I just imported my follow list from the other account so you’ll be seeing me refollowing a few hundred of you. This is a trial run to see how well this server manages my expectations and it won’t be a full migration until my usual apps fully support #Akkoma.

The iOS or web based ones that I’m aware of that do have some level of support, like @phanpy, @tusker, and @mammoth, still don’t have full Akkoma support with issues ranging from difficulty loading feeds or posts to not loading anything at all despite successfully signing in. @MonaApp seems to have the most support with the least issues. @ivory doesn’t have support at all, they’re clear about being Mastodon only, at least for now.

So it’s not that great yet, far from it. Even when loading the instance from the browser I’m seeing so many 5xx errors and everything just takes a lot longer to load. Maybe it’s my instance, maybe it’s the platform, I don’t know, but that’s been my current experience over the last couple of days.

Loaded my Mastodon account profile from this #Akkoma server, it’s missing a massive chunk of my posts 😂😂 only a tiny fraction seem to be detected, I’ve posted over 3,000 posts and this instance only managed to see 57? Most of today’s posts are missing.

Maybe I need to be using this a lot more so more posts are loaded from the interactions and network effect. I’d like to use Akkoma eventually as my primary social web presence but if it fails to load posts from across the fediverse, that’s not ideal. It struggles to load posts with the starwars hashtag for example, I don’t know why it keeps returning “Error fetching timeline. Load fails” every single time.

Side note: I’m happy that @phanpy seems to sort of work with Akkoma but it has trouble fetching posts, loading content and functions, like replies, smoothly.

Hmmm. I can’t load this post from my other account. See if mentioning it will force it it show up @aulia.

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".

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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.

---

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.

I run two instances-of-one: Akkoma and Friendica, much due to the reasons he mentions.

Most of the issues he had in the article are related to the one HUGE problem Mastodon has with not federating properly, due to lack of "backfilling" (which he also links to at the end of the article too). That is a Mastodon specific problem, and it doesn't exist in for example Akkoma, as Akkoma handles the "backfilling" just fine.

For the end-user the broken "backfilling" basically means they feel ignored and/or annoyed, neither of which are great feelings on social media services when looking to be social online.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34#issuecomment-1338999322

I therefore would interpret his article headline ("Single-user Mastodon...") quite literally: "if you are to set up a single-user instance, use any other Fediverse service but NOT Mastodon as it is broken".

I would recommend #Akkoma. It can be hosted on very modest hardware (i.e. "cheaper") compared to Mastodon. It has all the features. More importantly, it actually federates.

@atomicpoet @kkarhan @fediversenews @RedDevil

Yeah, that is the thing. As Mastodon steals the limelight, no other Fediverse service gets seen. It is like searching online. If everyone calls it "googling", guess where everyone will go to search? Guess how many that will go to DuckDuckGo.com, Qwant.com or use SearX? Literally no one. Terminology matters.

If I were to pick one service to replace Twitter, I'd say Akkoma. It has it all. There are others that has a few of the nice-to-have-things too, but not only does Akkoma have "all the features" (working search, quote-posts, excellent thread views, lists where you can add people without following them etc) but it most importantly has functional federation with dynamic fetching of data. What would that matter you ask? Or how does that differ?

Well, to me, in the Fediverse, actually federating is quite important.

On Mastodon (and also Calckey/Misskey) posts are not collected dynamically. They are also not updated dynamically. This means that if someone you do not federate with already, replies to a post, you will not see their reply. It is invisible (to you). The person making the reply will not KNOW you won't be able to see it, but hey, that is how it is. Also, Mastodon (and Calckey/Misskey) only update edits on actual content changes. Not on meta-data changes.

This means that if someone posts a reply to another post, that original post does not get updated with its meta-data. That meta-data in reality contains information about how many replies/interactions that have been made to this particular post. This is data that actually comes in the protocol, Mastodon just opts to not use it for anything helpful.

This in turn means that if you look at a thread (like this one) and new replies come in, you have to back out of the thread and then go back in to it, and then MAYBE the thread has caught wind of that there are new updates (replies) to the thread. So you have to back out and in again to get it all. Rince/repeat.

Akkoma on the other hand heeds updates to posts, not only for its content, but also for meta-data. If new replies come in to a thread it dynamically reloads the thread where you are. Without going in/out of the thread you can literally see the replies slot in to the thread-view (which Mastodon admittedly doesn't have at all, so difficult to fault it for this) in realtime.

The same goes for visiting a new thread or a profile you don't already federate with. In Mastodon it will simply be empty. Akkoma goes out and dynamically fetch the information it doesn't have.

In Calckey/Misskey, which look amazing, they are still just going to say "Information from remote instance might be incomplete"...yeah, not really helpful...

So...which one I recommend, after having tried them all? #Akkoma. Without a doubt.

@atomicpoet @davidslifka @zack

Yes, the list of functionality is great for Akkoma.

Everything from the little things that are hard to explain unless experienced, such as the "replies" functionality (which I tried to convey via screenshots in this thread) to the increased character count. Proper search. Quote-posts. Proper thread views, with an optional tree-view, and where you can "re-focus" a thread on a specific message. Good list management where you can add people (their public posts) to lists even if you don't follow them. Re-skinning/theme-ing of "everything". Great filters. Everything mentioned is optional for the user by the way.

For me the biggest thing is probably dynamic fetching of information, be it when viewing threads or profiles, from people you don't already follow (and thus don't normally federate with) is a huge one over most of the other services, IMHO.

Most of the other services (I avoid mentioning names on purpose) do not show posts they haven't federated "in", which means there can be "invisible" replies in threads for users of those services, replies they simply do not see, whereas Akkoma runs out and collects the information it doesn't already have, dynamically, and also shows it dynamically.

In busy threads this can make it feel like a "live" view where replies slot in to the thread at their correct position as and when they are made, whilst you are reading the thread.

On many of the other services you have to back out and then go back in to a thread to get it to update at all, and even then it isn't sure they update posts where only the meta-data has updated (which then can hold information about replies etc). One could have thought "actually federating" would be a priority for services of the Fediverse...but I might have gotten that backwards...:)

And then, of course, the bread-and-butter things these days, like translations, follow hash-tags etc, and of course (and obviously) fully compatible with ActivityPub and thereby also Mastodon.

I think #Akkoma is great. Can you tell? 🤣

@martlund @atomicpoet @fediversenews