@Kevin Davidson (Friendica) For comparison, I've just checked what could be done with #Hubzilla forums.

They work pretty much like Friendica groups, but instead of separate user accounts, they're separate channels. On Hubzilla, you can have pretty much as many channels as you want on your account. They're fully separate, and only the hub admin could possibly find out which channels belong to the same account. So if you set up a forum, you still have to mention manually who runs it. The advantage is that you don't have to log out and back in to switch between the forum and your personal channel.

Restricted forums are not only possible, I am in one. This means, however, that none of the posts that appear in the stream of the forum are visible to those who aren't authorised to see them. There are eight levels of access restriction from everyone on the Internet to only the owner.

Write access rights can also be granted to others for file/image folders (upload only, no deletion), Web pages and wiki pages which can be facilitated through special channel roles, but I've got my doubts that Mastodon users can use their Mastodon login credentials to upload files to a Hubzilla channel or edit its wiki pages.

I haven't tested this yet. The reason why it doesn't work with projects connected via ActivityPub is probably because Hubzilla/Zot login credentials are explicity required, maybe even through OpenWebAuth which Mastodon & Co. simply don't have.

Also, the public calendar can be shared with other Hubzilla users connected to the channel, but again, only to Hubzilla users. Sharing Hubzilla calendars to other projects like Mastodon or Akkoma doesn't work either, not even to Friendica and (streams) which have public calendars, too. In the case of pure ActivityPub projects, this would work even less because calendar sharing means that you manipulate the calendar of another channel on another instance from your own calendar UI. And Mastodon doesn't have a calendar UI.

@Kingsley Uyi Idehen @Alex Oberhauser :verified_o: @Helge Heß @Free Software Foundation @Chris Trottier @Mastodon @Fediverse News Generic servers would mean that all instances of the #Fediverse are basically the same project with the same features and the same capabilities.

This would mean that either the Fediverse lost lots of features (long-form blogging, audio streaming, video streaming, connections beyond #ActivityPub etc.) because they would have to be sacrificed to achieve total unification, or people coming over from Twitter would have to learn to wrangle an absolute feature monster that can do everything. Not to mention the monstrous mobile app that'd be necessary to harness all that power on the small touch screen of a smartphone.

In other words: You'd either have to cut Hubzilla down to Mastodon's capabilities or inflate #Mastodon to be able to do everything that #Hubzilla can do plus everything that #Funkwhale can do plus everything that #PeerTube can do plus everything that #BookWyrm can do plus everything that...

Don't forget that the Fediverse can do more than unformatted microblogging.

One-size-fits-all clients for all projects from micro.blog to Hubzilla to #Owncast are an illusion, too. What should they be able to do? Basic Twitter-like microblogging? That'd make all features of more advanced projects inaccessible. Everything? Then you may only want to do some microblogging, but you'd have to do that with an app whose user interface, all menus put together, is bigger than a barn door and mostly useless because the project you've joined doesn't support 99% of it.

Native dark/light mode is probably the most visible new addition in Hubzilla 8.2. The modes can be switched on the fly via the moon and sun buttons in the hamburger menu. They also made the light and dark schemas redundant. Another nice usability improvement is the contact filter in the HQ widget. Just simply start typing the name or address of a contact and select it from the dropdown to get a list of top level posts by this contact only. Last but not least there is the addition of multi-factor authentication in core which we have ported from streams. It uses TOTP and can be setup in your account settings.

Other notable changes
- A fancy new project website created withhubzilla webpages at https://hubzilla.org
- Page load progress indicator for PWA standalone mode
- Improved contact search
- Author images in HQ widget
- Theme improvements
- Many bugfixes

Breaking changes
- PHP 8.1 is now the minimum supported version
- If you used multifactor auth via the TOTP addon you will need to set it up again in your account settings
- You might need to revisit your custom theme settings due to native dark/light mode changes

For a detailed list of changes please refer to the changelog.

