@jupiter_rowland Interesting, thanks for sharing! This applies to anything your Hubzilla account is connected to (also diaspora), right?

@jupiter_rowland Oh, I never noticed the color changing in your channel. I guess I always looked at it during the day (light blue). I will have to look into this, but many features and functions of Hubzilla are somewhat hidden, at least to a newbie like me.

I'm not surprised that Friendica had a Facebook theme. Diaspora also makes sense. Mastodon also has a Twitter-like theme (Bird UI by @rolle). I think this helps when people are migrating. Hubzilla, on the other hand, is too unique for that

@jupiter_rowland It's a shame. The concepts behind Hubzilla are amazing. But marketing and presentation are big factors. And the UI/UX design in Hubzilla is very outdated in my opinion. Neuhub seems to be able to provide a more modern interface and make Hubzilla more appealing and accessible when it's finished.

The people who are still on Facebook are probably not the type of people looking for a free/decentralized alternative. And even if you Google it, all you get is Diaspora and Mastodon...

@jupiter_rowland Interesting dynamic, thanks for the summary!

I still wonder how people coming from Facebook are not able to find out about Friendica, Hubzilla and co, as their experience with Mastodon must be very unsatisfactory. But then again, most people have no media competence whatsoever.

Apart from Mitra, I have actually heard of all these projects. But well, I'm interested in this stuff. As always, your posts are a great source of knowledge about the Fediverse!

@jupiter_rowland Sure, you're absolutely right. Their main focus is definitely Mastodon and they cover things beyond Mastodon on the side. I would put this down to supply and demand, as many (inexperienced/non-tech) people join Mastodon.

But I don't understand why Mastodon is so popular. Is it just because of the Twitter crash? Sure, I also joined the Fediverse when I was looking for a micro-blogging platform, but that's not for everyone.

@sk @jupiter_rowland While @FediTips is on Mastodon and mostly posts about Mastodon topics, I would not say that they contribute to the belief that the Fediverse is only Mastodon:

What is Mastodon? What is the Fediverse? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse

An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse

(fedi.tips)

There's even a section called "The Fediverse beyond Mastodon" which describes various platforms.

But as @jupiter_rowland said, only those willing to look for information can find it, and most people won't.

@shiri @jupiter_rowland Yes, Mastodon mimics the old Twitter in many ways, but I don't think that's at odds with the federation in the Fediverse? Each platform has it's own concepts and quirks. As long as they can talk over AP, that's fine with me.

However, Mastodon now has such a large user base that other platforms feel pressure to adapt to Mastodon's quirks, such as some of its APIs. This can be problematic, especially if the Mastodon implementation is hacky or unclean.

@jupiter_rowland Isn't this mainly because Mastodon works tag-based rather than because of user ignorance? If you use a hashtag that's relayed to, say, mastodon.social, and the post shows up on their timeline, I would expect that most people wouldn't know or care where it came from?

@rolle @FediThing @zicklepop Excellent article, thanks for pointing this out! I am reposting the link for easy access:

melkat.blog - Hosting Bluesky with Coolify

I recently spun up my own Bluesky PDS server on Coolify. It's fairly easy compared to all the documentation Bluesky put out. It's also a lot less than you would have ever imagined. Before digging into what I did, I want to say thanks to Brandon at krrd.ing, Rafael Eyng's blog, and this GitHub repo I found for all of their work clarifying what Bluesky could not.

(melkat.blog)

"most Bluesky apps and integrations do not support self-hosted accounts" -> Is this because of bad docs, because it's too complex, or because app devs don't believe in the concept?

"reliance on the venture-capital-backed front-end to Amazon’s Simple Email Service, Resend" -> This really worried me, but as far as I can see it could be any SMTP service?

@rolle I don't think they have any plans to change that. It's hard to make money when anyone can set up an instance "for free". And with the numbers mentioned in the article, we can see how much money there is for investors to cache in before dumping the product...

@rolle In my experience, this is something that business people do not understand. Unless your entire code base is open sourced with a licence that allows others to fork, modify and redistribute it, you always have vendor lock-in. You always have to accept the company's terms and conditions or leave. And, as you say, it can always go down.

@rolle But is Bluesky really completely open source?

bluesky-social

bluesky-social has 25 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

GitHub (github.com)

Sure, the app, ATproto and some components like a feed generator are there, but that does not make bsky.app open source...

This blog post by @rolle about how he found his way into the #Fediverse and created IMO the best #Mastodon #theme #BirdUI is well worth a read!

The day I decided to build my own "Twitter" - @rolle / Web designer, web developer

The social media and I go way back. It’s always been about the companies who run them and you, user, a product. Until now. Fediverse is here to change everything. I was one of the early adopters with social media and Twitter. The 2000s was a very exciting era on the Internet, because suddenly there […]

@rolle / Web designer, web developer (rolle.design)