@julian Mastodon doesn't really have a conversation model at all. It doesn't know what a conversation is because such a thing doesn't exist on Twitter either. The same goes for Pleroma, Misskey and all their forks.

Threads on these projects are loosely tied together from single posts. Any post, regardless of whether it's a reply or not, only goes out to the followers of the poster plus whomever the post mentions.

If Alice posts something, it's her followers and the users mentioned in the post. who are notified about it.

If Bob replies to Alice's post, it's his followers and the users whom he mentions who are notified about it. Alice's followers are not notified unless Bob mentions them one by one. In fact, not even Alice would be notified if Bob didn't mention her.

As far as I know, before nodeBB appeared, there were only a few Fediverse projects that had a concept of conversations:

• Mistpark/Friendika/Friendica
  
• Free Friendika (fork of Friendika; defunct)
  
• Friendica Red/Red/the Red Matrix/Hubzilla
  
• Osada (first a fork of Hubzilla, then a fork of Zap, then probably a fork of Zap again; all discontinued)
  
• Zap (fork of the first Osada; discontinued)
  
• Mistpark 2020 (probably fork of Zap or the third Osada; discontinued)
  
• Redmatrix 2020 (probably fork of Zap, the third Osada or Mistpark 2020; discontinued)
  
• Roadhouse (fork of the third Osada/Mistpark 2020/Redmatrix 2020; discontinued)
  
• the Streams repository (fork of Roadhouse)

With the sole exception of Free Friendika which was forked due to licensing, these were all created by one and the same guy: @Mike Macgirvin ️ who still maintains and develops (streams). He is currently reworking (streams)' conversation model to become more compatible with the ActivityPub standard ((streams) itself isn't based on ActivityPub, but on Nomad). But it's difficult to make it understandable for something like Mastodon that only understands the very basics of a hopelessly outdated version of the ActivityPub standard and substitutes everything else with non-standard, home-brew hacks.

What is now Friendica was not designed as an alternative to Twitter. It was designed as an alternative to Facebook. And so it as a thread structure like Facebook or Tumblr or a blog: exactly one post plus many comments.

Again, if Alice posts something, it's her followers and the users mentioned in the post. who are notified about it.

But if Bob replies to Alice's post, it's a comment on Alice's post and not a stand-alone post itself. Next to whomever Bob mentions, it's Alice and Alice's followers who are notified. Bob's followers are not notified unless they're mentioned because it's none of their business what Bob comments on Alice's post. And Alice is notified even without a mention, as are her followers.

If Carol comments on Bob's comment, apart from whomever Carol mentions, it's Alice, Alice's followers and Bob who are notified. Again, Carol does not have to mention Alice or Alice's followers or Bob. And again, Carol's followers are not notified, neither are Bob's followers.

By sending the post, Alice automatically follows the thread which this post starts. Thus, she receives special notifications for each comment. Likewise, by commenting, both Bob and Carol subscribe to the thread, follow it and receive special notifications for each new comment, regardless of what within the thread is commented on.

Also, Alice, Bob and Carol have the thread in their respective streams anyway. So even if they unsubscribe from the thread, they still get the same notifications for comments as they get for comments on posts from whomever they follow.

By the way, it's only what Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) perceive as posts that is drawn into a stream and listed as unread. So even if you follow Bob or Carol, but not Alice, Bob's and Carol's comments don't show up in your stream.

Lastly, it's Alice who owns the whole thread. Including all comments. At least on Hubzilla and (streams), Alice can moderate her own thread and delete posts from it; unfortunately, that deletion is not forwarded to originally ActivityPub-based projects such as Mastodon which don't understand such measures. And self-moderation on (streams) can go even further than on Hubzilla.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)

It really seems like @Mike McCue's perception of the Fediverse is Flipboard, Mastodon and nothing else.

Posting long-form articles in the Fediverse with almost the full HTML feature set from text formatting to tables to any number of embedded in-line images is completely, utterly inconceivable to many Mastodon users. But this is nothing that is only just being introduced right now. It has been done in the Fediverse since 2010, almost six years before Mastodon was launched, when Rochko was still a school kid, and Friendica which introduced this was still Mistpark.

However, Mastodon users don't notice this happening. They can't. Mastodon flat-out refuses to support full HTML formatting, in-line images etc. simply because that's not what a Twitter clone should do. Thus, Article-type objects are reduced to links to the original which Mastodon users don't even perceive as still within the Fediverse because it doesn't directly show up in their timelines.