A big THANK YOU! to all contributors and everybody who supports Hubzilla and its development.

Update

- Backup your data
- Make sure you use at least PHP 8.1
- Add App::$config['system']['db_skip_locked_supported'] = 1; to .htconfig.php if you use postgresql > 9.5, mysql > 8.0, mariadb > 10.6 or any other DB backend that supports skip locked
- Execute util/udall

Install

Please refer to the install instructions.

#Hubzilla is a powerful platform for creating interconnected websites featuring a decentralized identity, communications, and permissions framework built using common webserver technology.

https://hubzilla.org

CC: @Fediverse News

Funny how, in spite of the rising number of likes, many people seem to misunderstand what I've written.

Here's a short explanation.

People: We want bold type and italics and stuff in the Fediverse! And quote-tweets! And more than 500 characters! Please, #Mastodon, include it!

Me: Join #Akkoma (), and you've got your bold type and italics and quote-tweets and thousands of characters! And you can still talk to people on Mastodon! Easy as that.

Or if you don't like Akkoma, try #Pleroma ().
Or #MissKey ().
Or #CalcKey ().
Or #GoToSocial (https://gotosocial.org/).
Or if you don't mind something bigger, #Friendica ().
Or if you don't mind a hard-to-handle feature monster, #Hubzilla (#^https://hubzilla.org/).
And all of them let you stay in contact with your friends on Mastodon.

#MastodonIsNotTheFediverse. Nor is Mastodon the best the #Fediverse has to offer.

I keep seeing lots of people who are totally giddy about the #Fediverse, who are gushing over it, who want to promote it, who want it to spread.

And who want it to advance. To learn new abilities. To grow new features.

That's all fine and dandy.

But almost all of these people are still fully convinced that the Fediverse equals #Mastodon. And nothing else. At least not until Tumblr and P92 join the fray. Okay, maybe the #WordPress plug-in that's the talk of the town now that it has become official. Okay, maybe a few of them have also heard of #Pixelfed and/or #PeerTube because their makers are all over the Fediverse.

When these people are talking about the Fediverse, they mean Mastodon. And when they're thinking about the Fediverse, they're only thinking about Mastodon. Because that's all they know.

So these people want new cool features or even new cool use-cases in the Fediverse, stuff that Mastodon doesn't have. They want Mastodon to have it, or they want new projects to be launched that have these features.

If only they knew.

If only they knew that everything, literally everything they propose has already been done. Yes, in the Fediverse. In projects which are fully federated with Mastodon. Why don't they know? Because they've never heard of any of these projects, much less what they can do.

---

So they want "quote-tweets" in the Fediverse. Which means they want Mastodon to introduce them.

Tell you what: Mastodon is the only microblogging project in the Fediverse that doesn't have quotes. Not only will Eugen Rochko never introduce them, but all the other projects have them with Mastodon forks #GlitchSoc such as being the exception. #Pleroma has them. #Akkoma has them. #MissKey has them. #CalcKey has them. #FoundKey has them. #GoToSocial has them. The old heavyweights #Friendica and #Hubzilla have them, and so does Hubzilla's youngest decendant, the #Streams project. Et cetera.

You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".

---

Or text formatting in posts like bold type, italics, underline, strikethrough, code blocks etc. Would be great if Mastodon had that, in spite of other people saying they don't want it.

Again: Pleroma already has it. Akkoma already has it. MissKey already has it. CalcKey already has it. FoundKey already hasit. GoToSocial already has it. Friendica already has it. Hubzilla already has it (look at this post at its source in a Web browser and weep). (streams) already has it. And so forth. This time, even Mastodon forks have it.

It has been done. It has been done many times. It has actually been done before Mastodon.

---

Next, long-form blog posting. We need something like #Medium in the Fediverse that isn't Medium itself. Mastodon's 500 characters are too few, and Twitter-like threads are inconvenient.

