@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

@klu9 @Leigh Silvester First of all, Friendica is a Facebook alternative. It was designed as such.

However, it was designed as a better-than-Facebook-itself Facebook alternative with a lot of useful extra features and without a lot of Facebook-typical cruft. And not as an all-out, 1:1 Facebook clone. It was made almost 16 years ago, in a time when a decentralised alternative to something didn't absolutely have to be a nearly identical clone.

Friendica does have groups; there's the official group directory. So does Hubzilla which was made by Friendica's own creator from a fork of a fork of Friendica, so they're similar.

However, groups on Friendica and forums on Hubzilla are a lot different from groups on Facebook, especially if you want to have your own group. On Facebook, groups are a wholly separate feature of their own.

On Friendica, a group is just another account, but configured differently. Likewise, on Hubzilla, a forum is just another channel (on Hubzilla, your identity is not your account and not tied to your login), but, again, configured differently. (streams) and Forte, the two still existing more recent Hubzilla descendants from still the same creator, have groups in much the same fashion as Hubzilla's forums.

Friendica groups are not limited to users on the same Friendica node. In fact, anyone anywhere on Friendica, on Hubzilla, on (streams), on Forte, on Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, any of the Forkeys etc. can join Friendica groups and Hubzilla forums and interact with them. Yes, you can join Friendica groups with your existing Mastodon account.

Basically, how they work (within the Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte family and with a Mastodon translation) is:

• In order to join a group/forum, you request a connection.
  (Mastodon: You follow the group account/forum channel.)
• Your request is accepted.
  (Mastodon: Your follow request is confirmed, and you're followed back.
• Now you're a member.
• In order to start a new thread, you send a post to the group/forum, but you must mention it in such a way that your post becomes a DM.
  (Mastodon: Most of the Fediverse, Mastodon included, doesn't know these special mentions, so Friendica groups and Hubzilla forums accept normal mentions from those server applications that can't direct-mention.)
• The Friendica group account/Hubzilla forum channel will automatically be quoted-shared (Friendica)/shared (Hubzilla)/quoted (Mastodon lingo) to all other group/forum members.

If you want to start a new thread in a Friendica group or a Hubzilla forum from Mastodon, which you can, you have to know the order of things, keep it in mind and adhere to it:
Title

@Group mention

Post text

So while Mastodon doesn't officially support titles, at least not when posting, you can give the thread a title by writing it above the mention and the post text below the mention.

A common Mastodon mistake is to first write the post text and then add the mention afterwards. However, if there is exactly one paragraph above the mention, and that paragraph is short enough, Friendica and Hubzilla will treat it as the title. Your start post might end up with a title, but not with a post text.

How exactly groups are handled on Friendica if you're the owner, I can't tell you. The last time I've used Friendica must have been either when Mastodon was still fairly new or even before Mastodon was even made. I've switched to Hubzilla as my preferred daily driver back then and never looked back.

I've read that Friendica has something like secondary accounts which you can attach to your existing account. This way, you can have your personal Friendica account and a group account on the same login, and you can switch between them without having to log out. But that must have been introduced long after I've quit Friendica.

On Hubzilla, something like this has always been possible: If you want to start a group, you simply create another channel on your account and configure it as a forum channel, either by choosing "Community forum" as the channel role or, if you know what you're doing, by choosing "Custom" as the channel role and then activating "Group actor" in the Custom channel role settings. The latter is also the only way to have a private forum.

Friendica lets you appoint additional admins/moderators, but only from the same Friendica node that your group is on.

As Hubzilla has a full implementation of OpenWebAuth magic sign-on, include server-side, you can promote any forum member on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and Mitra as extra forum admins.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Facebook #FacebookAlternative #FacebookAlternatives #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups

@Jasper Burns

Permissions meet groups

It gets really interesting when the permissions system is applied to groups. As the owner of a Hubzilla forum, you have the following options:

• You can control who can see the profile of the forum, i.e. what it is all about. For example, you can only allow confirmed members to see it. Or, in fact, you can only allow certain members to see it by assigning a specific contact role to them. Or you could make it Fediverse-specific: Only those who can be recognised as logged-in Fediverse users can see the profile. Or you can hide it altogether.
• You can control who can see the contacts, i.e. the forum members, all the same. Like, for example, only a chosen inner circle may be allowed to see the list of forum members, but Joe Average Forum Member is not.
• Likewise, you can control who can see what has already happened in the forum when visiting the group profile.
• You can choose to hide the whole forum from the directory, the place where people go to find new contacts (the mastodon.social equivalent is https://mastodon.social/directory), to keep the forum secret altogether by keeping people from finding it accidentally or by searching.

(streams) and Forte have four different types of group channels instead:

• Normal: public, group members may upload media to the group's file storage
• Limited: public, but group members may not upload media to the group's file storage
• Moderated: like Limited, but by default, posts and comments by new group members have to be approved by the admins; members may have their permissions upgraded and post and comment without approval once they've proven themselves worthy
• Restricted: private, profile is only visible to group members, stream of posts and comments is only visible to group members, posts and comments are only sent to group members, but group members may upload media to the group's file storage

Whether or not a group is visible in the directory is a separate switch.

