@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.

@DaywalkingRedhead I've never really seen #PeerTube as a #TikTok replacement. Maybe the devs could say something about it (@PeerTube).

@EamonnMR I'm not quite sure what exactly you mean with "app".

If you mean whether users of different mobile apps for the #Fediverse can stay in contact with users with the mobile app named "Mastodon" that you install from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, that's the wrong question. But the answer is yes.

If you mean whether users of different projects (platforms, server apps etc.) in the Fediverse that aren't Mastodon can stay in contact with Mastodon users, then: Yes, they can. Each project I've mentioned is federated with Mastodon, i.e. they all connect to Mastodon, and their users can interact with Mastodon users.

That's the magic of the Fediverse. And that's the actual idea behind the Fediverse. After all, the Fediverse is not only Mastodon.

@{mattl@social.mat.tl} They don't have to put up with all these features.

If they want cool new features, they may move to e.g. Akkoma or CalcKey or Friendica or whatever. If they don't, they can stay on good old Mastodon.

What they won't get, though, is a 100%, 1:1 Twitter clone, just without Elon Musk.

@Phoenix Thank you!

@Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; Soni L. Do you mean me myself in my specific situation or "you" as in anyone with whichever app is the most popular on whichever hardware/OS platform is the most popular?

Do you mean which steps I personally would take using Hubzilla through Firefox on desktop GNU/Linux? Or which steps a beginner would have to take, e.g. using the official Mastodon app on an iPhone?

I could tell you the former, but it'd be of little use for most here. I can't tell you the latter because I don't have any practical experience with it.

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.

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

@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.