Except we already have that, too. #Plume and #WriteFreely are about as close to Medium as Mastodon is to Twitter, including clean and distraction-less layouts. Oh, and Hubzilla can do that, too.

By the way: Again, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that can do microblogging that has a 500-character limit. Pleroma, Mastodon's oldest direct competitor, raised it to a default of 6,000. MissKey and its forks have 3,000 as a default. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have character limits of "go ahead, drop your short story in one post in its entirety," so virtually none at all. And yes, Hubzilla has long-form writing on top of that.

---

Speaking of Hubzilla: Most recently, there has been the idea to uncouple one's online identity from a specific instance. Your online self should no longer be firmly tied to any one server exclusively. Now, this sounds so ambitious, it might just as well be science-fiction.

What if I told you that just this very thing already exists as well?

No, really. No, I'm not making this up. But you should know by now that I'm not.

Better yet: It was conceived as early as 2011. By the guy who launched Friendica in 2010. He invented a new principle named #NomadicIdentity and a new protocol named #Zot. In its early stages already, even with no technical implementation yet, Zot was more powerful than ActivityPub is today.

In 2012, Zot became reality as the basis of a Friendica fork which later became known as #RedMatrix and, upon its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, which is still prior to Mastodon's initial release, Hubzilla. Hubzilla is still being developed and improved, and it has a fledgling but growing "successor of a successor" named (streams) which offers nomadic identity, too.

Now, what does this nomadic identity even look like? Well, not only does it let you move your channel(s) around from instance to instance with ease and, unlike on Mastodon, with absolutely everything on it. No, it also lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once. Identical clones, automagically kept in sync in real-time, all with the same identity, the same content, the same connections.

Your identity is no longer strapped down to one instance. Not only that, but your channel, your posts, your content is no longer hosted on only one server. This means that if one instance with one of your clones goes down, you still have spares.

---

Okay, so how about community groups/forums? That'd be cool.

Well, for one, there's #Guppe. It's basically bolted on Mastodon, and in practice, it's centralised because there's only one instance. But it's impractical to use.

Besides, this is becoming a running gag here, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have exactly this built-in and open for the rest of the Fediverse.

Better yet: There's also #Lemmy which amounts to a federated #Reddit or #HackerNews clone. So not only does Lemmy offer this, it specialises in it.

Hubzilla alone can provide Fediverse feature suggestions with "has been done" for years to come. Not to mention what else the Fediverse has to offer. Even if someone should want a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated #GoodReads clone in the Fediverse, it has been done: #BookWyrm.

@lafnlab @Bluedepth @Ada @Dave Troy :toad: @Supernovae aka Byron Miller @Mark Earnest @Paul Chambers :chambers: @Darren du Nord @Flaming June @Flatbush Gardener 🌈 @HistoPol @Qazm @David Boles @Fediverse Report

#Diaspora has its own protocol. It's distributed and federated within itself, but it is not interested in federating to anything else. All federation to the outside was established by the developers of other networks and by reverse-engineering Diaspora*'s protocol and directly tapping into its databases because it didn't have an API back then.

#Friendica has its own internal protocol, #DFRN. But Friendica's main goal was to federate with everything that moved. It was Friendica which established the first cross-project federation with Diaspora*. And Friendica also has #ActivityPub support. Otherwise, pretty much none of you could connect to @Fediverse News.

#Hubzilla has its own internal protocol, #Zot. Hubzilla also has ActivityPub support, this time optionally for each user channel because everything that isn't Zot kind of stands in the way of Zot's main killer feature, #NomadicIdentity.

Anything built from #Streams uses a successor of Zot, #Nomad. (streams)-based projects and instances have ActivityPub support, too, and like on Friendica, it's on by default.

So the latter three can directly connect to everything that uses ActivityPub. Interaction between Diaspora* users and, for example, Mastodon users can only happen in the comments on a post from Friendica or Hubzilla.

