to this HTML if the HTML document is not served to the recipient by a Web server, but by a file server.I don't know how Google Chrome on Android or Safari on an iPhone will react when they access an HTML document on a file space. Will they display it as a website? Or will they download it onto the device as a file without opening it because, again, it is served to them not by a Web server, but by a file server?Mobile users dislike opening websites from apps because they dislike their browser popping open. And on Mastodon, much unlike Hubzilla, almost everyone is on a phone and a dedicated app almost all the time.This also means that mobile users would have the image and the description in two separate apps. The image in their Mastodon app, the description in their browser.I would need much more description.
Right now, when I have multiple images, my long descriptions consist of a preamble that contains all necessary explanations and, if applicable, visual descriptions of elements that are common to all images. The individual descriptions for each image follow.
But if I had one image description file per image, then each image description would need the whole preamble included. I can't just add the preamble to the first description file.
What if someone opens the third description file first? They'll only have a very incomplete description. And linking to the first description file is inconvenient. I would have to know the URL of the first file before completing and uploading the other files because I'd have to include the URL of the first file in them. And the users would have to have three documents open (the image post, the description of the image they're interested in, the description of the first image with the preamble) just to experience one image. Spread across two phone apps.
And that's why I can't put my additional long description in an external document.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextPolice #MastodonHOA #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #MastodonCulture

@ValorZard No dice. First of all, implementing nomadic identity ...

2026-04-20T17:32:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…yk34
_________________________

@ValorZard No dice.

First of all, implementing nomadic identity would drastically alter the way how Mastodon works. It would make Mastodon, something that's supposed to be dead-simple, a great deal more complex.

I mean, in order to really pull this through all the way (as in Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte-level nomadic identity), your identity, your posts, your followers, your followed, your settings, your filters, your everything, all this must no longer directly reside in your account. It must be containerised in something that Hubzilla calls "channel", and that container would then reside in your account and be able to reside in multiple accounts on multiple independent servers.

Next, when Mastodon introduces a new feature, they tend to try to market it as their own original pioneering invention. They can't do that with nomadic identity. There are already enough people who know that nomadic identity was actually pioneered by Hubzilla before Mastodon even existed.

Furthermore, before Gargron implements something invented by Mike Macgirvin, hell will freeze over. Even if he tried to sell it as a unique feature of Mastodon, he'd still secretly have to admit that there's something that Mike did right. And quite a few eyes would be on him in hope of Mastodon getting more features from stuff created by Mike.

Ever heard of OpenWebAuth magic sign-on? Invented by Mike for Osada and Zap in the late 2010s, then backported to Hubzilla.

It was proposed for Mastodon, even if it was only client-side (as in, Mastodon logins would be detected by Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, but Mastodon wouldn't be able to detect OpenWebAuth logins itself). This went as far as a merge request on GitHub. It could have been built into Mastodon. The code was literally there.

The merge request was silently rejected. And that would have been a fairly small change in comparison to the complete rebuild that'd be necessary for a full-blown, Forte-level, server-side implementation of nomadic identity.

I mean, @silverpill had to implement nomadic identity on Mitra client-side. That wouldn't be possible on Mastodon, what with every other Fediverse app being a Mastodon client. Mastodon would require a server-side implementation.

Seriously, it'd be easier to strap Mastodon's Web UI to Forte or Hubzilla with the necessary changes to adapt it to a vastly different backend.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Mitra #FEP_ef61 #NomadicIdentity

@hosh If I were to do that, my blogging platform would be ...

2026-04-20T17:08:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…23gg
_________________________

@hosh If I were to do that, my blogging platform would be Hubzilla as well.

Granted, articles don't federate to Mastodon, and 95% of all Mastodon users wouldn't even notice that the blog post is part of the same channel as the announcement post, as in, the blog post technically is in the Fediverse. But it is, so someone who is Fediverse-savvy enough might point out that, at least as far as accessibility is concerned, the same rules apply to non-federating Hubzilla articles as to Mastodon toots.

On the other hand, it could all be futile anyway because Mastodon users aren't exactly known for being keen on opening links.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla

On the one hand, I have to go out of my way and write two image ...

2026-04-19T19:56:33Z

On the one hand, I have to go out of my way and write two image descriptions for each one of my original images. One is short and goes into the alt-text, and I'm going to limit all my future alt-text to a maximum of 512 characters (otherwise users on Misskey, Sharkey etc. will believe I haven't written any alt-text because they won't receive any due to a bug).

The other one is enormous degrees of magnitudes longer than anything most Fediverse users have ever read in the Fediverse. It also contains all explanations necessary to understand the image and its description, and if there's text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable or not, it contains verbatim transcripts of said text.

The nature of my original images requires such long descriptions. Besides, the only way to really be safe from the alt-text police of the Mastodon HOA is to overcomply with whatever minimum standards for good image descriptions anyone of them may have.

On the other hand, the self-same Mastodon HOA is likely to sanction me for the self-same posts. The reason: The posts are way too long. They exceed the limit of 500 characters that's so deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture that many Mastodonians are eager to defend it. Even if I hide them behind a summary with a content warning about the post being long. If I were to appease these Mastodonians, I'd have to underdescribe my images, and I wouldn't be able to explain them at all.

Speaking of underdescribing, I think at least some members of the alt-text police actually don't let image descriptions in the post count. What counts is only the image description in the alt-text. It must be accurate, it must be sufficiently detailed, and it must contain all the text transcripts. In fact, I wouldn't wonder if they demanded sufficient explanations in the alt-text, not knowing that explanations in alt-text are actually a big no-no.

Even if all requirements of a good alt-text by alt-text police standards are met or even exceeded by the image description in the post, chances are the alt-text police will still sanction me if the alt-text doesn't meet these criteria.

When it comes to my original images, even squeezing all that into the 1,500-character limit for alt-texts imposed by Mastodon is pretty much impossible. Squeezing it into the 512-character limit for alt-text imposed by Misskey and its forks is even more impossible.

The only winning move is to not play at all. Curiously, some people are even upset about me rarely posting any images. Although they don't follow me. Although the channel that I use for original images (@Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet) has next to no reach, so even if I were to post images again, practically nobody would notice. Although it doesn't even seem that there's much interest in that kind of images in the first place.

But apparently, according to some, posting images with only rudimentary alt-text whipped up in a minute, no long description and no explanations is always so much better than not posting images because it takes so much time and effort to describe them.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextPolice #MastodonHOA #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CWContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #MastodonCulture

@silverpill Would be interesting to add Hubzilla's Zot6 and ...

2026-04-02T08:40:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…z9j4
_________________________

@silverpill Would be interesting to add Hubzilla's Zot6 and (streams)' Nomad (which would be Zot12 if it wasn't incompatible with Zot6) to the list.

By the way: Forte doesn't require a gateway to communicate with non-nomadic ActivityPub. A fully cloned Forte channel can communicate with a Mastodon account without jumping through hoops. Remember that Forte has almost fully-featured Hubzilla-level nomadic identity (i.e. everything except real-time syncing between channel instances; unlike Hubzilla and (streams) which do sync in real time, it needs a cronjob for that) directly built into its core.

(streams) does support nomadic identity via ActivityPub. But internally, it uses and relies upon Nomad for its nomadic identity. It only supports nomadic identity via ActivityPub a) because it was used as a development platform for just this and b) in order to be able to understand cloned nomadic ActivityPub actors elsewhere. This is also why it isn't possible to move from (streams) to Forte, to move from Forte to (streams) or to clone between (streams) and Forte.

(streams) itself doesn't require gateways to communicate with Mastodon & Co. either. It speaks three protocols natively: its own Nomad, Hubzilla's Zot6 and (optionally, but on by default) standard ActivityPub.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ActivityPub #Zot #Zot6 #Nomad #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #NomadicIdentity

I've learned something about alt-texts and image descriptions ...

2026-02-28T21:38:17Z

I've learned something about alt-texts and image descriptions in the Fediverse again today: You must never talk about alt-texts and image descriptions. Ever.

Oh, sure you're allowed to give all those unsolicited lectures who don't provide alt-texts. Or alt-texts that don't describe the image. Or alt-texts that don't describe the image accurately. Or alt-texts that don't describe the image enough. Or alt-texts that don't describe the image in the right way. Just prepare to be counter-attacked for being an intrusive, mansplaining reply guy, at least in the latter three cases.

But what you must never do, under any circumstances, is attempt to discuss alt-texts and image descriptions. For that's ableist. Even if actually blind or visually-impaired Fediverse users may disagree. But since when does the Mastodon alt-text police listen to them? Or, in fact, to anyone?

You aren't allowed to ever ask if you're doing it right. For that's ableist, too.

You aren't even allowed to think about how to do it right. For that's ableist, too.

Just do it. Literally everything else is ableist.

Oh, but you absolutely must do it the right way. 100% by hand with no AI help whatsoever, even if you're blind or visually-impaired or autistic and unable to turn images into words. Absolutely accurately, at the right level of detail and in the right style. And you must know right off the bat what the right level of detail and the right style is. Without thinking about it.

Thing is: The Mastodon alt-text police have never agreed upon one standard level of detail, depending on the circumstances, and one standard style. Everyone of them thinks that their preferred way is the one and only gold standard, and everyone of them enforces their preferred way as if it's the one and only gold standard. All with no coordination with anyone else.

So you post an image, and you write an alt-text. Just like you think you're required to do. So far, so good.

Then comes Alice from the Mastodon alt-text police and calls you out as ableist because your image description isn't detailed enough. How dare you mention there's something in the image without describing what it looks like? You're supposed to know that you have to do that!

Okay, so you edit it according to Alice's requirements.

Then comes Bob from the Mastodon alt-text police and calls you out as ableist because your image description is too long and too excessively detailed. You're supposed to know that you have to keep your alt-texts short and succinct and only describe what's important within the context of your post! Fun fact: Your original alt-text would have been too detailed for Bob, too.

Needless to say that Alice and Bob have never talked to each other. However, this is not so much due to the Fediverse-wide, Mastodon-imposed ban on discussing alt-texts and image descriptions. It's because both are on Mastodon and only on Mastodon, and Mastodon with its complete lack of support for enclosed conversations, much less groups, is absolutely horrible for discussions.

The only way to get around this is to never post any images or other media. However, if you mention at some point that you don't post images because you're afraid of uncoordinated Mastodon alt-text police attacks because one or some of them find your image descriptions not up to their personal standards, you'll probably be attacked for allegedly trying to weasel out of your responsibility.

Of course, this also means that my WIP wiki about how to describe images and write alt-texts for the Fediverse is pointless. Not only pointless, but its very existence is ableist. And if someone else reads it, they're ableist, too. So don't click or tap that link.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextPolice #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@HarkMahlberg That's because Hubzilla has a feature called ...

2026-02-28T18:20:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…nvp4
_________________________

@HarkMahlberg That's because Hubzilla has a feature called nomadic identity (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity).

