@Free_Press I think we need to have a #ContentWarning when people show pictures of that scumbag's face.

@wikinaut Musste ich ausblenden.. 😆 #ContentWarning

@Sharp Leaves 1) what are the cultures of the other parts of the Fediverse and how they differ from Mastodon's in these critical aspects, if they do;
I don't know them all because I haven't actually used that much Fediverse software, and I don't actively follow that many non-Mastodon, non-Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte users.

Hubzilla's culture is derived from Friendica's, so it's very similar, only that Hubzilla's culture is influenced by having the Fediverse's absolute jack-of-all-trades at hand with even more optional features than Friendica. Also, even more than Friendica, and very much unlike Mastodon, Hubzilla is all about self-empowerment and self-moderation thanks to its very powerful and fine-grained permissions system.

(streams)' and Forte's culture is sitting somewhere between Friendica's and Hubzilla's culture. These two aren't nearly as much about connecting with everyone and everything as even Hubzilla because they're limited in the protocols they support.

The non-Mastodon *blogging Fediverse is generally a lot more relaxed and a whole lot friendlier towards the greater Fediverse than Mastodon on average. Almost everyone on Mastodon has only ever been on Mastodon. Maybe a few have got a Pixelfed account as well. But for the majority of Mastodon users, the Fediverse equals Mastodon.

The huge majority of the rest believes that Eugen Rochko has invented the Fediverse as a Mastodon network, and that Mastodon is the best, the be-all, end-all decentralised social anything. They don't want to know about the non-Mastodon Fediverse. They want their Mastodon-only Fediverse back. And they're eager to protect Mastodon and its culture against all those evil intruders.

But if you look at the *omas and *keys and all that, there's hardly anyone who got there directly from Twitter (except for East Asian Misskey users). And there's nobody who genuinely believes that the Fediverse only consists of the software they use. At least in the western world, just about everyone in the non-Mastodon Fediverse has been on Mastodon before (except for Friendica and its descendants where people generally came from either Facebook or nothing, optionally via Google+).

Also, for one, the *keys indicate which Fediverse server software a note came from. You'll learn a lot about the Fediverse only from this feature ("What the hell is Smithereen?"). Besides, it isn't too atypical for people on an *oma or *key to have been through a whole slew of Fediverse server applications before they've found their new home, or they actually still have semi-active spare accounts elsewhere.

I think it's only natural that these users are not defensive of Mastodon, nor do they think Mastodon is the pinnacle of Fediverse development. Maybe some did believe that. But once they really started daily-driving Akkoma or Firefish or whatever, they were enlightened. They saw just how much more their new home offered them than Mastodon, things they previously couldn't even imagine being possible in the Fediverse.

So instead, these people are rather defensive of the non-Mastodon Fediverse. I know quite a few in places like Akkoma or Sharkey who are eager to explain to Mastodon users that the Fediverse is far from being only Mastodon.

Lemmy is a special case. I guess it's a common faulty assumption amongst Mastodon users who have heard about Lemmy that the typical way into Lemmy is Twitter > Mastodon > "I need groups" > Lemmy. In reality, almost everyone on Lemmy came directly from Reddit, particularly when Reddit enshittified itself by charging third-party app developers $20,000,000 for API access.

They were not, however, discontent with Reddit's culture. So while Mastodon's culture is an idealised version of Twitter's old culture, Lemmy's culture pretty much is Reddit's culture. Not an idealised version, but the real deal itself. It's only tainted by having two tankies, one Maoist, one Stalinist, as main devs, by several major servers being very tankie themselves and lastly by the side-effects of decentralisation in the shape of kerfuffles between servers.

It's important to know at this point that Lemmy used to have an opt-in model for federation between servers: If you, as a server admin, wanted your server to federate with another server, you had to manually add that server, and that server had to add yours. These days are long gone, but the side-effects still linger. Lemmy admins have even less of a problem with blocking other servers than Mastodon admins.

Lemmy users are even less used to getting into contact with folks from outside than Mastodon users. Things that are commonplace or even absolute necessities on Mastodon irritate them: more than one mention because mentions aren't needed on Lemmy to get your messages across and hashtags in general because neither Reddit nor Lemmy has them.

While Lemmy does have a kind of overarching culture, each Lemmy community has its own culture, just like every subreddit has its own culture. Some are nice and friendly and have rules to protect it. Some exist for the very purpose of shitposting (I've inspired the creation of one of these, it's for Fediverse memes: https://feddit.uk/c/fedimemes). Some are outright NSFW and flagged as such. And so forth.

There may be Lemmy communities that ask their users to add alt-texts to their images, a feature which Lemmy hasn't had for that long. But Lemmy doesn't have any CW culture _anywhere_. In fact, Lemmy doesn't have any CW support whatsoever, neither for the Mastodon method of putting CWs into the summary field nor for the Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte method of having them automatically generated by a keyword filter on the reader's side. Lemmy isn't really for the faint of heart and the Twitter or Tumblr convert, for neither is Reddit.

Another difference between Mastodon and Lemmy: It's common for Mastodon users to try to enforce Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules upon literally everyone in the Fediverse and to make this culture and these rules mandatory on every last Fediverse server. Lemmy users, in stark contrast, know that such an endeavour would never even make it into the next community on the same server.

2) when you have seen a clash between broader Fedi rules and Mastodon culture. I've seen this fight play out a lot and it's always on Mastodon, I've never seen the rest of Fedi come up outside this hypothetical.
There aren't any broader Fedi rules that apply in the whole Fediverse. The Fediverse is too diverse in technology and in culture. At least half of the diversity in culture accounts for the different Lemmy and PieFed communities and Mbin magazines. And places like Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte are about as impenetrable for external culture or external rules as your average shitposting community on Lemmy, just for different reasons.

But I'll give you some specific examples.

@crossgolf_rebel - kostenlose Kwalitätsposts (used to be on Calckey until his home server switched to Sharkey; there's hardly any *key he hasn't tried) could tell you a lot of stories. For example, he was once attacked by a Mastodon user and told to either limit all his posts to no more than 500 characters or get the fuck out of the Fediverse.

They could have muted him. They could have blocked him. But no, they demanded that culture-less, barbarian, evil intruder leave the Mastodon Fediverse entirely, the Fediverse which Eugen Rochko has created as a purist, 500-characters-only microblogging network.

By the way, vice-versa, @Hiker (mainly on Akkoma, but with lots of accounts elsewhere) and @Matthias (has probably been on Friendica since before Mastodon was even made) both block users who chop long posts up into snippets of no more than 500 characters. Unfortunately, nobody on Mastodon notices.

Maybe this story is interesting, too: @Jakbous Schürz (Friendica) once came across a user who wondered how he could possibly post more than 500 characters at once on Mastodon. He told her that he is not on Mastodon, but on Friendica which doesn't really have a character limit.

She promptly blocked him. Why? She thought he's an evil black-hat hacker who used an evil black-hat hacker tool named Friendica to illegally hack himself into the Mastodon-only Mastodon Fediverse to harass her.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Sharkey #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Lemmy #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #MastodonCulture

@TeflonTrout :bc: he/him @Sharp Leaves Still, forcing Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules upon literally everyone in the Fediverse is bad.

Maybe you haven't heard about this yet, but: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. It has never been only Mastodon. It didn't even start with Mastodon. And it doesn't entirely work like Mastodon either.

For starters, this means that just because you see it on Mastodon, it didn't necessarily originate on Mastodon.

There are places in the Fediverse that are vastly older than Mastodon, and that are very different from Mastodon. Thus, they have their own culture, based on their own technology and their own features and where their users came from, and largely without any influences from Mastodon.

The oldest still existing server software in the Fediverse is not Mastodon from 2016. It's Friendica (https://friendi.ca, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica). Friendica is essentially a mixture of a Facebook alternative and fully-featured long-form blogging. No Twitter or Mastodon influence anywhere. And Friendica first came out in May, 2010, five years and eight months before Mastodon.

Friendica did not intrude into the Mastodon Fediverse that was created by Eugen Rochko as a Mastodon-only network. Mastodon was born into an already existing Fediverse that consisted of at least Friendica, Hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla, https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla) and GNU social (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social; now defunct).

Here's how Friendica differs from Mastodon in ways that may disturb Mastodon hardliners:

• Mastodon is hard-coded to 500 characters. This character limit is deeply engrained into Mastodon's culture.
  Friendica doesn't have an arbitrary character limit; it's limited by the maximum size of the database field for the post text. Currently, this is 16,777,215 characters. Thus, Friendica doesn't have keeping messages short in its culture, it never has, and it never will.
• Mastodon users tend to be eager to block anyone who doesn't cut long posts into pieces of no more than 500 characters each.
  I know at least one Friendica veteran who blocks everyone upon first strike who does cut long posts into annoying strings of tiny chunks.
• Mastodon introduced a CW field in 2017.
  Friendica has had the exact same field as a summary/abstract field since its own beginning in 2010. That, and Friendica has always had a much more efficient way of handling CWs, one that Mastodon itself adopted with version 4.0 in October, 2022. Thus, by its technology and culture, Friendica users despise misusing their abstract field to force the same CW upon everyone out there with a hot, flaming passion.
  So if you see someone "misusing" the CW field for "a subject or a summary or whatever that is," that might not be a clueless Mastodon user. Instead, it might be a Friendica user who has been around for a dozen years longer than you, who is used to living by Friendica's culture, and who knows tons more about the Fediverse than you do.
• Friendica users are much less likely to add alt-texts to their images. That's for two reasons.
  One, Friendica's culture is not an idealised version of pre-Musk, very-left-wing Twitter's culture. It does not include attacking and punishing everyone who doesn't add 100% hand-written, 100% accurate, sufficiently detailed alt-texts to their images.
  Two, Friendica handles images drastically differently from Mastodon. Mastodon always has a nifty little entry field for alt-texts whenever you attach an image. On Friendica, images are embedded into posts rather than attached to them, like in a blog post. And oftentimes, you literally have to program the alt-text into the raw image embedding markup code.
• On Mastodon, it's considered intrusive and reply-guying to reply to someone who hasn't mentioned you, and to whom you aren't mutually connected. You couldn't possibly have received the toot that you're replying to otherwise.
  On Friendica, that's perfectly normal. Friendica doesn't show you single messages by default. It always shows you the entire conversation thread, all the way up to the start post, with all branches. Thus, neither Friendica's technology nor Friendica's culture rules out replying to any comment in the thread.
• Mastodon has only just introduced Twitter-style quote-posts a few months ago. With a safety feature that only works on Mastodon and GoToSocial for fear of that feature being used for harassment and dogpiling just like on Twitter. And because literally everyone on Mastodon comes from Twitter, it's actually being used for harassment and dogpiling.
  Friendica has had that very same feature since its inception in 2010, over a decade and a half longer. It has never not had this feature. It has always been able to quote-post any public message in the Fediverse. But since Friendica is not entirely populated by former Twitter users, it hasn't been used for harassment or dogpiling even once. It's only used to forward content. For most of the time, it literally was the only available way to forward a message.
• Mastodon users tend to be very protective and defensive about their allegedly Mastodon-only Fediverse.
  Friendica users are used to being able to connect with everything that moves and then some. It's one of Friendica's key features that it speaks a whole lot of protocols, not just ActivityPub.
  Whereas Mastodon users see Mastodon as a "decentralised walled garden", Friendica users see Friendica as the gateway to the whole federated social Web plus some places that aren't, strictly speaking, federated.
• Mastodon users will staunchly insist that "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" essentially mean the same because they believe they do. They will attack anyone who claims otherwise.
  Friendica users will staunchly insist that there's a huge difference between "Fediverse" and "Mastodon" because they actually know there is one. They will lecture anyone who claims otherwise.

Of course, from a Mastodon point of view, it's both tempting and fully justified to tell the Friendica users that this is the Mastodon Fediverse, and that they will have to adapt the Mastodon culture and abolish their own culture or be thrown out. But for one, Mastodon's culture doesn't fit Friendica's technology.

Besides, that'd literally be like European settlers holding Native Americans at gunpoint and forcing them to give up their own culture, adopt European culture and convert to Catholic Christianity or else. The only difference is that European settlers, unlike the Mastodon users, did not think that they were there first, and that everyone else is an intruder.

I mean, sure, go ahead and attack anyone who doesn't strictly live by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's rules if you think you have to. But prepare for a whole lot of defence and even counter-attacks from Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Iceshrimp-JS, Iceshrimp.NET, Sharkey, GoToSocial, Hollo, snac2, Mitra, Socialhome, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and the rest of the non-Mastodon Fediverse.

CC: @Jan Wildeboer

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse