@glyn To many Mastodon users, I guess every other Mastodon user, the Fediverse is only Mastodon. To not few others, the Fediverse is Mastodon plus some stuff glued onto Mastodon. Or it's Mastodon and Threads. Either way, it's regularly perceived as nothing but a microblogging platform with a very limited character count and otherwise hardly any features beyond Twitter, features such as text formatting.

And, of course, your identity is always firmly tied to your account and thus one specific server instance. That's a fact. Allegedly.

Few people know how far it extends outward and away from Twitter clones and Twitter alternatives, much less what the Fediverse beyond Twitter clones and Twitter alternatives is like.

And it's way out there where @Mike Macgirvin ?️ has been active since 2010. Five and a half years before Mastodon came out. Seven years before ActivityPub was first adopted, and even that was by one of Mike's creations.

The Fediverse is not defined by what's connected via ActivityPub, and especially, it is not defined by what's based on ActivityPub or what only uses ActivityPub. ActivityPub was officially established as a standard in 2018. It was first adopted in July, 2017, by Hubzilla, followed in September, 2017 by Mastodon which was entirely based on OStatus until then.

But the term "Fediverse" has first been used as early as 2012 which means that there was something back then that was decentralised and federated, even without ActivityPub. And that "something" already had features that partly went way beyond what Mastodon has today.

The oldest Fediverse project still in existence is Mike's Friendica, first released in July, 2010, then named Mistpark. A Facebook alternative. Not a Facebook clone like Mastodon tries to be a Twitter clone. A Facebook alternative that does a whole lot differently from Facebook, but better than Facebook, and that can also do a lot of things Facebook can't.

Friendica used to be based on its own DFRN protocol until 2023 AFAIK, but one of its killer features has always been that it speaks a whole lot of languages and connects to a whole lot of platforms, including OStatus and ActivityPub which it is based on today.

Friendica took over a few features from Facebook which are outright inconceivable in today's Twitter-clone-centred Fediverse. One is that it doesn't have Twitter's dichotomy of followers and followed. It has Facebook's concept of friends, connections that are always mutual, follower and followed at the same time, only that it doesn't refer to them as "friends" because, frankly, that term is stupid.

Another one is an actual conversation model, the same as Facebook and Tumblr and Reddit and all blogs out there. On Friendica, threads aren't loosely tied together from posts and more posts, nor do they rely on visible mentions. On Friendica, like on Facebook, on Tumblr, on Reddit and on blogs, each thread has exactly one post, the start post, and all replies are comments as opposed to posts.

This also changes a lot what you receive. Not just singular posts. Instead, you receive posts with their entire conversations, including comments from after you've received the post. Regardless of whether they mention you, regardless of whether you're connected to the commenter. In fact, on the other hand, you do not receive singular comments by your connections. All this may be unimaginable to those who only know Twitter and Mastodon, too.

But Friendica is still harmless to what Mike did later. In 2011, one issue of decentralised networks became apparent: If the instance you're on shuts down, you lose everything. And Friendica nodes often shut down, sometimes even without prior warning. People kept having to start over.

So Mike invented something to overcome this issue: nomadic identity. Not only did it make moving from one instance to another easier than anything else that exists even today, but even that's just a byproduct of the actual killer feature of nomadic identity: Your identity can reside on multiple instances at the same time, not as dumb copies, but as clones, as bidirectional, real-time, live, hot backups of each other.

This very idea sounds like absolute utopic science-fiction in 2024. But this, along with Mike's Zot protocol which was the first to make it real, came to exist as early as 2011. And it was in 2012 that Mike actually implemented it in software for the first time: a fork of his very own Friendica with its backend re-written against Zot in its entirety, first called Red, then renamed the Red Matrix.

It introduced something else that's completely and utterly unimaginable in most of today's Fediverse: an elaborate permissions system. One that did not rely on everything else out there having the same permissions system, much unlike what Mastodon keeps trying to do.

All kinds of interactions require separate permissions, such as:

• seeing my public profile
• receiving my posts (this permission is granted when I confirm a connection)
• sending me posts
• seeing my stream
• liking, disliking or commenting on my posts
• sending me DMs
• etc.

Better yet, these permissions aren't granted to everyone all the same, but different sets of permissions can be granted to different subsets of my connections.

In 2015, the Red Matrix became Hubzilla which still exists today (I'm writing to you from it), and which is even more powerful. It is usually referred to as a "decentralised social CMS" because it's Facebook meets WordPress the blogging platform meets WordPress the CMS meets Google Cloud Services (and I'm not even kidding) meets some other stuff. If something truly is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, it's Hubzilla.

Hubzilla is still based on Zot6. It can optionally speak a whole lot other things like ActivityPub or diaspora*.

But 75% of all Fediverse users have never even heard of Hubzilla as a poll has revealed not long ago. This is "the vast fediverse that exist outside Mastodon" that Mike is speaking of.

Also part of this "vast fediverse" are those of Mike's later works that still exist today.

There is the streams repository from 2021. What's in this repository is a more modern fork of a fork of three forks (of a fork?) of a slimmed-down fork of Hubzilla. Mike intentionally gave it no name (again, I'm not kidding), no brand identity, almost no nodeinfo code and released it into the public domain right away, except for 3rd-party contributions which still have their own licenses. It's colloquially referred to as (streams).

It's back to Facebook-style social networking with the usual side of full-blown long-form blogging and also keeping Hubzilla's WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV server functionality, and it only speaks its own Nomad (a Zot successor), Hubzilla's Zot6 and ActivityPub, and the latter can still be turned off.

(streams) basically came as not only an alternative to Mastodon and many other Fediverse projects, but especially as an "anti-Mastodon" that'd provide people with all the features Mastodon should have but doesn't while not being as hard to get into as Hubzilla. Also, it was intended to be forked and used as a base for all kinds of other Fediverse creations while being impossible to legally turn into something proprietary and closed-source due to the mish-mash of licenses in 3rd-party components.

But even fewer people seen to know (streams) than Hubzilla. Even most Hubzilla users only know it from hearsay, and on Mastodon, it's even more obscure. There have never been more than seven public instances with at least partially open registration; it's down to three plus two whose closure has been announced. All in all, (streams) which could have solved a whole lot of problems that plague Mastodon and its users probably has fewer than two dozen users now.

This is a problem because Mike has retired from Fediverse development. His rate of contribution has slowed down a whole lot, and he said that the streams repository is basically up for grabs, and so is his most recent creation, the still experimental Forte from August which is (streams) without Zot6 and without Nomad, but with nomadic identity via ActivityPub.

From such a tiny user base, it's practically impossible to recruit new developers. And (streams) and Forte do need developers and maintainers, and they need devs and maintainers who know a thing or two about their philosophy and their technology. Other than knowing that they exist and knowing PHP, that is.

It isn't like the Fediverse doesn't have developers. But everyone just keeps creating new iOS apps for only Mastodon, new websites to help Mastodon users (often with questionable compatibility with anything that is not Mastodon or none at all), new Misskey or Firefish forks and new Reddit clones (because they've heard of neither Mbin nor PieFed, much less Sublinks).

Nobody seems to care for the really good far-out stuff far out there. That's because it's too far out there for anyone to even have heard about it. But even if it wasn't, I'm almost afraid it's too far out for a Fediverse that takes Mastodon for the ActivityPub reference implementation and the origin of it all to really comprehend.

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