The channel that I'm replying from, here on hub.netzgemeinde.eu, has a clone on hub.hubzilla.de. A full, live, hot, bidirectional, near-real-time backup that I can use just like the original. This is a feature that some are trying to invent right now, but that "proto-Hubzilla" has had since 2012.

Within Hubzilla, both instances of my channel count has having the exact same identity, jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu, and as being one thing, only that this thing exists in two places simultaneously.

However, the non-nomadic Fediverse neither knows nor understands nomadic identity. It sees the two instances of my channel as two fully separate identities. Thus, I guess lots of Mastodon users must have blocked me for having an unlabelled bot.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #NomadicIdentity

Just discovered that Misskey actually doesn't truncate ...

2026-02-28T17:52:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…uwxw
_________________________

Just discovered that Misskey actually doesn't truncate alt-texts with over 512 characters, but it silently discards them entirely. If your alt-text is longer than 512 characters, this gives the impression that you're too lazy to write alt-texts altogether.

https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey/issues/13823

I don't know if any Forkeys have fixed this, though.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta

Nostr event nevent1qqspxseddk8rwy4ny5u8f45dzlp3n5t7dgzjhkxwd5ztu6uy2xjrm9gzyq57gs5t6g35gvnyt4d6hr8xpm2e3aftpt2l86v8jdn59g607937w4e7rgc

2026-02-28T17:48:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…c7zp
_________________________

@HarkMahlberg @:petthex_javasparrow:しゅいろ:petthex_javasparrow:(本物) Well, I wonder whether removing inbound character limits or raising them a lot would be against Misskey's microblogging philosophy.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta

Just the other day, I found something out. Something very ...

2026-02-28T17:22:40Z

Just the other day, I found something out. Something very inconvenient about Misskey and maybe also the Forkeys.

It should be commonly known that Misskey has a local limit of 3,000 characters for posts (which it refers to as "notes"). What is not so well-known is that Misskey has a limit of about 8,000 characters, probably 8,192 or so, for inbound messages, ironically fewer than this post is long. Also, it has a limit of 512 characters for alt-text, both locally and in-bound.

Mastodon has a character limit for in-bound content, too, at least for Note-type objects (not for Article-type objects because it refuses to render them fully and links to the original instead). To my best knowledge, it rejects messages with over 100,000 characters. As for its 1,500-charater limit for alt-text, it enforces that by truncating alt-text that's longer.

Misskey, in contrast, truncates everything that exceeds its limits while still letting it in. If your post is longer than the inbound limit of ca. 8,000, all excess characters are chopped off and thrown away. If your alt-text is longer than 512 characters, all excess characters are chopped off and thrown away.

I don't know which Forkey behaves how in this regard, seeing as all Forkeys I know about have a configurable local post character limit that can be adjusted to well over 8,000. But even if the inbound limit is configurable, too, I don't think any *key admin cranks it over 60,000 or over 70,000 or over 100,000. It's simply unimaginable that someone, anyone, could ever post that much at once if your idea of the Fediverse is pure microblogging.

Also, I don't know what *key users do when they come across a truncated post or what blind or visually-impaired *key users do when they come across a truncated alt-text. Do they even suspect that it's a truncated copy of something that's longer at its source and then go check the source? Either way, it's very inconvenient.

It's especially inconvenient for me. My longest posts by a gigantic margin are image posts with original images. They always have a long image description block in the post itself that tends to be tens of thousands of characters long. It contains highly detailed visual descriptions of all images in the post. It contains all explanations necessary to understand the post, the images and the descriptions. It contains verbatim transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image that I can read, no matter whether or not my audience can.

In addition, each image has a shorter description in the alt-text, along with a bit that announces the long description, including where to find it. I even used to explain how to get to that description for Mastodon users for whom the summary and content warning hides the post text, but not the images, depending on which Mastodon version and frontend they use. This alone took up several hundred characters in the alt-text. All in all, I got to a point in which my alt-texts always ended up either at precisely 1,500 characters or just a few characters short.

I myself am not really bound to character limits. I used to post images here on Hubzilla where I have over 16.7 million characters for the post, including all alt-texts. Now I post them on (streams) where I have over 24 million characters. I could theoretically write alt-texts as long as I want to, seeing as, unlike on Mastodon, they aren't separate text fields; instead, they're being woven into the image-embedding markup code in the post text.

Still, I stick to a maximum of 1,500 characters for alt-text to keep Mastodon from truncating it. If you post images into the Fediverse, the main audience for your alt-text is on Mastodon, and most of them don't understand that there's something, anything, out there in the Fediverse that does not work exactly like Mastodon. And 1,500 characters can be tight already.

But if I have to stay within Misskey's limits, I can hardly post images anymore. At least not with appropriate descriptions and explanations.

Since late 2024, I have been working on-and-off on a series of fairly simple avatar portraits or rather their image descriptions. The idea is for the long description to consist of a preamble that starts with a general summary, followed by explanations, then followed by visual descriptions of what all images in the post have in common. Next come the individual descriptions of each image. Each post shall have three or four images with three or four portraits each, all in the same pose, all with only minor differences in outfits, all with a neutral, bright white background.

In addition, of course, each image shall have an alt-text, and none of the alt-texts shall depend on each other.

Now, the problem is that I have to describe three or four individual portraits in each alt-text. I'm actually struggling to squeeze such a description plus the note that announces the long description into 1,500 characters, especially if I want to fulfill Veronica Lewis a.k.a. Veronica With Four Eyes' requirements for outfit descriptions to a tee in the alt-text as well (https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-write-alt-text-for-casual-outfits/, https://veroniiiica.com/writing-image-descriptions-for-red-carpet-outfits/; see also https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-write-alt-text-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/ and https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-create-visual-descriptions/).

But in 512 characters so that even Misskey users won't get a severely truncated version? This is absolutely impossible. Even if I limit the long description announcement to some 100 characters, even if I didn't walk people through how to get to the long description, I'd have fewer than 140 characters on average to describe each individual outfit.

The long description won't fare any better. Currently, the preamble starts with some 14,000 characters of explanations, most of which are necessary to understand the visual descriptions. But when Misskey goes and truncates the post at the 8,000-something mark, Misskey users won't even get to any visual description because all visual descriptions would be chopped off.

What makes matters worse is that the preamble grows the longer, the easier to understand I make it and the less I leave people with unexplained technical or jargon terms which you shouldn't use in image descriptions at all anyway. So the next time I go through it and rewrite it to make it easier to understand, I'll also make it even longer than it already is.

But what if I simply cut all the explanations? For one, I'd leave people to their own devices to understand extremely obscure niche content. They won't. My explanations aren't 14,000 characters long because I've artificially inflated them, but because there is so much to know before you understand the post and the images and the descriptions.

Besides, the visual descriptions alone won't fit into 8,192 characters either. What I currently have is over 5,000 characters of common visual description for all portraits in all images plus about 2,500 characters of individual visual description for the three portraits in the first image. That's over 7,500 characters altogether already. And I still have to describe nine portraits in another three images. The post will end up with some 15,000 characters of visual descriptions unless they grow longer when I simplify them again.

I guess users of Misskey or any Forkey will still have to put up with truncated alt-texts and truncated long descriptions in the future. But my future image posts will contain a paragraph at the beginning that explains that the post and/or the alt-text may be truncated on Misskey and the Forkeys, and that both are uncut at the source. Still, this means that *key users will have to put up with the extra hassle of opening my original post at a source with a quite cumbersome UI. And I've got my doubts that this UI is really accessible.

Unfortunately, this also means that *key users won't get any hashtags along with these posts. But then again, the handling of Identi.ca-style/Friendica-style hashtags with the number sign outside the link is broken on all *keys and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Sharkey #CherryPick #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #A11y #Accessibility

You know things really take a turn for the weird when one ...

2026-02-25T22:27:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…dftx
_________________________

You know things really take a turn for the weird when one partygoer falls asleep with voice on. And you can hear him snoring over voice.

You haven't partied in the Hypergrid until you've ...

2026-02-25T21:58:05Z

You haven't partied in the Hypergrid until you've celebrated Cornflakes Week among dinkies. While wearing a plunger that one of the dinkies gave you on top of a top hat.

Happening right now.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorld #VirtualEvent #CornflakesWeek

Work has been resumed on establishing connections between the ...

2026-02-12T20:50:31Z

Work has been resumed on establishing connections between the Fediverse and the likewise decentralised metaverse, i.e. OpenSimulator.

For now, the only feature that's actually implemented is sending OpenSim group messages out via ActivityPub. However, it has been tested against the opposite end of the Fediverse from Mastodon: Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

https://codeberg.org/fionasweet/OS-AP

https://opensimworld.com/post/128355

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #ActivityPub #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds

@silverpill Another case of people who don't know the ...

2026-02-12T13:53:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…wer8
_________________________

@silverpill Another case of people who don't know the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. Or, at most, Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube and maybe Threads.

Since none of these have groups, these people firmly believe that the Fediverse itself doesn't have any.

I have a GitHub account for bug-reporting purposes. Shall I barge in and tell them?

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #FediGroups #FediverseGroups

It has finally happened. I was a guest at Inworld Review and ...

2026-02-08T21:43:45Z

It has finally happened. I was a guest at Inworld Review and interviewed by Thirza Ember and James Atlloud of @HG Safari fame as well as Petlove Petshop today.

Here's the video, redirected to Invidious. (Link instead of embedding so I hopefully don't have to spend months writing a visual description that'll take you days to read or listen to.)

Better yet: Thirza wanted to interview me about the Fediverse. Good thing OpenSim users are already used to things being decentralised because OpenSim itself is. In fact, I could have told her that some of the tropes associated with OpenSim being decentralised apply to the Fediverse as well.

Extra shoutouts to @Elena Rossini for her Fediverse video featured on fediverse.info and to @Dorena Verne as a good example of a grid manager (see Petlove's video in the video) because she has managed to move Dorenas World from a Windows server to a Debian server and considerably speeding it up in the process.

For those who aren't familiar with Inworld Review: It's an OpenSim-themed talkshow on YouTube started by the late Mal Burns many years ago. His whole backlog of almost 400 episodes can be found here. And here is the channel on which Mal's former co-host continue Inworld Review without him with 62 episodes so far.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #InworldReview

@Oliver ⚡ Truth be told, Pixelfed is not and has never been ...

2026-01-28T11:55:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…tmp2
_________________________

@Oliver ⚡ Truth be told, Pixelfed is not and has never been meant to be anyone's one and only Fediverse daily driver. It's specialising in image sharing.

However, it's still either meant or made out to be an Instagram clone. And Instagram pretty much is the one and only all-purpose social media daily driver for most of its users, for almost the entire Millennial generation. It was created as an image-sharing platform, and it's being used as a social network, just like the Zoomers use TikTok as a social network.

Thus, all those former Instagram users who were lured to Pixelfed by rather clueless Mastodon users use Pixelfed as their all-purpose Fediverse daily driver, probably also because they fail to wrap their minds around requiring multiple accounts and multiple logins for multiple Fediverse server applications.

This idea of only requiring one Pixelfed account to do pretty much everything in the Fediverse clashes hard with Daniel's idea of what Pixelfed is and shall be. Then again, the former idea was probably also fostered by Mastodon users who use Mastodon for pretty much everything in the Fediverse, regardless of whether Mastodon is fit for it or not.

And just like many Mastodon and Pixelfed users don't want to have more than one Fediverse login, many Mastodon and Pixelfed users don't want to move someplace that's more of a jack-of-all-trades, or they simply don't know that such places exist.

Then again, the really fully-featured jacks-of-all-trades in the Fediverse are Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. But they're also at the opposite end of friendliness towards converts from corporate silos. They have steep learning curves; Hubzilla, the most powerful of them, has the steepest. It's easier to adapt from Twitter to Mastodon than it is to adapt from Mastodon to Forte.

Also, other than (streams) and Forte being totally obscure, obstacles in joining them are also that (streams) barely has any public servers, and these servers are intentionally being kept away from server listings like Fediverse Observer and FediDB. And Forte doesn't have any public servers, full stop, only personal, single-user servers.

CC: @ploum

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Pixelfed #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte

Dereos will celebrate its 11th grid anniversary on Saturday, ...

2026-01-27T20:15:02Z

Dereos will celebrate its 11th grid anniversary on Saturday, January 31st, with a beach party at Ko Suai. Music will be supplied by the local DJs.

Important: Party language is German, but I expect there to be a translator.

Taxi: hop://dereos.org:80/ko%20suai

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #VirtualEvent #GridAnniversary #Dereos

So there's that nasty bug on Sharkey that mangles hashtags in ...

2026-01-16T16:18:12Z

So there's that nasty bug on Sharkey that mangles hashtags in messages from Hubzilla and probably also Friendica, (streams) and Forte. They always look like this:

#[Hashtag](https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Hashtag)

Basically, Sharkey receives fully standard Rich Text from Hubzilla. It manages to convert this Rich Text into its own Misskey-Flavored Markdown. But then its Markdown parser does not parse it and leaves the Markdown code visible to everyone. It simply doesn't expect there to be a hashtag character in front of an embedded link because, seriously, who'd ever do that and why?!

Friendica would. In fact, Friendica does. It puts the hashtag character in front of the tag, as in outside the tag, as opposed to at the beginning of the tag. It has been doing that since its beginnings in 2010 because it was designed from the get-go to also federate with StatusNet from 2008. And StatusNet does hashtags the same way on its few remaining servers. In fact, so did Identi.ca from 2008, from which StatusNet emerged.

Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do it, too, because they have inherited it from Friendica.

On StatusNet, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, a hashtag in a message looks like this:

#Hashtag

Notice how the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the post text. And not the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is not part of the link. (To Mastodon users who don't know this: If something in a "toot" has a different colour from the rest of the "toot", it's a link. Even if it doesn't show a URL in plain sight.)

On 𝕏, Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, the various Forkeys and a whole lot of other Fediverse software, a hashtag in a message looks like this:

#Hashtag

Notice how now the hashtag character has the same colour as the rest of the hashtag. This means that the hashtag character is part of the link.

But why did Identi.ca do hashtags differently from Twitter? Because Identi.ca did hashtags before Twitter. AFAIK, when Identi.ca was launched, it had support for hashtags right away. About one year before Twitter.

The hashtag itself had already been invented by the Twitter community. Chris Messina had already codified it in 2007. But it wasn't until 2009 that Twitter actually introduced a technological implementation to support it.

Again, Identi.ca must have had hashtags as early as 2008, and there was no way that Identi.ca creator Evan Prodromou could possibly predict what Twitter would do the following year. So he did what he thought was right and what actually made sense to him.

But nowadays, everybody "knows" that Twitter had the world's very first hashtag implementation ever because nobody, even in the Fediverse, has ever heard of Identi.ca. I mean, the majority of Fediverse users "know" that the Fediverse started with Mastodon.

You know, just like Officer James Barrett "knew" that there is no intelligent life outside Earth only a few minutes before he became Agent J of the Men In Black.

This is also why just about all Fediverse software that does hashtags the Twitter way expects everything to do hashtags the Twitter way. It does not expect hashtags to be done differently. And when a message comes in from Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte with hashtags in it, it fails at varying degrees of ungracefully.

Hashtags with the hashtag character outside the link are older than hashtags with the hashtag character inside that they're not only completely unexpected, that they cause software to malfunction, but the same software often can't even handle that malfunction. It's a miracle that the Friendica/Hubzilla family doesn't cause Fediverse servers to crash or even server databases to go corrupt by simply sending hashtags.

Mastodon used to be an exception of sorts, but only because, before version 4.0 from October, 2022, its HTML "sanitiser" actually ripped out any and all rich text code from incoming messages and left nothing but plain text behind. And then it didn't recognise hashtags in messages from outside Mastodon as hashtags at all.

When Mastodon 4.0 came and supported some rich text, including embedded links, it went haywire, of course. But then someone from Friendica and Hubzilla went in and complained about this malfunction and explained what happened, why it happened and why it was not Friendica and Hubzilla that did things wrong. Besides, if something utterly defaces "toots", then Mastodon developers do step in to stop it. After all, Mastodon has a few more of them at hand, paid, full-time professionals even. You have to give it that.

Which takes us back to Sharkey. Sharkey is developed by a small handful of individuals in their spare time. Granted, it's a soft fork of Misskey, so a lot of development work is done by the Misskey devs and taken over by the Sharkey devs, but they still have to weave the code changes coming from Misskey in and make them work with what's different on Sharkey.

So it turned out that (Link content warning: eye contact) this bug has already been filed to the Sharkey devs in October, 2024. All that has happened since then until today was that Hazelnoot added two labels. But the bug report came with no explanations. In fact, it misattributed one of my Hubzilla posts as a Friendica post.

And in fact, it turned out that this is actually (Link content warning: Microsoft GitHub link, eye contact) a Misskey bug which has been filed in January, 2024, two years ago. The bug report is a bit more elaborate, but the reporter still knew precious little about what's going on. So I wrote a comment in which I explained the bug from a Friendica/Hubzilla POV as well as what's going on on the technical side, and why the error has to be on Misskey's side.

I hope this will finally help get the bug fixed. Unfortunately, this fix would come too late for Iceshrimp. Iceshrimp-JS is a true Forkey, but in maintenance mode, so I guess only security patches and critical bugfixes will be merged from Misskey, if anything. And Iceshrimp.NET is a complete rewrite of a pre-this-fix Misskey fork, so the Iceshrimp devs probably don't know about this issue either. If it fails ungracefully upon receiving hashtags with the hashtag character outside, it will require its own bug report.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Twitter #𝕏 #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp-JS #Iceshrimp.NET #Identi.ca #Laconi.ca #StatusNet #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte

Dorenas World, the oldest German-speaking grid and the ...

2026-01-14T21:12:49Z

Dorenas World, the oldest German-speaking grid and the third-oldest of all grids, is going to celebrate its 16th anniversary this week. Due to real-life influences, the schedule is somewhat cut short.

All times are in grid time = PST.

Friday, January 16th (actual anniversary date)
11:00: DJ Anachron Young (open end)
Event location: Rock-House, Nihilon
hop://dorenas-world.de:8002/Nihilon/216/167/22

Saturday, January 17th
10:00: Reading by Rubeus Helgerud
11:00: Wolem Wobbit live "Still Alive"
Afterwards: DJ Rubeus Helgerud (open end)
Event location: Festival ground, Landing
hop://dorenas-world.de:8002/Landing/140/149/22

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #DorenasWorld #GridAnniversary

Good news from the Fediverse: Just turned out that events sent ...

2026-01-06T21:48:46Z

Good news from the Fediverse:

Just turned out that events sent from PieFed work very well with Hubzilla's event calendar. Including converting the time zone from EST to CET. Guess they'll play along with Friendica, (streams) and Forte as well.

That is, I hope I'll get some feedback whether Hubzilla's interactions with PieFed events work on PieFed.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #PieFed #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Events

I'm experimenting with filters on Hubzilla again. For some ...

2026-01-03T13:55:53Z

I'm experimenting with filters on Hubzilla again.

For some reason, Boolean lines with || (or) on the allowlist of a contact not only don't work on my channel, but they actually defeat the whole filter, i.e. they render both the whole allowlist and the blacklist non-functional. Unfortunately, the devs can't reproduce the bug, so I'll have to go find the specific edge-case in which it appears.

Until then, I've decided to turn the Boolean lines inside-out: I've written their exact opposite, and I've placed it onto the blocklists.

So instead of having "the body contains foo, or the body contains bar, or the body contains baz, or it's a private message, or it isn't the top of the thread" on the allowlists, I now have "the body does not contain foo, and the body does not contain bar, and the body does not contain baz, and it isn't a private message, and it isn't not the top of the thread" on the blocklists. Let's see how it works.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Filter #Filters

In other news: Christmas is over, and so is almost the year. ...

2025-12-30T21:26:16Z

In other news:

Christmas is over, and so is almost the year. Snow-covered themes are being shut down again, and it won't be long after New Year's Day that OpenSim is back to its usual eternal summer until October. And then we'll have one month of autumn in a few places because autumn and Halloween are basically the same here.

Good thing there are a few exceptions. @Kelso Uxlay's Novale on his own grid probably still changes its seasons along with real-life Québec. Jimmy Olsen's Norge in the Wolf Territories shares its weather and daycycle with real-life northern Norway; his Alfheim used to do the same. And there are a few permanent winter or Christmas places; Dorenas World has three of them.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Novale #WolfTerritories #WolfTerritoriesGrid #WolfGrid #DorenasWorld

Now I'm wondering whether Tootik is a Moomin reference of ...

2025-12-26T19:08:28Z

Now I'm wondering whether Tootik is a Moomin reference of sorts. Something which I think we could use in the Fediverse.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Tootik

@*_jayrope Easier? Maybe, although that's unlikely without ...

2025-12-25T21:02:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…q9g7
_________________________

@*_jayrope Easier? Maybe, although that's unlikely without dumbing it down.

Easy enough for those who only know Twitter and Mastodon? Or those who only know Facebook? Especially if they only know the respective phone apps? I doubt that.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla

@「 Jürgen 」:fedi_mastodon: Fifth class. All of them. As ...

2025-12-25T20:44:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…388j
_________________________

@「 Jürgen 」:fedi_mastodon: Fifth class. All of them.

As I've said, everyone talks about Mastodon as "the" Twitter alternative in the Fediverse. This means that microblogging server apps that aren't Mastodon, and that don't have the same level of publicity and fame as GoToSocial and snac, are next to unknown by Mastodon's standards.

Mind you, this ranking is extremely Mastodon-centred. But Mastodon-centrism has been the default in the Fediverse for many years now.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys

We have a five-class Fediverse nowadays. First class: Mastodon. ...

2025-12-25T17:55:45Z

We have a five-class Fediverse nowadays.

First class: Mastodon. It's what everyone knows (everyone outside of Lemmy at least). It's what more Mastodon users than not take for the one and only Fediverse and ActivityPub gold standard (while literally nobody outside of Mastodon does, go figure). And it's the only Fediverse server application which many Fedizens take for the entire Fediverse. (Lemmings don't refer to Lemmy as the Fediverse, although many are still completely unaware that Lemmy is connected to anything else.)

Second class: the stuff that looks like add-ons glued onto Mastodon to enhance Mastodon. Pixelfed, an Instagram clone glued to the Twitter clone as an add-on. PeerTube, a YouTube clone glued to the Twitter clone as an add-on. Loops, a TikTok clone glued to the Twitter clone as an add-on. WordPress, a blogging engine and content management system eventually glued to the Twitter clone. I guess you get the idea.

It's only up to the second class that Fediverse server software is generally recognised and accepted from the usual Mastodon-centric point of view.

Third class: other halfway well-known "clones" of or replacements for corporate online platforms that do not look like they're glued onto Mastodon as add-ons. This is limited to the Threadiverse (Lemmy, what's left of /kbin, Mbin, PieFed) as Reddit replacements and Friendica as "the" Facebook replacement.

Fourth class: anything that doesn't fall into the first three classes, but that has enough publicity. Like Bonfire and WriteFreely. Also, minimalist stuff for self-hosters like GoToSocial and snac. Hubzilla is ever so barely teetering on this class, if at all.

Basically, it's only up to the fourth class that Fediverse server software is known at all.

Finally, fifth class: the whole rest. I mean, why is Mastodon known as "the" Twitter alternative in the Fediverse if there are loads of others that are better, more powerful, sometimes even closer to Twitter in certain features? Why is Friendica known as "the" Facebook alternative in the Fediverse if Friendica's own creator has built a whole family tree of successors that outclass Friendica in various ways?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pixelfed #PeerTube #Loops #WordPress #Threadiverse #Lemmy #/kbin #Mbin #PieFed #GoToSocial #snac #Bonfire #WriteFreely #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity

@julian Many of the hashtags that I use are not for discovery or ...

2025-12-20T20:04:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…42z0
_________________________

@julian Many of the hashtags that I use are not for discovery or not only. They are also or exclusively there to trigger filters.

@🌴 Seph 💭 👾 Fun fact: Hubzilla (which my post and this ...

2025-12-20T16:45:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…vzmm
_________________________

@🌴 Seph 💭 👾 Fun fact: Hubzilla (which my post and this comment come from) has a feed reader, too. But Hubzilla is the most powerful and feature-rich Fediverse server software out there. So if Friendica is overkill for you already...

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #FeedReader

Whenever someone announces to "bring" something "to ...

2025-12-20T11:02:15Z

Whenever someone announces to "bring" something "to the Fediverse", chances are that Friendica has actually had it since 2010, for five and a half years longer than Mastodon has been around.

For example, just about everyone on Mastodon is fully convinced that Eugen Rochko has brought quote-posts to the Fediverse this year. That's because next to nobody on Mastodon knows that Friendica has been able to quote-post practically everything in the Fediverse, including Mastodon toots, for 15 years now.

And if Friendica doesn't have it, chances are still that Hubzilla has it, and that Hubzilla has probably had it for longer than Mastodon has been around, too.

For example, private messages that are actually private. Mastodon doesn't have them because the "privacy" of Mastodon DMs is only "guaranteed" by limiting whom a DM is sent to. Hubzilla does have them and has had them since 2012, since it was still named Red. How? Because Hubzilla also limits who is permitted to see a DM.

Oh, and Hubzilla even offers optional encryption on top of that.

Or how about server-independent identity? Everyone still waiting for Bluesky to finally be the pioneer who invents this and implements it for the first time? LOL! Once again, Hubzilla has had this since 2012. Not a vague concept, not an unstable proof-of-concept, but daily-driven by production-grade channels on production-grade servers. (streams) has it, too, inherited from Hubzilla through a whole number of forks. Forte has it, too, and Forte is the first and, so far, only Fediverse server software that uses ActivityPub for nomadic identity.

Now I'm waiting for someone to announce that something will "bring" actual groups "to the Fediverse". A feature that was actually introduced to the Fediverse by StatusNet in 2008, and that's also available on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. Not to mention that the very principle of the Threadiverse (Lemmy, the remains of /kbin, Mbin, PieFed) is based on groups.

This is what happens when you think that the feature set of the whole Fediverse is the feature set of Mastodon and maybe Pixelfed because that's all you know.

Speaking of Mastodon: Just because it's being "brought to the Fediverse", doesn't mean it'll be adopted by Mastodon.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonCentrism #MastodonNormativity #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #NomadicIdentity #StatusNet #Threadiverse #Lemmy #/kbin #Mbin #PieFed #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups

How unfinished is Iceshrimp.NET? This unfinished: Iceshrimp.NET ...

2025-12-10T20:51:15Z

How unfinished is Iceshrimp.NET? This unfinished:

Iceshrimp.NET appears to have no support for conversations. At all. I'm not just saying it has no support for enclosed conversations like on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte, Facebook and every last blog out there, not to mention FEP-171b "Conversation Containers".

I'm saying it has no concept of threads. It has no concept whatsoever of a message having a parent or children in a thread.

All it seems to know is stand-alone messages. Iceshrimp.NET only shows you single messages, and it gives you no way at all to access even only what these messages reply to. This is even worse than Mastodon, and that has to say something.

Also, Iceshrimp.NET seems to use some exotic, home-brew message format that must have little to do with the W3C ActivityPub standard, even taking FEPs into consideration. It's impossible to use Hubzilla's search to import an Iceshrimp.NET message onto your stream.

And: iceshrimp.net redirects to the Iceshrimp.NET code repository. Which, in turn, contains a link to an iceshrimp.net website at the top. Another to-do that isn't even on any to-do list. Yeah, I know that (streams) and Forte have no websites either, but Mike doesn't pretend they have websites, and especially (streams) has very good reasons not to have an official website.

Let's just hope that it has overcome the *key-inherent federation issues by having been rewritten.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Iceshrimp.NET #IceshrimpNET

It says a lot about Luna that there's an 11-hour memorial ...

2025-11-30T23:14:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…csnk
_________________________

It says a lot about Luna that there's an 11-hour memorial festival on-going inside the Great Pyramid on her sim Luxor now. 51 avatars inside a building covered in PBR with decoration glistening and gleaming with PBR, and even some of the avatars are wearing PBR. So it's also a challenge for everyone's graphics hardware.

@Holocluck Henly Forgot to mention: Our common rezday is April ...

2025-11-30T23:10:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…hlkl
_________________________

@Holocluck Henly Forgot to mention: Our common rezday is April 30th.

It isn't that easy anymore to impress me in OpenSim. I've ...

2025-11-28T19:15:52Z

It isn't that easy anymore to impress me in OpenSim. I've seen just about everything by now.

But then, yesterday, there was (CW for the link: eye contact) Shandon Loring, looking just like Arlo Guthrie while reciting Alice's Restaurant Massacree. Inside a church modelled after Alice's and Ray's church with their little room in the belfry.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Kitely #VirtualEvent #Thanksgiving #Thanksgiving2025 #ArloGuthrie #AlicesRestaurant

Interesting to see how popular this post of mine has become ...

2025-11-28T11:02:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…zfy9
_________________________

Interesting to see how popular this post of mine has become today, what with how many Mastodon users are faving and boosting it.

This makes me wonder how they would react if I gave them an unsolicited lecture on never adding explanations or other exclusive information to an alt-text and generally never writing around their character limits in alt-text. Or why line breaks and the quotation marks on your keyboard must never be used in alt-text.

As of late, people would rather lash out against me if I did that.

(@Mastodon users: If it has a different colour than the rest of the text, it's a link. Even if it isn't a URL in plain sight.)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta

Seriously, never before have I seen as many condolence posts and ...

2025-11-26T22:19:45Z

Seriously, never before have I seen as many condolence posts and comments and actions on OpenSimWorld as for @Luna Lunaria. And never before have I seen two independent memorial events being scheduled for one member of the community. (Unfortunately, one will be in the middle of the night for me.)

This is even more remarkable when you consider that she was a commercial merchant who sold most of her creations for money. Even some of the "Never buy in OpenSim" die-hards appear to mourn her. After all, her creations are worth the money, especially the buildings. I doubt that there's anything exclusive to Second Life that comes close to that monumental art déco event location appropriately called (CW for the link: eye contact) "The Majestic". (Sadly, we'll never get a PBR "Majestic" now, as gorgeous it is with Blinn-Phong textures.)

So I guess (I actually hope) that her passing won't be seen as an opportunity to copybot her creations, rebox them and offer them as freebies somewhere, now that she can't do anything against it anymore. I mean, her content isn't going to go anywhere. @Lone Wolf has said her sims will stay online. I hope that even the anti-capitalist activists and the freebie store owners who are constantly looking for exclusive, top-notch-quality content won't have the heart to bot or god-mode her stuff, especially seeing as her creations are so unique that nobody can get away with rebranding Luna's works as their own original creations.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Death #CWDeath

You want me to describe my images? Properly? So that you will ...

2025-11-18T21:09:05Z

You want me to describe my images? Properly? So that you will never have to ask me about details?

You want me to explain them? So that you understand them, no matter how super-obscure it is that they show?

Do you? Yes?

Then don't complain when I post tens of thousands of characters.

(Intentionally not CW'd.)

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

You want the Fediverse to have alt-texts of the best quality ...

2025-11-18T21:08:11Z

You want the Fediverse to have alt-texts of the best quality possible?

Do you? Yes?

Then don't complain when I come and give you unsolicited advice on how to do it right when you do it wrong.

(Intentionally not CW'd.)

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta

@Orb 2069 No, I haven't, and it doesn't really look ...

2025-11-13T19:38:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…rhwh
_________________________

@Orb 2069 No, I haven't, and it doesn't really look interesting to me.

Resonite uses monolithic avatars which you have to create with an external third-party tool like Ready Player Me and then import into the world. This is pretty common amongst new virtual worlds because it saves the world developers both the effort of building an engine for modular avatars, the effort of creating at least some basic avatar content and the effort of making it all work together smoothly.

For one, I myself vastly prefer building my avatars by piecing them together from content already available in-world and reshaping them with in-world parameters. One advantage is that I don't have to go through the entire hassle of importing yet another avatar just to change something about my outfit.

Besides, in order to have long hair and/or skirts as described, Resonite would require glTF avatar objects with extra skeleton parts in the hair/the skirt and with physics for only the hair/the skirt. And it would require collision detection within the same 3-D object, i.e. checking whether one "floppy" physical region of the object collides with a non-physical region of the very same object.

Sansar and High Fidelity were designed for modular avatars like their common predecessor, Second Life. The body is one object attached to the avatar. The long hair is another object attached to the avatar. The skirt is yet another object attached to the avatar.

I guess the long-term goal was to establish avatars that are at least as highly modular and configurable in-world as Second Life/OpenSim avatars.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Resonite #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Avatar #Avatars

There's a lot of talk about male-defaultism these days. You ...

2025-11-12T21:32:32Z

There's a lot of talk about male-defaultism these days. You know what else is totally male-default? Avatars in 3-D virtual worlds. At least if they can be modified in-world instead of being monoliths like from places like Ready Player Me.

Almost everytime an avatar system is being designed for virtual worlds, it's designed with only adult males in mind. Eventually, someone will ask the question, "Well, and how do we make female avatars?" It'll probably be those who design either the avatar parts if the avatars are sufficiently modular or the complete avatars if they're monolithic. But this won't occur before the avatar system is finalised to the point at which it can't be substantially reworked anymore.

If you're lucky, female avatars get a somewhat slimmer waist. Or a pair of boobs, maybe only one that's being hinted at by a single bulge. If you're very lucky, they get both. If you're unlucky, there's only one hard-coded body shape, and all they get is more feminine clothing for the upper body, maybe even painted onto the one body shape that's available. In fact, you'll probably have as many "clothing items" for women as for men, all of which were designed by guys. All of whom are software developers with next to no sense of fashion.

Oh, and you get female-looking hairstyles, none of which are even shoulder-long. Well, except maybe for one ponytail that stands off so far that it has no chance of clipping into the body because the head motion is too limited.

Seriously, though: Even if your virtual world system is only planned for purely professional purposes, i.e. business, industrial, governmental, organisational otherwise, and extra care is taken that it will never be used by anyone in their spare time, even then this won't nearly be sufficient. If you plan to hold formal (not necessarily as in business formal) events, it'll be even less sufficient. If it's supposed to be an all-purpose virtual world system, a "metaverse for everybody" that people will use in their spare time, it'll suck completely.

I dare say that I've been using 3-D virtual worlds for longer than most of those who design them from the ground up nowadays. I've been in OpenSim for five and a half years now. I've built both male and female avatars. So I know first-hand what it's like.

OpenSim's default avatar, which also used to be the default avatar in Second Life long long ago, is female. She is named Ruth. But she's based on an avatar system that's mostly geared towards male avatars, and her hairstyle is more of a mullet because this avatar system can't even grow hair over the ears, because guys don't normally wear their hair over their ears. She isn't even really pretty. She can easily be switched to her male pendant, Roth: A bit less shapely, no boobs, therefore abs and pecs, the hair is shorter, and the face changes a little.

Now, if you want to see what kinds of avatars people actually make in Second Life nowadays, just look around (content warnings: eye contact, mild female nudity) PrimFeed, the Flickr alternative created exclusively for Second Life users. These pictures were actually rendered in-world and not by an AI. They show actual Second Life avatars, often even daily-driver avatars, in actual Second Life environments.

Short hair? Long pants? Almost only on male avatars, if at all. And today's male avatars have even more chiseled abs than 22 years ago. And chiseled faces and chiseled everything.

Female avatars, on the other hand, are shapely like you wouldn't believe from a virtual world unless you've been there yourself. Big butts. Big boobs and actual boobs. Dresses. Skirts. Bikinis. Lingerie. High heels, almost never under 15cm or 6 inches, sometimes even higher with platform soles. And: long hair. And with "long hair" I mean lush long locks, not just longer than male hair.

By the way: Nothing of what you see in the images was supplied by Linden Lab. Everything that the avatars and the landscapes consist of was made by users. It has basically always been the users who drove Linden Lab to refining Second Life's avatar system, often by working around its limitations and repurposing features.

Sooner or later, users with female avatars will demand three things for them. Male-centric avatar systems will be unfit to deliver either.

Long hair
The challenge with long hair is to not only make it look natural and, especially, keep it from clipping into the body. Extra challenge: If the clothes aren't simply painted on, keep it from clipping into the clothes when the head moves.

Of course, this point is moot if avatars can't move their heads. Which Second Life and OpenSim avatars can.

Skirts and dresses
This point is moot if avatars don't have legs. You know, like in Meta Horizon or (formerly Mozilla) Hubs.

But if they do, then even in a strictly business environment, I wouldn't too firmly count on all women being content with putting trousers on their avatars. They will wish for pencil skirts.

Skirts and dresses will pose a whole bunch of challenges. None of them is to keep people from upskirting, especially if the camera can move independently from the avatar which it should be able to do in good virtual worlds. In fact, depending on how a skirt or dress is shaped, preventing upskirting can be quite trivial. So that isn't one of the challenges.

No, the first challenge is to rig skirts in such a way that the legs don't clip through them, no matter how the legs move. If you manage to get that done with one kind of skirt, try again with another nine kinds of skirts. Including a pencil skirt.

Think you got that pat down? Well, here's the next challenge: Rig them in such a way that they look good when the avatar is sitting. This is rather trivial with pencil skirts. Now try it with a circle skirt in such a way that the skirt doesn't stand off as if it's made of wood. Extra challenge: Try it with a 1950s poodle skirt. These are just about as unthinkable in virtual worlds as 50s-style corrugated stainless steel diners. Trust me, someone will build the latter.

If you think it's smart to simply hide the legs from the skirt hem upwards so they won't clip, this will come back to bite you once the avatar sits down.

By the way: Even Second Life has never managed the former, and neither has OpenSim. And the latter is hit-and-miss with more miss than hit, and it works best with the old "painted-on" system skirt.

The cherry on top would be if skirts still flowed halfway naturally, and if skirts with a looser fit swayed with the motion of the avatar. This requires not only at least a basic physics model, but also a collision system.

High heels
Again, this point is moot if avatars don't have legs. But if avatars don't have legs, they'll be ridiculed. Yes, they will.

It doesn't matter how high the heels have to be. They don't have to be 15cm spike heels. Or 30cm spike heels with 15cm platforms.

So you want a virtual business environment first and foremost. Then your female users will wish for footwear that isn't men's leather shoes. And not ballet flats or Mary Janes either. Something with at least slightly raised heels. Just like they'll wish for pencil skirts; see above.

Okay, so you may manage to put high-heeled shoes on your avatar. Now, the first challenge will be to get the avatar's feet into the shoes. You know, the same feet that are firmly rigged into a flat position because that's all you need for male avatars (until someone comes and wants to cosplay Dr Frank N. Furter).

So you've reworked large parts of your avatar system to allow for other foot positions than flat? Good luck. Now adjust the avatar's Z position accordingly because the feet and the shoes are clipping into the floor. Ready to pump another few thousand man-hours into something else that you didn't take into consideration when designing your avatar system?

In Second Life and OpenSim, the former could only be solved in a satisfactory way by attaching different feet. Or, in the case of mesh bodies from Second Life, by giving it a whole bunch of feet in various positions and using a HUD to make the appropriate pair visible and the other ones invisible. The latter requires manual adjustment or some long forgotten trickery from almost two decades ago.

Finally...
I've read about four worlds and world systems that have tackled at least the former two points, namely by implementing a basic skeleton-based physics system that's a big upgrade in comparison to flexi prims in Second Life and OpenSim. Its big advantage is a basic collision model that makes hair and skirts (and anything else that needs it that you want to attach to your avatar) nicely flowy with little to no risk of clipping.

The thing is: Sansar was launched by Linden Lab as a kind of Second Life successor. That was at a point at which Second Life already had user-made, highly detailed fitted mesh bodies from various vendors.

High Fidelity was launched by Philip Rosedale. Also known as Philip Linden. The guy who invented Second Life in the first place and who led it for many years.

Well, and Vircadia is a High Fidelity fork, and Overte is a Vircadia fork.

This goes to show how virtual worlds are developed by people who have years upon years of experience with already existing virtual worlds and their users and creations.

And it goes to show that even reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (which, by the way, introduced the word "metaverse" as early as 1991) doesn't give you the knowledge that personal experience with and in virtual worlds does. For Philip Rosedale has read it, and it has inspired him to make Second Life in the first place. But it has not inspired him to add certain elements for building female avatars right off the bat.

Unfortunately, however, even being prepared for that won't necessarily save a virtual world: Both Sansar and High Fidelity are no more. But that wasn't due to their avatar systems.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Horizon #HorizonWorlds #MetaHorizon #Sansar #HighFidelity #Vircadia #Overte #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Avatar #Avatars #MaleCentric #MaleCentricism #MaleDefault #MaleDefaultism

@Jupiter Rowland Here's the official website, by the way: ...

2025-11-08T22:34:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…fuax
_________________________

@Jupiter Rowland Here's the official website, by the way:

https://www.syntheticdreams.info/

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #VirtualArt #TheWrong #TheWrongBiennale #WrongBiennale

@Juno Rowland and I are at an art event for a change, but one ...

2025-11-08T21:56:52Z

@Juno Rowland and I are at an art event for a change, but one that only happens every two years: The Wrong Biennale. Not in real life, of course, but at one of the virtual locations, the Kitely Expo Center. This virtual expo is named Synthetic Dreams, and it is explained as "a collaboration between artist and algorithm in the age of AI".

Amazingly, it only took two months to set up.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Kitely #VirtualArt #TheWrong #TheWrongBiennale #WrongBiennale

Good news: It was fixed already yesterday. Guess the hotfix will ...

2025-11-08T11:45:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…yl2r
_________________________

Good news: It was fixed already yesterday. Guess the hotfix will be rolled out soon.

Just because it works under your very limited and controlled lab ...

2025-11-08T10:03:05Z

Just because it works under your very limited and controlled lab conditions, doesn't mean it will work just as well under real-life conditions.

A few may remember the summer of 2024 when (streams) rolled out FEP-171b. It broke federation in every imaginable way because, as it turned out later, (streams) suddenly confused the many different IDs it had to juggle. Granted, the byproduct of trying to fix this was Forte, the first Fediverse server software to provide nomadic identity via nothing but ActivityPub.

Now Hubzilla rolled out FEP-e232. And there's breakage again. Not quite as badly, but in places that really hurt.

So the talk of the town in the Fediverse is Mastodon 4.5 introducing quote-posts. (Mastodon 4.5 allegedly introducing quote-posts to the Fediverse, and how that's wrong, is another story.)

Interestingly, almost at the same time, Hubzilla 10.6 was rolled out. Money quote from the announcement:

Implement FEP-e232 (object links) for quote posts
FEP-e232 Object Links in practice usually = "quote-posts like Misskey" = linking to the original with "RE:" before the link.

Apparently, rather than what Hubzilla had been doing since 2012 when it was still Red. What Friendica has been doing since its own inception in 2010. Namely insert a dumb copy of the quoted post into the quoting post.

While (streams) and Forte have been supporting FEP-e232 under the bonnet for quite a while while still quote-posting with dumb copies, Hubzilla has decided to go all the way and replace the old-fashioned Friendica way of quote-posting entirely with the Misskey way that's all the rage in the Fediverse now.

Yes, this has its advantages. If the original is edited, then the edit (in theory) is reflected in all posts that quote-post it.

But here on Hubzilla, this switch causes trouble.

Mastodon rolled out rendering support for Misskey-style quote-posts before rolling out quote-posts themselves, so those Mastodon servers that can't render these quote-posts are hopelessly outdated.

Hubzilla, on the other hand, rolled out Misskey-style quote-posts with version 10.6 while 10.4 and older can't even render Misskey-style quote-posts, not even when they come straight from a *key. In this regard, it would have been smarter to first make sure that Hubzilla renders this kind of quote-posts, then wait for a few minor releases and then change the way Hubzilla quote-posts.

You may see this as just a minor nuisance. But on top of that, it breaks Hubzilla's forums.

See, Hubzilla's forums are based on quote-posts. You start a new thread by DM'ing to a forum, and the forum will automatically share (quote-post) your start post to all forum members. If it's a private, limited-access forum, only the forum members are permitted to see the post with your quoted post in it.

I guess it's kind of obvious that this can only work by quote-posting a dumb copy of the start post unless a few more stops are being pulled.

Now, however, forums on Hubzilla 10.6 quote-post start posts by linking to the original. Remember that the original is a DM to the forum. As in only the forum is permitted to see it. You can click the link to the original all you want. But unless you run the forum, Hubzilla will not let you see it, not even with all the OpenWebAuth magic sign-on that you have on yourself as a Hubzilla user. In fact, I'd be very worried if I could see it now.

If there was even only one active forum on one of the two public hubs that run development versions, this critical bug would have popped up earlier and been fixed before it would have hit a release. But apparently, nobody is crazy enough to run a forum on a dev-grade hub, not to mention how few active Hubzilla forums there are in the first place. Seriously, I wonder if there's any feedback coming from the two dev hubs because I never see any hit the Support Forum. Does it all go straight to Framagit?

Good thing hubzilla.org is still running Hubzilla 10.4. hubzilla.org is not only the official Hubzilla website, it's actually a Hubzilla hub itself. The official Hubzilla website is built on a Hubzilla channel, using the Webpages app. And hubzilla.org is home of the Hubzilla Support Forum. It would have been a disaster, had this forum been broken, too.

I guess there's a hotfix due now, even if it means reverting FEP-e232 support (although changing the permissions of a DM to a forum channel would do the trick, and looking at how (streams) and Forte do it would be even smarter). And I hope it'll come before hubzilla.org is upgraded to 10.6.

By the way, while it's at it, maybe Hubzilla could also permanently set that GoToSocial/Mastodon flag that allows being quote-posted. I mean, if you come to a place that has been able to quote-post for a whopping 13 years, that can quote-post any public content from anywhere in the Fediverse with zero resistance, and that has no control over whether or not your stuff can be quote-posted (other than not posting in public), it's safe to assume that you're okay with your stuff being quote-posted anyway.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Misskey #GoToSocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Forums #Groups #FediverseGroups #FediGroups #FEP_e232

So I've picked up an image description project again that ...

2025-11-02T19:43:34Z

So I've picked up an image description project again that I've started about a year ago. I wanted to publish a series of avatar portrait pictures, each with three or four portraits of my OpenSim avatar on them, always in the same pose, always in front of a neutral background that won't take me days to describe, but in slightly different outfits.

The current status:

As for the short description that shall go into the alt-text, a first experimental draft was written for a picture with three portraits. But it exceeds 1,500 characters, and I don't know what to cut from it. In fact, I'll probably have to add even more characters to explain some fashion jargon.

For the set of long descriptions that shall go into the post text itself, the preamble with explanations and common descriptions was written. But I'll have to re-write it partially. It's ripe with jargon, and jargon must be avoided in image descriptions. If that isn't possible, jargon must be explained all the way down to the very basics until absolutely everyone understands it with no prior knowledge.

The preamble starts with a very short introduction that says what the image roughly shows. It is followed by a description of the visual style, again followed by an explanation what OpenSim is which includes an explanation what Second Life is. I'm currently rewriting this part; I guess it'll end up over 2,500 characters long.

It is followed by a bit over 600 characters that describe and explain the background, including that the neutral, bright white background makes it impossible to discern where exactly the images were made.

The next part is the biggest part of the preamble. It explains how avatars are built in Second Life and OpenSim. It's an info dump with currently almost 10,000 characters that goes all the way down to the basic building blocks in Second Life and OpenSim, and that's likely to grow even longer. This is extremely complex niche knowledge, so I have a whole lot to explain, especially if I want to avoid using unexplained jargon. But it's critical for understanding the following sections, including the visual descriptions. Also, if my readers had to ask me things or look stuff up themselves in order to understand the post, that wouldn't really be accessible.

This part is followed by a general visual description of my avatar, i.e. what all portraits within one post have in common. It includes things from all clothing to the camera position. Right now, it is over 5,000 characters long. It may grow even longer if the terms for certain parts of clothes or shoes count as jargon and need to be explained (shank buttons, Berlebeck-style shank buttons in particular, or the various parts of a men's leather shoe).

One big problem is caused by the shoes. The kind of shoes my avatar is wearing in the images I've started with probably don't exist in real life, so I have to give a fully detailed description of all details, even though (or actually because) these details are actually hardly visible in the images. Right now, the description of the shoes is one paragraph with almost 2,000 characters. Since it contains jargon, it will probably grow even longer, but I'll have to split it into multiple paragraphs.

There are portraits in which my avatar is wearing full brogue shoes. I'm still not sure whether it's common knowledge among blind and visually-impaired people what full brogue shoes are, and what they generally look like.

Also, the first image with three portraits has its individual description. Right now, this part alone has almost 2,500 characters, and it's likely to grow even longer if I have more things to explain. All in all, I plan to have three or four images in each post. I actually have dozens of images of this kind, but I can't shove them all into one post. For one, I don't want too different outfits in one post. Besides, Mastodon can't show more than four images, no matter how many I put into one post, so nobody on Mastodon will even know that there are more than four images. Alternatively, I could write a non-federating article instead of a post and then send a post with a link to the article. But nobody on Mastodon will ever read that.

The other individual descriptions are still unwritten, but they may be shorter since they can rely on not only the preamble, but also the first description.

All in all, I still don't know when I'll be done with describing the images for one post, much less all of them. But what I know is that when I'm done, all image descriptions combined will be as long as a novel.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #Inclusion #A11y #Accessibility #CWImageDescriptionMeta #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #SecondLife #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds

The third annual Bunker Party has started about half an hour ago, ...

2025-11-01T19:38:56Z

The third annual Bunker Party has started about half an hour ago, and it's our first visit there. (@Juno Rowland is with me again.) The musical motto, as usual, is that the unusual is usual. It's happening inside LyAvain Swansong's private bunker in Dereos. Maybe you know Ly from Star Citizen. And right now she is playing music from Star Citizen. This is probably the most harmless part of the evening.

We'll have three more DJs tonight, including @Akira and Xenos Yifu who are known for taking notes at each other's DJ sets.

The sim is not listed on OSW as it's a private residential sim, so there won't be any visitors who have just teleported where an OSW beacon told them that there are a few more avatars. Everyone who'll come here tonight will know what's going on.

Still, if there was a random visitor, they'd first have to find their way to the entrance to the bunker, then they'd have to get into the bunker, and then they'd have to find their way through the bunker. By the way, all signs are in German. Every other OpenSim avatar can only find parties that happen right in front of or around them anyway.

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #VirtualEvent #Dereos #StarCitizen

@Kris If you have any questions about (streams), don't try ...

2025-10-30T17:28:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…ttpf
_________________________

@Kris If you have any questions about (streams), don't try the Mastodon way and "shout into the ether" with a hashtag or two.

Instead, join the @Streams/Forte Tea Garden group and ask there. Important: You must join it from (streams). It has turned ActivityPub off, so you can't join it from Mastodon.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams)

Current status of my image description/alt-text wiki here on ...

2025-10-29T12:39:03Z

Current status of my image description/alt-text wiki here on Hubzilla: 17 pages with another 20 planned, backed by almost 50 webpages and blog posts with alt-text and image description guidelines.

In case you're wondering: What most of these webpages and blog posts try to do on one page, I build an entire wiki with dozens of pages about. The goal is to one day have an ideally all-encompassing source of information on how to describe images and write alt-texts for the Fediverse. This is already (and still) the only such guide that touches the Fediverse outside of Mastodon.

Sole exception: I won't walk you through Fediverse Web interfaces or mobile apps step by step and explain how to add alt-text to an image.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #Hubzilla #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Accessibility #A11y #Inclusion #Wiki

I guess my multi-tasking abilities will be put to the test ...

2025-10-28T20:24:32Z

I guess my multi-tasking abilities will be put to the test tomorrow evening.

For one, there's the second German Hubzilla workshop. This time, I even have to present something myself. Half an hour earlier, Dereos will use its last-Wednesday-of-the-month event to inaugurate a new event sim. I could manage to juggle these two. @Juno Rowland is fairly likely to go; not sure about myself. At least I can simply leave it running.

But then there's also the @HG Safari which is on Wednesdays, too, and which will start half an hour after the Hubzilla workshop. I haven't been there in a while. HG Safaris always require full attention because there's constantly something happening, and you have to walk around the location yourself.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Dereos #HGSafari

@deutrino Forte Advantages: written in PHP, runs on a LAMP ...

2025-10-27T17:04:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…5cu5
_________________________

@deutrino

Forte

Advantages:

written in PHP, runs on a LAMP stackuses much fewer system resources than Mastodon while being magnitudes more powerfulcomes with a git-based update scriptresult of over 15 years of development (traces back to Friendica from 2010)developed by a retired professional developer with almost half a century of experience who has made more Fediverse server apps than anyone else and even more decentralised protocols than anyone elsedoes not cache everyone's images and mediaFacebook-like; not a microblogging systemhighly configurable Web UIyour login/account is not your identity; you can have as many fully independent channels/identities (each corresponding to one full-blown Mastodon account) on the same login/account and switch between them without logging outnomadic identity; if you run another server (or you find a public server, and Forte doesn't have any), you can clone your channel between multiple servers and make it resilient against server outageover 24 million charactersfull set of text formatting, using BBcode, Markdown and HTMLsupports both titles and summaries (Mastodon understands summaries as CWs)embed as many images as you want within the post (as in text, image, more text, another image, even more text etc., like a blog post)can double as a long-form blogcan optionally send multiple-paragraph posts as Article-type objectsthe most advanced permissions system in the whole Fediversefull support for threaded conversations; see entire conversations by default instead of single-message piecemeal like on Mastodon; supports FEP-171b Conversation Containers
supports groups; built-in group functionality including moderated groups and private groups as well as hiding groups (and other channels) from directorieshas at least one support group on (streams)built-in cloud file storage which is also used for embedded images; ties into the permissions system; WebDAV connectivitybuilt-in federating event calendarbuilt-in headless CalDAV calendar serverbuilt-in headless CardDAV addressbook serverhighly modular, comes with lots of add-ons called "apps"
Disadvantages:

steep learning curve, especially if all you're used to are Twitter and Mastodon (this looks, feels and handles absolutely nothing like Mastodon, so you'll have to relearn everything from the ground up and learn tons of stuff on top)does not cosy up to Mastodon at all, makes few to no concessions for more compatibility with Mastodonwill need configuration before you can really get starteddoesn't post in public by default; configuration needed if you want to always post in publicpoor documentationdoesn't work with any phone app out there; progressive Web app with the Web interface is the best you can do on a phone
Advantage or disadvantage, decide for yourself:

implements ActivityPub by the book (whereas other Fediverse server applications "implement Mastodon" rather than implementing ActivityPub)
(streams)

How it compares to Forte:

direct precursor of Forte which is forked from itfrom the same developerofficially and intentionally nameless and brandless ("streams" is the name of the code repository)has at least two public, open-registration servers, but they're hard to finduses the same support groupbased on its own protocol, Nomad, which has even better support for nomadic identity; ActivityPub is optional and on by default on new channelscannot clone from or to Forte
Hubzilla

How it compares to (streams):

older than Mastodon (forked from a Friendica fork in 2011, development started in 2012, became Hubzilla in 2015, still 10 months before Mastodon)created by the same developer, now maintained by two other devsserver lists readily available on FediDB and Fediverse Observer (in case you want to try it first or clone to a public server)even steeper learning curveActivityPub is off by default for new channels, must be activated in order for Hubzilla to federate with most of the rest of the Fediversecan optionally federate with diaspora* as wellcan subscribe to RSS and Atom feedsrequires another bit more of configuration before you can get startedway better documentation written by a userone public and multiple private profiles per channel, can be assigned to certain contactsover 16.7 million characterstext formatting only with BBcodecannot send Article-type objects, always sends Note-type objectsthe second-most advanced permissions system in the Fediverse (a bit more complicated and less adapted to today's Fediverse; also, not quite as detailed reply control)even more configurable UICalDAV calendar can use the event calender UIoptional non-federating long-form articlesoptional non-federating wikis (as in multiple wikis per channel with multiple pages per wiki)optional non-federating "planning cards"optional non-federating webpages
Here you can find lists with detailed comparisons between Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

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

So Amazon Web Services was offline for a few hours, taking a lot ...

2025-10-20T14:44:43Z

So Amazon Web Services was offline for a few hours, taking a lot of other services with itself, including Second Life.

I simply had to revive my OpenSim-focused (streams) channel, @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet, and spork that outage from an OpenSim point of view; (content warning: eye contact, alcohol) find my sporkage here. (You'll have to click at least twice to see the image.)

#OpenSim #OpenSimulator #SecondLife #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Amazon #AmazonWebServices #AWS #Meme

When I describe my images, I do so under a few assumptions. One: ...

2025-10-19T20:16:03Z

When I describe my images, I do so under a few assumptions.

One: My audience is not limited to my following contacts. It's absolutely everyone who comes across any of my posts.

It isn't sufficient to make my posts accessible to those who have chosen to follow me. I must make them just as accessible to a random stranger who receives them after they've been boosted a dozen times over. I must make them just as accessible to a random stranger who stumbles upon them on the public timeline of whatever server they're on.

Two: If an element in an image is mentioned, it must also be described visually.

Blind or visually-impaired people always need to know what something in my images looks like. This goes doubly for my typical original images; I mean, how are they supposed to know what something looks like in a specific 3-D virtual world?

So if there's a building in one of my images, and I mention that this building is there, I also have to give a visual description of it. A full, detailed description.

If there's an image in one of my images, e.g. a preview image on a teleporter that shows the place where the teleporter would take me, I have to fully describe that image. An image in my image that doesn't even take up 200 pixels in my image. (Something that I've refused to do in my longest image description so far because that would have led me to going at least four levels deep: describing loads of infinitely small images in several dozen infinitely small images in an image in my image.)

In fact, this isn't an assumption. I have written confirmation for it. I can't find it right now, otherwise I'd share it here, but I have it somewhere.

Three: Image descriptions must always deliver all information that someone may need right away.

Not everyone wants to ask for a description of a certain detail in an image. Not everyone wants to ask for an explanation of what they don't understand or what they're unfamiliar with. Having to look things up yourself isn't much better. Some may go as far as likening not having an image description that contains everything they need to know to not having any image description.

By the way: It's a fact that some Mastodon users consider linking to external information ableist because linked websites aren't necessarily sufficiently accessible themselves. Instead of linking to information, the information must go into the post itself. (And I can't even use any character limit as an excuse not to do that because my "limit" is over 16.7 million.)

In other words, the only way for me not to be ableist is to give any and all information that anyone out there may require in my image post immediately.

Of course, this will clash with the demand by other Mastodon users (or maybe even some of the same) to never post more than 500 characters at once. But I can't do both. And I've never read anywhere that posting more than 500 characters is allegedly ableist.

Four: Someone somewhere out there may be interested in even small details in my image. And they may not be sighted.

Maybe you aren't. But someone somewhere out there may be. And they matter every bit as much as you or everyone else.

If they need a full description of all details, regardless of why, I have to deliver it. Immediately. See above.

Five: Any and all text within the borders of the image must be transcribed verbatim, no exception.

Most importantly, this even extends to text that's unreadable in the image if I can read and/or source it.

The assumptions further up apply here as well: If I mention it (the text in this case, and be it as part of the visual description of something else like a teleporter), then I must describe (as in transcribe) it. And someone somewhere out there may be interested in it.

If this means that I have to transcribe not one or two, but 20, 30, 40 bits of text in one image, then so be it, so are the rules.

Just because nobody on Mastodon does it, doesn't mean they're doing it right, and I'm doing it wrong. Maybe they don't know what that unreadable text says. Maybe they don't know that someone wants to know what's written there.

Six: All images must have an accurate and sufficiently detailed proper alt-text.

I can spend two days, morning to evening, working on an image description of 60,000 characters. 10,000 words. Three hours worth of reading. I can put the whole thing into the same post as the image. As in the post text body. As opposed to the alt-text for which this description is way too long.

But if the image in the post doesn't have an actual alt-text (and, again, it doesn't because the image description is in the post text itself), Mastodon's alt-text police is likely and fully justified to sanction me regardless.

So no matter how long and detailed and well-researched the long image description in the post is, I still have to distill an additional, shorter image description for the alt-text from it. And I have to do so without cutting too much information. Ideally, without cutting any information. If any of my images need a long description in the post, they need two descriptions, the long one in the post, the shorter one in the alt-text.

Leaving the several dozen individual text transcripts out of the description for the alt-text is risky already because text transcripts belong into the alt-text.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta #Inclusion #Inclusivity #A11y #Accessibility

So OpenSimFest 2025 has started. But there hasn't been any ...

2025-10-19T18:52:44Z

So OpenSimFest 2025 has started. But there hasn't been any announcement whatsoever, at least not recently. Even the official OpenSimFest website is dead as OpenSimFest is ongoing. OpenSimFest will span 16 days, but you only learn that in-world, too.

The grid is down to one normal expo sim; the other "expo" sim is the home of the fenced-in zombie zone now. It's a far cry from 2022 and 2023 with their many expo sims, also because several very prolific exhibitors haven't been at OpenSimFest since 2023.

Also, the grid seems to have become painfully slow. It isn't laggy, there's no rubber-banding. But things rez rather slowly. Anything below the lowest mesh LOD only shows when I'm close and even then sometimes only after one or two minutes. Some objects take that long to appear in the first place. I've got my doubts that the recent Firestorm beta is to blame.

At least there are more exhibits on that one expo sim. Last year, OpenSim World's Fair in the Wolf Territories hogged so many resources that about half of the few remaining expo parcels at OSFest remained vacant and had to be used as impromptu Arcadia Asylum showcases upon short notice so that there was at least something on the land. Now we have things like a tiny Venice exhibit built by Cooper Swizzle, complete with a keyframed gondola ride.

Speaking of Kitely, Kimm Starr has brought back the fairground freak show that had to be removed when Coopersville was shrunk prior to being passed to its new owner. (By the way, Coopersville is not named after Cooper Swizzle. That's coincidence.)

Surprisingly little is still a work in progress on the first day. Then again, the sole expo sim is entirely in use.

After last year's break, Remmy Ravenhurst is back with her products, including an assortment of freebies. She even brought something new, namely free boxes with textures from which PBR materials can be made and free boxes with untextured mesh models. Since they are full-perm, it's possible to export the roughness texture and convert it into a specular texture for Blinn-Phong.

In general, the usage of the two Stores sims has improved, and that isn't only because the northern one of the two Stores sims is down to only two big stores. Still, as usual, there isn't a single freebie store; all stores offer payware either mostly or only.

What still makes me wonder are the clothes that are being sold, often for prices that appear to be converted from Linden dollars to Gloebits 1:1, regardless of the Gloebit being more expensive than the Linden dollar.

There are boxes with classic layer and prim clothes that must be well over a decade old, and yet, in real-life currency, they cost more than a comparable fitted mesh outfit with PBR materials and Blinn-Phong fallback textures costs in Second Life. Then there are boxes with mesh clothes that are rigged for mesh bodies of which not a single one is officially being sold in OpenSim. So in order to be able to wear these legally bought clothes, you need a pirated mesh body.

Interestingly, the grid was not reset since last year. I'm still a member of the OSFest Participant group.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #VirtualEvent #OpenSimFest #OSFest #OSFest2025

@Doris :fediverse:🦉🇪🇺 Wie schon beim letzten Mal gesagt, ...

2025-10-12T16:51:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…tgp8
_________________________

@Doris :fediverse:🦉🇪🇺 Wie schon beim letzten Mal gesagt, genau an dem Tag kann ich leider nicht.

Okay, everyone, sit down. I'll tell you a few things about ...

2025-09-21T19:42:56Z

Okay, everyone, sit down. I'll tell you a few things about Mastodon's quote-post feature that you know nothing about. Definitely not if all you know is Mastodon. Oh, and by the way, in case you don't know yet in spite of following me: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon.

Mastodon has been quote-post-able for as long as it has been around
Eugen Rochko is bringing quote-posts to Mastodon. But he is not bringing quote-posts to the Fediverse. The Fediverse has had quote-posts for 15 years.

It was Mike Macgirvin who introduced quote-posts to the Fediverse in July, 2010, when he launched something called Mistpark back then and Friendica today (https://friendi.ca, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica). That was five and a half years before Mastodon was launched.

In fact, when Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated itself with Friendica and with Hubzilla, a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator which has quote-posts, too. So when Mastodon was launched, it immediately became possible to quote-post Mastodon toots. Not on Mastodon itself, but on Friendica and Hubzilla.

Just about everything that isn't Mastodon has already got quote-posts right now
Here are a few (but not even all) Fediverse server applications that already have quote-posts:

Pleroma
Akkoma
Misskey
Firefish
Iceshrimp
Sharkey
CherryPick
Catodon
Mitra
Friendica
Hubzilla
(streams)
Forte
And they're all part of the Fediverse which means that they're all connected to Mastodon. People on all of these can theoretically read your Mastodon toots. And people on all of these can theoretically quote-post your Mastodon toots.

Mastodon's quote-post opt-in is not a water-tight defence against being quote-posted
So you can choose not to be quote-posted. But you can only choose not to be quote-posted by Mastodon users. This opt-in does not work with the rest of the Fediverse.

First of all, that's because Mastodon's quote-post feature is not compatible with anything else out there. Mastodon's developers have chosen to re-invent the quote-posting wheel from scratch. They've intentionally chosen to do so in a way that's completely incompatible with everything else out there.

Their intention was to reinforce Mastodon's appearance to its own users as the one and only Fediverse and ActivityPub gold standard and to make Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon, Mitra, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte etc. look broken. It's part of their plan to keep Mastodon users on Mastodon in the wake of Mastodon's market share in the Fediverse shrinking.

Also, they did not publish any specifications on their quote-post implementation, so even those non-Mastodon developers who are fast enough didn't have a chance to implement support for Mastodon's opt-in.

This means that even if you've set your posts to un-quote-post-able on Mastodon, everything I've listed above can still quote-post you with no resistance.

Absolute Fediverse-wide protection against being quote-posted is impossible
And don't get your hopes high that the day will come when nobody on the Fediverse will be able to quote-post you, whether they're on Mastodon or not. Such a setting is technologically impossible.

Who says that? Mike Macgirvin says that. The guy who launched Friendica and brought quote-posts to the Fediverse 15 years ago, remember? This guy has built the Fediverse's most elaborate, most complex, most fine-grained, most advanced permissions system into (streams) and Forte.

These two have reply control, the kind of which you couldn't image in your wildest dreams. I'm serious. They have permissions settings for almost everything on two or three levels, for your whole channel, individually per contact and sometimes even per post or per file or folder in the file storage.

But they don't have quote-post permission settings. Because that's impossible to enforce Fediverse-wide. And even if it was possible, it'd be pointless. If they can't quote-post you, they'll copy-paste you. If they can't copy-paste you either because they're on a phone, they'll post screenshots of your toots.

Mike also says, there is exactly one way to keep people from quote-posting you, and that's by not posting in public. Unfortunately, unlike what he has created, Mastodon has little between "public" and "DM", if anything.

Mastodon cannot quote-post the non-Mastodon Fediverse
This may be the big surprise: It has recently been discovered by chance that Mastodon's quote-post feature only works with Mastodon toots.

On the one hand, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Sharkey, Friendica, Hubzilla etc. can quote-post just about everything that comes in from Mastodon. But on the other hand, no Mastodon 4.5 user will be able to quote-post anything from either of these. Or from Pixelfed or PeerTube or Loops or Castopod or WriteFreely or whatever.

That's because Mastodon is looking for a quote-post opt-in. But nothing else in the Fediverse supports Mastodon's quote-post opt-in, also seeing as it's still officially in development. And it's highly unlikely that everything in the Fediverse will adopt another piece of non-standard, proprietary Mastodon tech.

"Quote" actually means something else
Lastly, Mastodon has the audacity to call this feature "quote".

A "quote" is something else. Remember forums? Like, bulletin-board forums with subforums and all? Where posts are quoted in follow-ups, entirely or only partially? That's what a quote is. That has got nothing to do with quote-posts.

Why I say that there's a difference? Because I also say that Friendica has had both quotes and quote-posts.

It has had them for 15 years, both quotes (which it calls "quotes", go figure) and quote-posts (which it calls "quoted shares", and which include the original author of the quoted post, complete with their profile picture and a clickable link to them, as well as a clickable link to the original post).

Hubzilla has both. (streams) has both. Forte has both. And I wouldn't be surprised if other Fediverse server software had both, too.

The irony is that Mastodon itself has been able to render actual quotes since version 4.0 from October, 2022. At the same time, it will continue to be unable to render any quote-posts done outside of Mastodon for the foreseeable future.

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

@Scott Jenson The "can't see all replies" is a deeply ...

2025-06-20T14:09:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…c6w4
_________________________

@Scott Jenson The "can't see all replies" is a deeply hard federation problem but we have an incoming fix for that!
You mean the kind of "fix for that" that Friendica when it was launched into the Fediverse 15 years ago? Namely full awareness and support of threaded, one-post-many-comments conversations?

Or, better yet, Conversation Containers as created by Friendica's creator in his own streams repository, then inherited by his own Forte, then backported to his original creation Hubzilla as per FEP-171b?

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

In the cases of some Mastodon users, I actually wonder if ...

2025-06-11T11:26:44Z

In the cases of some Mastodon users, I actually wonder if it's worth telling them a) that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, b) that I'm on something that's very very much not Mastodon and c) the implications of all this. Especially if they give the impression of wanting the Fediverse to be only Mastodon oh so very much.

Or whether I should simply Superblock them so that they'll never appear on my stream again.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Superblock

If you talk about non-Mastodon Fediverse server software, always ...

2025-06-07T08:28:09Z

If you talk about non-Mastodon Fediverse server software, always mention that it's part of the Fediverse.

There are people in the Fediverse who read your message, but who don't know the software that you're talking about, and who don't know that it's in the Fediverse. In addition, there are people on Mastodon who are still fully convinced that "Fediverse" refers to an alleged Mastodon network, that the Fediverse is only Mastodon.

Also, always mention that the software you're talking about is connected to Mastodon. If you say it's in the Fediverse, that doesn't automatically imply for everyone that it's connected to Mastodon.

Case in point: Early this year, there were lots of people who were on both Mastodon and Facebook, and who wanted to migrate away from Facebook. So they created Friendica accounts because they had read somewhere that Friendica is "the Facebook alternative in the Fediverse", and they wanted their friends to move to Friendica, too.

Why didn't they invite their friends to Friendica and follow them from Mastodon instead? Did they want to move away from Mastodon as well and use something better instead? No. Did they want to try Friendica so that they could help their friends with it? No.

No, they moved to Friendica because they thought they'd have to in order to be in touch with other Friendica users. After they had learned that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon, that there's also Pixelfed and PeerTube and, well, Friendica, they thought that "Fediverse" refers to a bunch of decentralised networks which, however, are completely isolated from one another. They're all totally different things that run totally different software after all. Mastodon users can only follow Mastodon users, Friendica users can only follow Friendica users. Why should it be any different?

Well, and then someone told them that, in fact, Mastodon and Friendica are connected. Like, you can follow a Friendica user from Mastodon. That was completely unimaginable to them until they tried following their own Friendica account with their own Mastodon account. And they succeeded. So much to their surprise that they stared at the successfully established connection between a Twitter clone and a Facebook alternative like a deer staring at the high beams of your car at night.

To you, it's only natural that "Fediverse" means everything is connected. But to many Mastodon users, this concept is completely alien until you explicitly mention it to them.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica

I'm very certain that there are people on Mastodon who have ...

2025-06-07T07:21:19Z

I'm very certain that there are people on Mastodon who

have joined in autumn of 2022 or even earlierhave only ever used the official Mastodon mobile app, but never a third-party app or even the Web interfacedon't even know that Mastodon has a Web interface in the first place because it's just another phone app to themfollow a four-digit number of Fediverse actors, all of which are on Mastodon
are fully convinced that the Fediverse is only Mastodon, and Mastodon is an enclosed network that doesn't connect to anything else
I'm just as convinced that there are people on Mastodon to whom largely the same applies with one difference: They do not only follow Mastodon users. But they think they do. That's because those on Pixelfed, Sharkey, Friendica etc. whom they follow happen to never get caught behaving in ways that Mastodon users may find odd, they never even get caught posting more than 500 characters at once, and they never point out that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon. And seriously, if you've never heard of Pixelfed, you may believe that even pixelfed.social is another Mastodon server.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

@Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸 At least you probably ...

2025-06-05T07:06:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…6e63
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@Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸 At least you probably already knew that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon. I mean, I see you follow not only Bluesky users via Bridgy Fed, but also a few Pixelfed accounts.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

@Week in Fediverse :fediverse_light: Also, the 25.5.14 "15th ...

2025-05-17T18:46:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…9ymu
_________________________

@Week in Fediverse :fediverse_light: Also, the 25.5.14 "15th anniversary" releases of the streams repository and Forte.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Streams #(streams) #Forte #WeekInFediverse

Theory: If you've been on Friendica or Hubzilla for a certain ...

2025-04-16T20:22:23Z

Theory:

If you've been on Friendica or Hubzilla for a certain minimum amount of time, and you've got diaspora* on, you'll inevitably have connections on diaspora* proper.

It's a law of nature, only not actually of nature, but more of the Fediverse.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #diaspora*

@Joaquim Homrighausen @Kevin Beaumont To be fair, full data ...

2025-03-26T09:03:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…3lu0
_________________________

@Joaquim Homrighausen @Kevin Beaumont To be fair, full data portability via ActivityPub has only been available in a stable release of anything for two weeks.

That was when @Mike Macgirvin 🖥️'s Forte, created in mid-August of 2024 as a fork of his own streams repository and the latest member of a family of software that started in 2010 with Friendica, had its very first official stable release.

And, in fact, Forte just uses ActivityPub to do something that (streams) and its predecessors all the way to the Red Matrix from 2012 (known as Hubzilla since 2015) have been doing using the Nomad protocol (formerly known as Zot). It's called nomadic identity. This is technology that's over a dozen years old on software that was built around this technology from the get-go, only that it was recently ported to ActivityPub.

Now, nomadic identity via ActivityPub was @silverpill's idea. He wanted to make his Mitra nomadic. He started working in 2023. The first conversion of existing non-nomadic server software to nomadic still isn't fully done, much less officially rolled out as a stable release.

If Mastodon actually wanted to implement nomadic identity, they would first have to wait until Mitra has a first stable nomadic release. Then they would have to wait until nomadic identity on Mitra (and between Mitra and Forte) has become stable and reliable under daily non-lab conditions. (Support for nomadic identity via ActivityPub on (streams) worked nicely under lab conditions. When it was rolled out to the release branch, and existing instances upgraded to it, it blew up in everyone's faces, and it took months for things to stabilise again.)

Then they would have to look at how silverpill has done it and how Mike has done it. Then they would have to swallow their pride and decide to adopt technology that they can't present as their own original invention because it clearly isn't. And they would have to swallow their pride again and decide against making it incompatible with Mitra, Forte and (streams) just to make these three look broken and inferior to Mastodon.

And only then they could actually start coding.

Now look at how long silverpill has been working on rebuilding Mitra into something nomadic. This takes a whole lot of modifications because the concept of identity itself has to be thrown overboard and redefined because your account will no longer be your identity and vice versa. Don't expect them to be done in a few months.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Mitra #RedMatrix #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #DataPortability #NomadicIdentity