Qdegrees

Future of Fediverse Friend-Finding is Here! 📱✨

Just got a notification in the mall. This hypothetical 'Rita' alert is exactly the kind of location-aware, decentralized friend-finding feature I’d love to see integrated into the Fediverse! Imagine the possibilities for safe, opt-in meetups. What kind of cool, decentralized social features are you hoping to see next in our federated world? Discuss below! ☕️🤝 #Fediverse #Mastodon #DecentralizedTech #FutureTech #Friendship #SocialFeatures

May 11 at 5:42amWeb
Show threadJupiter Rowland2d ago
@Qdegrees Fun fact: Something similar already exists in the Fediverse. Not on Mastodon, but in the Fediverse.

In case you don't know: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. There are a lot more things in the Fediverse than Mastodon, all connected to one another, and always have been.

For example, there is also Hubzilla which is pretty much the exact opposite of Mastodon in terms of features.

Hubzilla has always been developed fully independently from Mastodon, and it's actually even older than Mastodon. Still, Mastodon is connected to Hubzilla. This very comment here comes from Hubzilla; it should be blatantly obvious by its size and its formatting that it can't possibly be a Mastodon toot.

And Hubzilla can do things that are outright unimaginable on Mastodon.

For starters, whereas Mastodon has four unlabelled profile fields, Hubzilla can have dozens of profile fields, each with a dedicated purpose. These include five fields for your current location plus one for where you're originally from, much like on Facebook.

You can optionally add a location to each one of your posts. This can either be the default post location that you specify in a text field, or it can be the location of your Web browser (Hubzilla can only be used in a browser; there are no apps for it). This, however, is information that only server applications from the same family as Hubzilla can display; Mastodon has no use for it.

It's also optionally possible to show locations in OpenStreetMap embedded in posts. Hubzilla is highly modular; it has an official add-on for that: https://framagit.org/hubzilla/addons/-/tree/master/openstreetmap. As the map is dynamically generated in the message, this does not work on Mastodon either.

On top of that, Hubzilla also has an add-on named Rendezvous (https://framagit.org/hubzilla/addons/-/blob/master/rendezvous/rendezvous.php) which is just a few months newer than Mastodon, and which does pretty much what you're envisioning. Only, again, this is not compatible with Mastodon either.

In other words: Your "future tech" is from 2016 and almost ten years old now.

(Inb4 lots of Mastodon commenters who, due to Mastodon's by-design limitations, don't know that this comment from me even exists.)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Hubzilla
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