And Note-type objects are butchered by Mastodon's "sanitiser" almost beyond recognition. Even images are still fully being stripped out, which is why e.g. Pleroma, Akkoma, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) resort to converting embedded in-line images into file attachments. And then Mastodon only keeps a maximum of four of these and throws the rest away.

This wouldn't matter much if it weren't for Mastodon having a market share of 65% which feels more like 95%. It's absolutely possible for Mastodon users to have been around since late October, 2022 and still "know" that the Fediverse is only Mastodon.

@julian Mastodon tries hard to generate a preview out of anything in any post that comes in from outside.

If I include a link, Mastodon generates a preview.

If I mention someone, Mastodon generates a preview of their account/channel.

If I post a URL in a code block, Mastodon generates a preview if that URL has a website behind it.

If I don't do anything, Mastodon generates a preview of my own channel.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #LinkPreview #LinkPreviews

@julian @Totally with Ю :questified: Also because there's the difference between conversation-oriented projects (Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), the Threadiverse, nodeBB) and Twitter-like micro-blogging projects that don't have a concept of conversations.

The former are built around being able to follow conversations, the latter lack that feature completely.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta

@julian

Whether this is actually true or not, I do not know.

It's true. Mastodon reduces Article-type objects to the title, if there is any, the summary, if there is any, and a link to the original page. It's intentional and by design.

Hubzilla managed to prove it with the 9.0 release several weeks ago. Up until then, Hubzilla posts went out as Note-type objects. The 9.0 release introduced a switch for the entire channel that defaulted to sending Article-type objects and could be switched back to Note-type objects. And all of a sudden, anything that came from Hubzilla was rendered as described above. The Hubzilla community had largely all but forgotten about it. A hotfix disabled the switch and hotwired Hubzilla to Note-type objects until 9.0.1 removed it again.

The actual reason of this behaviour is because Article-type objects tend to be blog posts with all bells and whistles. Text formatting, headlines, horizontal rules and, most importantly, an arbitrary number of images embedded anywhere within the post.

Mastodon, however, is so "original gangsta purist microblogging" that it refused to support any of this up until version 4.0. And even since version 4.0, it can only render the former two.

In other words, if Mastodon tried to render a blog post as-is, it'd fail miserably and botch it big time. Like, rip four of the embedded images out of their embedding, leave them dangling below the post, and throw all images that go beyond these four away altogether because Mastodon can't handle more than four images.

And this mangled rendering of the blog post would literally be the only way that most Mastodon users would experience the post. There wouldn't be a big button that'd take them to the source. There's a button, but stashed away in a pop-up menu that isn't labelled as containing such a button.

The next-best alternative would have been for Mastodon to include full support for everything that can be done with Markdown or HTML or Friendica/Hubzilla's expanded BBcode. But, again, that wouldn't be purist microblogging. That'd be un-Mastodon-like.

So the only alternative left was to not render the post at all and link to the original instead.

The Hubzilla community is fully convinced that Mastodon took this step to flip the bird at Hubzilla.

In order to understand this idea, there are a few things to understand. First: When Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated with Hubzilla which had already been there. Both communicated via OpenMicroBlog, the predecessor of OStatus.

Next: Hubzilla was the first Fediverse project to implement ActivityPub in July, 2017, when it wasn't even a W3C standard yet. Mastodon was the second, some two months later. For quite a while, it was just these two.

Finally: We all know how limited Mastodon is. Hubzilla, on the other hand, had inherited its text formatting capabilities from Friendica, and they're immense. If you can do it in a blog post, you can do it in a Hubzilla post.

Only that Mastodon couldn't render any of it.

AFAIK, Hubzilla kept asking Mastodon to implement full HTML rendering for posts so it'd stop mangling posts from Hubzilla and Friendica. Mastodon staunchly refused because that'd go too far beyond purist microblogging and Twitter-mimicking. Same reasoning as for hard-coding the 500-character limit.

Eventually, Mastodon introduced this switch plus the specific handling for Article-type objects. But instead of being a special mode that does have full HTML rendering capabilities as demanded by Hubzilla, it just creates a link to the original.

For Mastodon, it's keepin' it real and sticking to purist microblogging. For Hubzilla, it's a way to spite them and their silly text formatting and image embedding antics. Hubzilla still holds a grudge against Mastodon for this.

But that ought to change. The question is how, but this WG is not at the point where we start throwing around decrees and making up standards.

The only way for this to change is if you went to Mastodon's GitHub repository and filed an issue which labels this behaviour as a bug. And if as many other Fediverse projects as possible joined in on the same issue. And if the pressure on Mastodon became so big that they cave in and introduce all rendering capabilities necessary to show a long-form blog post the way it's supposed to look.

Again, Hubzilla has tried it which led to the creation of this phenomenon. Others have tried it, too. And I'm not even sure if a vast alliance of Fediverse devs could change it.

After all, Mastodon is in such a position that it doesn't even have to act. It presents itself to the majority of Fediverse users as the one and only fully-featured Fediverse standard and implies that everything that deviates from it is broken.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #ActivityPub

@julian @Terence Eden At this point, one might want to distinguish between how something works according to the ActivityPub standard and how Mastodon has implemented it, if at all.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ActivityPub #Mastodon

That's good. Hubzilla already has server-side and client-side OAuth2 support, so maybe this may come in handy.

That's basically a mixture of the official ActivityPub definition and how it's implemented. Article-type objects mostly come from dedicated long-form blogging applications anyway.

The main hindrance that keeps devs from implementing as:Article is Mastodon's refusal to implement full HTML rendering. Once an elaborate post from e.g. Plume or WordPress or Hubzilla can look basically the same on Mastodon and "at home", once applications that can produce such posts no longer have to convert embedded images into file attachments to at least save four of them from Mastodon's HTML sanitiser, more devs will be willing to implement Article-type objects.

At that point, the biggest complication, I guess, would be how to implement a switch, if at all. Friendica's switch is the title field which is kind of nifty and doesn't inflate the UI, but unfortunately, next to nobody knows about this. Hubzilla 9.0 tried a switch for the entire channel with no way to override it per post which I think is kind of cumbersome. Depending on how which project will implement Article-type objects, you might want to be able to fall back to Note-type objects in certain cases.

And truth be told, I myself might be the only one outside of Mastodon who doesn't mind Mastodon turning Article-type objects into links. That ensures at least that everyone will see them the way they're intended to look without being at the mercy of some 3rd-party UI.

@Dave Heinemann A whole lot has happened in these nine months, including the appearance of three more projects in the Threadiverse that try to do things better than Lemmy and /kbin.

/kbin was forked to Mbin.

PieFed and Sublinks are entirely new.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Threadiverse #Lemmy #kbin #/kbin #Mbin #PieFed #Sublinks

@julian What Lemmy understands is this:

Title

@Community

Post body

It was added back in the day to make it possible for Mastodon users to start new threads in connected Lemmy communities.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta

@julian Well, there are object types that Mastodon couldn't even handle if it wanted to. For example, it doesn't have anything to handle an Event-type object with. I don't think Gargron would build an event calendar into Mastodon just for Event-type objects, not unless enough people pester him to do just that.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon

@julian

Noting now that...

• summary is NOT treated like it is for as:Note, where it acts like a content warning teaser

AFAIK, that's typical behaviour. Mastodon acted the same when Hubzilla sent Article-type objects. It doesn't seem to make much sense to hide the title and the link behind a content warning. Also, I guess the Mastodon devs were aware that whatever sends Article-type objects does not treat the summary as a content warning because only microblogging projects do.

@julian @Emelia It's also fair to mention that this has been the standard mode of operation for everything @Mike Macgirvin ️ has ever created until this year, starting in 2010 with Mistpark which is Friendica today. Friendica still behaves like this, Hubzilla still behaves like this, and (streams) behaved like this until the move to Collections in 2023. Forte is the only exception, it started with Collections right away which, on the outside, don't feel much different.

After all, they're more or less Facebook alternatives. And not the Twitter clone as which the Fediverse in its entirety is being perceived nowadays.

The advantage of this is that everyone who participates in a conversation generally always receives all replies. Not only those that mention them.

From a Mastodon point of view, this concept may appear either revolutionary or entirely unimaginable. But it has been around for 14 years.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Conversations

@Johannes Ernst

same account for multiple instances

This in its pure, nomadic form and with proven stability is only available on Hubzilla and (streams) anyway.

They're also the only ones whose instances can detect off-site users' logins and grant them rights that other visitors don't have, provided said off-site users are on either of the two or Friendica. All thanks to OpenWebAuth.

@Mike Macgirvin ️, creator of all three and maintainer of the streams repository, is currently working on implementing nomadic identity and (streams)' set of permissions using nothing but ActivityPub so it can become available to everything else in the Fediverse as well.

share to fediverse

I'm not quite sure, but I think @Stefan Bohacek or someone who commented on one of his posts has figured out how to share at least to Hubzilla.