@David Boles @Ada @Dave Troy :toad: @Supernovae aka Byron Miller @Bluedepth @Mark Earnest @Paul Chambers :chambers: @Darren du Nord @Flaming June @HistoPol @Qazm @Fediverse Report

#Mastodon is only one project in the #Fediverse. One out of many. Very many.

#MastodonIsNotTheFediverse.

Right now, I myself am not posting from Mastodon, but from #Hubzilla (#^https://hubzilla.org/).

Which is not a Mastodon server. Which is not Mastodon at all.

Which is not an add-on that's bolted onto Mastodon.

Which has nothing to do with Mastodon at all.

Which isn't even a Mastodon knock-off. It's actually older than Mastodon. Mastodon was launched in 2016. Hubzilla had its 1.0 release in 2015, and development started in 2012.

But which, in turn, has #ActivityPub bolted-on as an extension so that it can communicate with Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse.

Also, @Fediverse News is not on Mastodon either, in case you haven't noticed. It's on #Friendica which, again, is something different.

Friendica isn't an add-on to Mastodon either.

And Friendica is even older. Friendica was published in 2010, 6 years before Mastodon.

@Brennan Stehling It isn't even the first. Not even for social networking.

Laconica = #StatusNet = #GNUsocial was the first. It was what drove Identi.ca. That was in 2008.

Then, in 2010, came #DFRN, the internal protocol created for and used by #Friendica. (Friendica can also use ActivityPub, that's how you can post on @Fediverse News.)

A bit later, also in 2010, came the internal protocol created for and used by #Diaspora.

In 2011 came #Zot, the first protocol that went beyond decentralisation and federation and introduced #NomadicIdentity. Starting the next year, it became the technical basis of what is known today as #Hubzilla. (Hubzilla can use ActivityPub as well, that's how you can read this post of mine. But its nomadic features don't translate fully to ActivityPub.)

All of this was before #ActivityPub.

The newest version of Zot, Zot/11, was renamed #Nomad and has been used by #Streams since last year. And (streams) being a "fork me and build something nice out of me" code repository rather than a run-as-is branded platform like Mastodon or Hubzilla indicates that Nomad, much like Zot, is quite versatile, as does the fact that Hubzilla's entire huge set of features is made nomadic by Zot.

Oh, and by the way, e-mail and #XMPP predate them all. And there's also #Matrix, for example.

@John Socks @Chris Trottier @{mistercharlie@indieweb.social}

@LucyWildboots 🏳️‍🌈 @clacke post fosdem 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 @Chris Trottier @Kevin Davidson @Sarah Brown @IceCubesApp @Mona app I'm not sure if it's wise to give mobile apps for the #Fediverse direct access to all features of all Fediverse projects.

At first glance, it sounds convenient. You install one app, and you can do everything with it on every project.

But imagine some poor sap who has just migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, who loads a Fediverse app from the app store, and who ends up with an outright monster of an app with a UI cluttered with greyed-out options and menu items.

Why is it so cluttered? Because the devs also included full #Hubzilla support. And I mean full support for all features of Hubzilla channels with all apps activated, including full access to all account and channel options and settings, including a post editor with buttons for the whole extent of Hubzilla's bored-up #BBcode implementation, including article, webpage and wiki page editors (which partly support #Markdown and #HTML on top of BBcode), including connecting your phone to the #WebDAV, #CalDAV and #CardDAV servers included in your channel, including even support for creating and managing nomadic clones.

And Hubzilla is something that's even cumbersome to handle in a desktop browser. Now imagine all this packed into a mobile app.

Such an all-in-one app would also confuse people to have access to multiple separate calendar systems through the app. One is a public calendar as available on #Friendica, Hubzilla and #Streams. The second one is a CalDAV-equipped engine for private calendars which Hubzilla has in addition to the public calendar, and which in itself supports multiple calendars, not to mention calendars on other channels which gave you write access. The third one is a collaborative calendar as offered by #Mobilizon.

Oh, and it'd of course support #OwnCast as well as the live stream feature included in #PeerTube to the point of enabling you to live-stream through one of these projects how you use the self-same app to handle another Fediverse project.

Last but not least, every update on every Fediverse project that comes with new or changed features will require an upgrade for the app.

@Chris Trottier I find it highly ironic that #Meta wants to join the #Fediverse now.

About a dozen years ago, #Facebook locked the Fediverse out. Back then, #Friendica had established full bidirectional federation with Facebook simply by latching onto its API. If you had accounts on both Facebook and Friendica, you could use Facebook without actually going to Facebook.

That was when Friendica's primary goal was to federate with everything, full stop. They had already managed to federate with #Diaspora, and Diaspora* didn't even have an API, so Friendica had to reverse-engineer the Diaspora* protocol and then drill right into Diaspora* pods.

End of the story, however: Facebook noticed and changed its TOS so that third parties were no longer allowed to extract content from Facebook. By and by, the federation was removed again. Facebook was pretty much the only federation option which #Hubzilla didn't inherit from Friendica.

If Meta launches a social network with #ActivityPub, it's going to be interesting. Someone from the old Friendica guard could waltz into Meta's new network and be like, "GUESS WHO'S BACK SUCKERBERG!"

@Louis Ingenthron @Chris Trottier Look beyond your bubble of .NET devs who came over from the birbsite over the course of the last six months.

Look at those who have been here before the #TwitterMigration. Better yet, look at those who have been on #Friendica or #Hubzilla before Mastodon even existed. The Fediverse was much different back then.

People generally distrusted all of #GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). They used Linux whenever and wherever they possibly could. They avoided commercial, corporate-owned, proprietary, non-free, closed-source software like the plague.

Microsoft was actually considered the ultimate evil, also due to Steve Ballmer's attempted crusade of total annihilation against #FreeLibreOpenSourceSoftware, Linux first and foremost.

Devs coded in C, C++, PHP, Python etc., always either cross-platform and Linux-first or Linux-only, put their works under the GPL, the AGPL, the MIT license etc. and open-sourced them. They would never have touched C#, .NET or any other language that was owned by a big corporation and/or would have lead to Windows-only or Windows-first software with a 10-foot barge pole. And they never had to.

Some Fediverse projects actually moved their code repositories from GitHub to Framagit, Codeberg or another non-corporate, non-commercial Gitea-based hoster after Microsoft took over GitHub.

@Chris Trottier @Fediverse News Back in 2010, when mainstream mass media were raving about the crowd-funding campaign for #Diaspora, he dropped the 1.0 version of #Mistpark which, at this point already, was more powerful in every possible way than Diaspora* would be a decade later. Mistpark would soon be renamed #Friendika which then became #Friendica.

In 2011, over a decade before #Bluesky, he invented #NomadicIdentity with the #Zot protocol.

In 2012, still over a decade before Bluesky, he forked Friendica into Friendica Red, then renamed Red (from Spanish "la red" = "the network"), then renamed #RedMatrix. In 2015, it went stable and was renamed #Hubzilla. Two stable point releases within five and a half years with no budget while crowd-funded Diaspora* was still a rather lack-lustre public alpha. And that's still several months before #Mastodon.

Friendica, Hubzilla, #Zap (EOL) and #Streams are only the four stable projects he created, all without crowd-funding. This does not include the various experimental projects that led to everything post-Friendica, all of which are past their EOL now that (streams) is out: #Osada, #Misty a.k.a. #Mistpark2022, #Roadhouse plus re-emerged Redmatrix and Osada. And even Zap started out as an experiment and was eventually declared stable after fully merging with Osada.

From what I've observed so far, it looks like #Mastodon wreaks quite some havoc on #Hubzilla posts with pictures in them. I guess the same happens to posts from #Friendica and servers based on #Streams.

• It probably only shows a maximum of four pictures.
  
• It moves them to the end of the post, regardless of where they are in the original post.
  
• It most likely reverses their order.
  
• It leaves them outside the summary (Hubzilla)/CW (Mastodon), so they're always in plain sight.

Here's a post to demonstrate what happens. This post should have five pictures of 7-segment digits embedded between paragraphs; vertical arrows mark where which digit should go.

↓ 1 should go here. ↓

↑ 1 should go here. ↑

↓ 2 should go here. ↓

↑ 2 should go here. ↑

↓ 3 should go here. ↓

↑ 3 should go here. ↑

↓ 4 should go here. ↓

↑ 4 should go here. ↑

↓ 5 should go here. ↓

↑ 5 should go here. ↑

If you don't see this the way it was intended, it's proof that there's still quite some inconvenient incompatibility within the #Fediverse.

@Kristian @Chris Trottier Free, non-corporate, decentralised projects have different intents and purposes than non-free, commercial, corporate, centralised silos. They're created by different people for different people, for different target audiences. And even the huge corporate silos don't start with a shiny iPhone app and then develop the server backend around it.

If it's free (as in, for example, Affero GPL), decentralised and distributed, it's made by geeks for geeks first and foremost. #Friendica first became available in 2010, and unlike Facebook, it never had the intention of becoming the next Internet for everyone in the world. Also, behind Facebook stood a huge megacorporation. Behind Friendica stood only one man, @mike, all alone, with zero budget. And yet, he managed to release something that was more powerful than Diaspora*, where at the same time only the crowdfunding campaign was running, would ever become.

Friendica's target audience were geeks. The same people that also used Linux as their main OS. Friendica wasn't made for the same people as Facebook or the iPhone. In fact, your typical Friendica user wouldn't touch an iPhone or any other Apple product with a 10-foot barge pole. They'd rather have a Nokia N900, and that was a clunky QWERTY slider that ran a modified Debian GNU/Linux.

#Redmatrix, the direct successor of Friendica, was experimental. Its sole purpose was to work on the brand-new #Zot protocol and the concept of #NomadicIdentity. It still had a small number of users and an even smaller number of instances, but they were generally voluntary guinea pigs. At this time, Friendica was already maintained by its own community which is about as far away from a Silicon Valley gigacorp as you could possibly get.

Redmatrix wasn't declared ready for prime time until late 2015 when it was renamed #Hubzilla. And even then, it didn't come with the "vision" of rolling over the mass market and replacing Facebook, WordPress, MediaWiki and the various GAFAM cloud services in one fell swoop. Again, Hubzilla was developed pretty much only by Mike Macgirvin.

#Osada and #Zap were both largely experimental again. Mike had forked them off Hubzilla because he still wasn't satisfied with what Zot could do at the time. However, the development of the new version #Zot6 couldn't happen on that monster named Hubzilla that was in everyday use now. That's why these two new projects were launched.

There's a good reason why they were two projects. Zap was there first. Zap was the actual Zot6 testbed, and thus, Zap was Zot6-only. Osada retained compatibility with Friendica and Hubzilla to test how well Zot6 would interact with ActivityPub with had meanwhile appeared as a draft and, IIRC, adopted by both Friendica and Hubzilla. Eventually, Osada and Zap ended up having the exact same codebase, and the difference between the two was an admin switch: ActivityPub on made it Osada, ActivityPub off made it Zap. As this was non-sense, Osada was axed, and Zap got ActivityPub and was declared the next stable one.

First, Zap's main killer feature over Hubzilla was Zot6 which had introduced #OpenWebAuth. When Zot6 was finally backported to Hubzilla, the remaining advantage was that Zap wasn't nearly as bloated with a somewhat less overwhelming UI. By the way, Redmatrix continued to exist with one user until Mike Macgirvin upgraded his own instance to Zap.

Now, again, you can't tinker with something that's stable. And tinkering continued. #Mistpark, Friendica's early name, returned in 2020, as did Redmatrix and Osada, all as Zap forks at various stages of instability and being experimental, none intended for a wider audience. And all created by Mike Macgirvin again. You could happily switch back and forth between Redmatrix, Osada, Zap and #Misty by simply rebasing your server code. (Installing either usually involved "git clone".)

He actually had a very good reason for this maze of names: He is opposed to big mass products with big brand identities. He wants to offer people technical solutions, not cool stuff with a sleek brand on it.

Anyways, on top of all this came #Roadhouse, another fork from somewhere in this conglomerate which was created in 2021 and solely intended for the development of the next Zot version, originally named Zot8, now known as #Nomad. Roadhouse was so experimental that there has never even been an official text saying what it actually was.

Also in 2021 came #Streams, a Roadhouse derivative that started out just as mysterious but was eventually intended for the public. It's often also referred to as (streams) because it's different from its predecessors in one point: It's even less of a brand. It isn't a product to be used as-is. (streams) is not a "Fediverse platform" that's waiting for its own iPhone app. (streams) is a code repository on Codeberg. And its purpose is for others to take the code and make something out of it. It isn't meant to be run as-is, although you can do that, and some people do. And even then, it comes without a fixed brand and kind of asks you to "rebrand" it, even on a per-instance basis. Most (streams)-based instances don't identify as (streams). Mike who is still involved in the project has his own instance based on (streams) but, probably deliberately and intentionally, still has it identify as Zap.

Another interesting fact: (streams) uses a wild hodge-podge of free licenses. Most of it is in the public domain, but parts of it are under various free licenses which aren't compatible with each other. This is fully intentional, too. It makes using (streams) for commercial products pretty much impossible because no corporate legal department will be able to figure out how to legally comply with all these licenses at the same time. Free use stays basically unlimited, though.

By the way: As of January 1st, 2023, Redmatrix, Osada, Zap, Misty and Roadhouse are EOL and discontinued, and their code repositories were closed. Instances running them can and shall be upgraded to (streams). All that's left is Friendica (the old faithful one), Hubzilla (the nomadic monster) and (streams) (the one for the tinkerers).

Now there's still the question: Why do all these projects, in fact including #Mastodon, use this approach? Why do they start with a server platform plus Web frontend instead of doing as big corporations do and start with an iPhone app and develop a server backend around it? Why appeal to a small bunch of Linux nerds rather than to a mass-market of billions?

Because if you want to go free and decentralised and distributed and federated, you'll need those Linux nerds before everyone else.

First of all, you'll need someone to run instances. Thus, you'll need people who are willing and able to do that. This requires Linux knowledge. The ability to use the command line. The ability to set up and configure a Web server. Network knowledge to connect it to the internet. You can't set up a Web server from zero with three taps on a mobile app.

In fact, when Diaspora* was young, it only ran on Mac servers. All four creators were Apple fanbois who didn't care for anything without the Apple brand on it. The Diaspora* server application was built against macOS. The result was a dire lack of public pods (instances) and everyone piling on the official pod. Mac users don't run Web servers at home, and I guess there were no hosting companies that offered Web hosting on Macs. The devs eventually had to make the server app at least halfway Linux-compatible to get more people to run pods, and you still had to compile Ruby on Rails from sources on Debian stable because Diaspora* depended on a newer version.

Also, you'll need these tech geeks to spot and report bugs. Your typical Windows or Apple user doesn't report bugs; they only complain about them or switch to a competing product. In stark contrast, many Linux users even know how to file a good and informative bug report. Some are even capable of submitting pull requests with bug-fixing patches through git.

And at least in the case of Mike's projects, you'll need a community that's capable of taking over the project itself and continuing its development. You'll need people who know how to code. You'll need people who know how to use git. And so forth. You'll hardly find such people amongst the masses who have spent all their digital lives in the cosy world of corporate-designed GUIs.

If, for example, Mastodon had started out with iPhone and Android apps and gone from there, appealing to a rather tech-illiterate mass audience, it would probably never have become decentralised. At least not beyond the federation between mastodon.social, mastodon.online and whatever more instances Eugen Rochko would have had to launch because these two were full.

And why not? Because Mastodon wouldn't have appealed to people who know how to install and run Mastodon instances. Mastodon would have only had the Windows/Mac/iPhone/Android crowd as users. All the geeks who would have known how to set up and run a Web server would have stayed on Friendica and Hubzilla. Some may have used ActivityPub to connect to Mastodon, but hardly anyone would have switched to that actually inferior platform with a wholly different crowd on it.

@Kevin Davidson @aethervision :ziltoid: @Fediverse News I think if someone made a mobile app for #Hubzilla alone that harnesses its full power and grants access to its entire set of features, maybe minus hub administration, it'd be so bloated that you'd wish for an external 30" touch screen for your phone.

That said, I'm not even sure if it'd make sense to include all of Hubzilla's features, even those that are optional apps per channel, in one mobile app. You wouldn't want to write a blog-like article with embedded pictures with your two thumbs on the 6" touch screen of a hand-held device, much less a bunch of interconnected wiki pages. This also makes mobile apps for blogging on #Plume or #WriteFreely questionable. (Then again, people might have Bluetooth keyboards.)

Now imagine squeezing the feature sets of all other #Fediverse apps into the same app. I mean, the UI would have to change, according to whichever project you're using. And you can't operate all your logins on all projects you use from the same surface. The various calendars with different functionality which will be displayed when logged into Hubzilla and #Mobilizon at the same time may be confusing.

In fact, you'll have to be able to switch between logins. Having four Mastodon logins laid out on the same screen already requires a curved ultra-wide desktop screen. Now imagine being "able" to operate four Hubzilla channels on the same account on a 6" smartphone.

Besides, one central Fediverse app would have to catch up with both innovations on existing projects and newly-launched projects.

@ch0ccyra1n :ins: #NomadicIdentity is a concept created for #Hubzilla (another project in the #Fediverse that has #ActivityPub as an option, launched in 2012) and has therefore seen over a decade of everyday use. Starting with #RedMatrix, all projects launched by Mike Macgirvin after #Friendica under the #Zotlabs "brand" got this feature. The two projects still alive that have them are Hubzilla and the #Streams code repository.

In other words, this is nothing new. The #Zot protocol with its nomadic identity is older than ActivityPub and much older than #BlueSky.

It basically removes the fixed connection of your identity to the instance that you're on by allowing you to have your channel(s) on multiple instances at the same time, fully in-sync. I'm using this feature myself.

On Mastodon, your account is firmly tied to the instance that it's on. When you move to another instance, you can take your name and those whom you follow with you, but you'll create a new identity.

With nomadic identity, you could e.g. "move" to mstdn.social with your entire account with everything on it, but you could choose to keep your new account connected to your current one on emeraldsocial.org and either keep the one on emeraldsocial.org as your main account.

If you toot something, this toot will appear on your emeraldsocial.org account and your mstdn.social account. If you receive a post, it'll appear on both accounts, too. If you follow someone, you follow them from both accounts, but they'll only see the connection from whichever is your main account. If someone follows you, they'll always follow your main account, no matter which one they've decided to follow. If you switch your main account to mstdn.social, all your connections will be automatically updated.

Now, this is not limited to two instances. Theoretically, you can have your Hubzilla or Streams channel on as many instances as you want to.

(If you're wondering why I'm talking about "channels" rather than "accounts" in connection with nomadic entity: The projects that offer nomadic identity have this special feature that's basically "accounts within an account." You can have one account on an instance, but multiple channels, i.e. multiple separate identities, on the same account. And you can make each channel nomadic in different separate ways from one another.)