As I've already said, you can grant individual permissions to your contacts on your personal channel. But you can grant individual permissions to forum users on a forum channel just the same. You can have regular users. You can have users with certain extra privileges. You can use the permissions system to silence users without kicking and blocking them.

And you can use the permissions system to appoint extra forum admins/mods. You can grant contacts permission to administer your forum. Now, this requires for your channel to recognise visitors and their identities to see what permissions they shall have and to grant them these permissions. And this requires OpenWebAuth. So right now, you can only make forum members from Hubzilla, (streams), Forte, Friendica, Mitra and Tootik additional admins/mods. But you can.

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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Privacy #Security #Permission #Permissions #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #PrivateGroups

@Jasper Burns

Groups, part 3: Replying to a thread, and how conversations work

If you want to reply, just reply. It's good manners to mention whomever you're directly replying to, and even that only if you're replying to a reply. But you don't have to mention anyone to reach anyone. Even then, your reply will be boosted to everyone who has received the top post.

Even if you reply to Carol who has replied to Bob who has replied to Alice who has started a thread in the group.

Within Mastodon, you'd have to mention Carol so she receives and sees your reply, you'd have to mention Bob so he receives and sees your reply, you'd have to mention Alice so she receives and sees your reply.

Conversations on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte work much more like on Facebook: Your reply will go past Carol. Past Bob. Past Alice. Straight to the group account/channel. From there to Alice because she has started the conversation. And to Bob and Carol because they have received the quote-post of Alice's post. And to everyone else who has received the quote-post of Alice's post.

Now, how does everyone see your reply?

At this point, it's important to say that a Friendica feed or a Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte stream looks vastly different from a Twitter feed or a Mastodon timeline and much more like a Facebook feed. Again, that's because Friendica was a Facebook alternative long before Twitter clones became the default. And Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are direct descendants of Friendica with largely the same purpose. So no mimicking Twitter's behaviour here.

What does your Mastodon timeline look like? Single posts with no context. And more single posts with no context. You receive a new post, it immediately shows up at the top of your timeline as a single post with no context. You have no idea how many unread messages you have. You want to see the context of a post, you have to click and click and click.

Facebook doesn't show you single-post-with-no-context piecemeal. Neither do Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. They always show you entire conversations with the top post and with all comments.

Imagine your Mastodon timeline. But instead of single posts with no context, you always see entire conversations with the top post and all replies; that is, you actually only see the last three replies, but you can easily unfold the thread view and see everything.

Imagine whenever someone replies to a post that you already have in your timeline, you automatically receive that reply.

Imagine that you have a little counter of unread messages somewhere. When you receive a new post, the counter goes up by one. When you receive a new reply, the counter goes up by one. But neither that new post nor that new reply is automatically added to the top of your timeline.

Now you click the counter of unread messages. Out comes a list of unread messages. Not the messages proper. A list, including who sent them and, if that's the case, whom they reply to (not as in whom they directly reply to, as in Carol in the above example, but who wrote the top post, as in Alice in the above example).

You can click on any item in the list. Imagine you do. You will leave the timeline view. You will be shown only that one conversation with the top post and the comments. And the view will focus on the new comment and flag it as seen, and the counter of unread messages will go down by one. You can scroll through the conversation and see the entire context in which that reply was posted.

This is what Friendica groups, Hubzilla forums, (streams) groups and Forte groups are geared towards. They aren't group add-ons to Mastodon, and they aren't geared towards integrating perfectly into Mastodon. Remember that Friendica groups are almost six years older than Mastodon itself.

I'm not sure how exactly Mastodon users receive replies from Friendica groups, Hubzilla forums, (streams) groups or Forte groups. One thing is certain: They will not visibly mention you. Another thing is certain: They will send you replies regardless.

I can only guess what happens: You do get replies. But you get them as new posts in your timeline. And you have to scroll down your timeline until you stumble upon them. If you really want to participate in groups, if you really want to see everything that happens there, you'll have to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll down your timeline until you hit posts which you know you've seen before. You probably won't be notified about these replies.

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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #Conversation #Conversations

@Jasper Burns

Groups, part 2: Starting a thread

Okay, here comes the twist. Here is where the group magic happens.

If you want to start a new thread in that group, you have to be a member of the group account. Connected to the group account. In Mastospeak, mutually follow the group account.

Then, if you send a new post that mentions the group account, and it is not a reply to another post, then the group account will automatically quote your post and send the quote-post with your post in it to all its connections (followers).

You know quotes? Quote-posts? Like, quote-tweets? What half of Mastodon is so afraid of because it's used on Twitter only to harass and dogpile people? That's what I'm talking about. Friendica has had these quote-posts for almost 16 years, and never have they been used for harassment and dogpiling, for never has anyone used Friendica as a drop-in replacement for Twitter. Friendica calls them "shares". And Friendica has used these quote-posts in groups for almost 16 years.

That is, within Friendica (and its descendants), one thing is a wee bit different: If you're on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte, you have to send a DM with a special mention (!group instead of @group on Friendica, @!group on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte) to the group account for this to happen. This automatically activates what's "mentioned only" on Mastodon and makes your post a DM.

But from Mastodon accounts and the like, it accepts public posts with @group mentions. That's because Mastodon & Co. don't know !group and @!group mentions.

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#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Fediverse #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups