@Strypey But this will take a lot of time. A whole lot of time.

The situation right now is still that Mastodon has considerably more users than the whole rest of the Fediverse combined. Within Mastodon itself, well over 90% of all messages are from Mastodon.

The majority of Mastodon users think the Fediverse equals Mastodon. The majority of the rest think the Fediverse equals Mastodon with PeerTube and Pixelfed and the like glued onto it as add-ons. The majority of those remaining cannot imagine for the lives of them that you can follow Friendica accounts from Mastodon because you can't follow Facebook accounts from 𝕏 either.

Apart from Reddit-to-Lemmy refugees, every single last Fediverse newbie enters the Fediverse via Mastodon without being told that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon. In fact, many don't even learn about the Fediverse itself, only that there's a phone app named Mastodon that's allegedly "literally 𝕏 without Musk".

Remember the early days of smartphones? When 99% of all commercial apps were only developed for iOS because developing for Android wasn't worth it, because Android was "too small"?

You know when this changed? This didn't change when Android had gained a significant market share. This din't even change when Android had a market share of over 50%. This only changed when the Samsung Galaxy S, one specific Android phone model, had been outselling the iPhone for long enough for market analysts to notice.

In Fediverse terms, this means it isn't sufficient for the non-Mastodon Fediverse as a whole to outgrow Mastodon in numbers of users or in content. Even if most content seen on Mastodon doesn't originate on Mastodon anymore, that wouldn't be sufficient to break Mastodon's dominance.

It's sad to say, but we need one Fediverse server application to outgrow Mastodon in users and activity. Ideally, that'd be a server application that's both standards-compliant and state-of-the-art in technology and blistering with technology that goes beyond Mastodon's wildest imagination.

In other words, what we need is to channel a Facebook exodus of several tens of millions of users to Forte. I'd say hundreds of millions to also outgrow Threads, but Threads will block every last Forte server because Forte is incompatible with Forte's federation requirements by its design and its philosophy.

Imagine a Fediverse in which, whenever one Mastodon user speaks of Mastodon as either "the Fediverse" or the best Fediverse software ever, two or three Forte users disagree.

Trouble is, Forte isn't fit to take a Facebook exodus infrastructure-wise. It doesn't have a single public, open-registration server. It probably has fewer than 20 daily-driving users, all of whom are on single-user servers.

This also means that nobody knows whether Forte is fit to take a Facebook exodus technology-wise. Nobody knows how many users a Forte server can handle if none has ever even had half a dozen users. And, in fact, nobody knows how well Forte's implementation of nomadic identity works if only Mike Macgirvin himself has evern cloned a Forte channel and even that only under lab conditions. I mean, why clone your channel when you can just as well back up the whole server because it's yours?

(streams) doesn't look much better, unfortunately. It has about two public, open-registration servers. There should be another one in Europe, but it's currently broken. Otherwise, it's like Forte: People try it by first setting up their own server. And hardly anyone is willing to host a public one, much less enough of these for cloning to be viable. So, again, even (streams)' nomadic identity is only ever tested by Mike under lab conditions.

It doesn't help that both have only one developer who is officially retired.

As much as I personally love (streams) for being sleek and more fitting into today's Fediverse, it's probably Hubzilla that's the most solid candidate for a state-of-the-art Facebook alternative.

It's the most well-known of the bunch (except non-nomadic, account-equals-identity Friendica). It has been around for a decade. It has two main devs, none of whom have ever retired from Fediverse development. It has quite a bunch of open-registration hubs. It has enough active users for bugs to be spotted quickly and even a few who occasionally submit pull requests. It has an active community, albeit a small one, but better than having only a few dozen users world-wide. I've even read somewhere that Hubzilla needs fewer server resources than (streams). And yes, it's more versatile. Also, it has a community-maintained help system where (streams) and Forte barely have a public tech spec.

On the other hand, however, Hubzilla has the steepest learning curve in the whole Fediverse. It feels like geared towards Friendica converts first and foremost, although Friendica and Hubzilla have been developed away from each other.

Its default settings are still adjusted for a Zot-based "Grid" that was envisioned as a successor to the Federation in the first half of the 2010s, but not for today's ActivityPub-based Fediverse. This means that you will have to configure your brand-new channel before you can start using it. And there's nothing on Hubzilla's Web UI that tells you that you have to "install" an "app" to be able to connect to Mastodon. Not to mention that many permission settings are only available in the shape of templates rather than individual switches like on (streams) and Forte.

It's hard enough for Mastodon users who are already used to decentralised things to switch to Hubzilla, the difference in philosophy (Twitter clone vs grand-son of a Facebook alternative with a side of WordPress) notwithstanding. But it'd be considerably harder for Facebook users to switch to Hubzilla than it is for 𝕏 users to switch to Mastodon.

I can't see Hubzilla dominate the Fediverse for other reasons as well, even in the event of a huge Facebook exodus.

First of all, the vast majority of Facebook refugees will be on-boarded by people who barely or not at all know the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, and who therefore think that Mastodon is the Fediverse's only viable alternative to Facebook. And by people who may know that Friendica exists, but who want to stay in contact with their old Facebook friends, and who cannot imagine that you can follow a Friendica account from Mastodon. So these Facebook refugees will end up adding millions upon millions of new users to Mastodon.

Besides, the Friendica community will try to reel in as many Facebook refugees as possible. The Friendica community is bigger than the Hubzilla community. Also, they've probably got some considerable foothold on Facebook whereas your typical Hubzilla user is hardly anywhere else except maybe for an experimental (streams) channel. Friendica will use its advantage of being widely considered "the" Facebook alternative in the Fediverse.

At the same time, the Hubzilla community won't even know how to tackle this situation, much less profit from it. They'll probably get stuck in discussions that don't lead to anything productive, in this case also being hindered by the notion that "Hubzilla is not a social network" (even though it'd work just fine as one).

Lastly, people will join whatever has its own official app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store with the same name as the whole project and the server software. And that's Mastodon.

In the meantime, Friendica only has a bunch of third-party Android apps and a few semi-open beta iOS apps, but no official one named "Friendica". The other three have no apps at all, save for a Web-based Hubzilla app that hasn't seen any development activity in over six years. And the Hubzilla community can't even agree upon whether any Hubzilla app would be feasible in the first place, much less which features it has to include, also due to the false assumption that people will use the app only occasionally when they're out and about rather than daily-drive it as their only frontend.

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