However, actual share buttons are all geared only towards Mastodon and hit-and-miss at best when it comes to anything else. The less something is like Mastodon, the less they work with it.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NomadicIdentity #OpenWebAuth #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #ShareButton #ShareButtons

Little heads-up: So far, Hubzilla renders everything the way I guess it's intended. Nothing out of the ordinary.

@julian They say they want to build Ghost against, direct quote from the link:

Mastodon, PixelFed, Buttondown, Flipboard, Lemmy, WriteFreely, Misskey, Threads, and many more.

In practice, I guess they've only looked at Mastodon so far. So they'll build Ghost against Mastodon.

Once that's done, they'll pick the next project on the list, probably Pixelfed, seeing as it's the second one mentioned, advertised a whole lot on Mastodon itself and, I think, the second biggest decentralised project in the Western Fediverse.

Then they'll discover that Pixelfed works quite different from Mastodon, not to mention that it's still constantly changing and shifting, so they can't do that work once and be done for all eternity to come.

They'll either end up with a half-arsed implementation because a lot of what they'd have to do would clash with Mastodon compatibility, totally surprisingly, or drop Pixelfed and look for the next one, or they'll decide that Mastodon compatibility covers some 65 or 70% of the Fediverse already, and everything else can be swept under the rug without losing too much audience.

I can promise you that they'll never built Ghost against nodeBB. Even if they somehow found out that nodeBB exists and supports ActivityPub, they won't get to it.

And I'm sure they won't build Ghost against anything that's significantly older than Mastodon or forked from something that's significantly older than Mastodon. This means that Ghost will be compatible with Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) either just barely so and by chance or not at all. I mean, they haven't even mentioned Friendica by name.

CC: @Johannes Ernst

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ActivityPub #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pixelfed #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #nodeBB #Ghost

@Stefan Bohacek @jdp23 @julian "Shadow mentioning" is a thing. (streams) and Forte do it to avoid clutter. Mentions don't have to be visible in a post/comment to work.

@damon @ShadSterling @Johannes Ernst Ideally, an instance picker would help pick a project along with the instance.

But what we have right now seems to be

• either "Choose a project, then we'll go from there"
• or railroading to Mastodon because only Mastodon instances can be recommended

Just about everyone who has joined the Fediverse in the last two years was railroaded to Mastodon and not being told what the Fediverse actually is. Some of them it took months to learn that there's stuff in the Fediverse that's connected to Mastodon but so very much not Mastodon itself. And when they learned it, some of them were shocked out of their minds. Others still don't know, sometimes after well over a year.

It cannot continue this way. We must no longer sweep everything under the rug that doesn't have an Inc. and a CEO.

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

@Scott M. Stolz Like a diaspora* dev once said: Threads didn't "implement ActivityPub", they "implemented Mastodon".

@glyn Decentralised identity has been available for longer than Mastodon, let alone ActivityPub. Only that it is known as "nomadic identity" here.

It was first implemented by Friendica creator @Mike Macgirvin ?️ in the Zot protocol in 2011 and in a Friendica fork named Red in 2012, later renamed into the Red Matrix, eventually reworked and renamed into Hubzilla in 2015.

Proof: This Hubzilla channel of mine actually simultaneously resides on two servers.

(Almost) everything that Mike has made afterwards, forks and forks of forks of Hubzilla, used to have or still have nomadic identity implemented.

His streams repository contains a fork of a fork... of Hubzilla that intentionally has no name, and that offers nomadic identity via the Nomad protocol with better compatibility with non-nomadic ActivityPub. In July, it had decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61 (see also here) implemented, a first step by Mike to fully implement nomadic identity in ActivityPub.

Forte, Mike's most recent fork from August, had all support for Nomad and Zot6 removed and only uses ActivityPub anymore while still offering nomadic identity. To my best knowledge, however, it has yet to be declared stable enough to be daily-driven, and it has no public instances.

Other than all this, a non-public development version of @silverpill's Mitra has nomadic identity via ActivityPub in development. I'm not sure whether FEP-ef61 is implemented in the release version yet. It's the only Fediverse project aiming to implement nomadic identity which Mike Macgirvin has nothing directly to do with.

The ultimate goal is to be able to clone a Fediverse identity across project borders. Only considering stable releases, it's currently only possible to clone Hubzilla channels within Hubzilla, using Zot6, or (streams) channels within (streams), using Nomad.

Unfortunately, Mike has officially retired from Fediverse development and only occasionally submits code to the streams repository and Forte anymore.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #DecentralizedIdentity #NomadicIdentity #ActivityPub #FEP_ef61 #Zot #Zot6 #Nomad #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Mitra