Mastodon Bluesky Nostr where Akkoma where Iceshrimp where Friendica where Pixelfed

“If it ain’t got no for-profit “Inc.” and no CEO, we ain’t gonna support it.”

Separating identity from instance was invented in 2011, first implemented in 2012, and it has been stable since 2013. Zot protocol, Red, Red Matrix, nowadays known as Hubzilla. It is called nomadic identity.

Separating identity from platform is a current WIP: Nomadic identity is to be introduced to ActivityPub and then made project-agnostic. The idea is to be able to clone your Lemmy account to Mastodon and Pixelfed and Mobilizon and Hubzilla and Funkwhale all the same. You won’t be able to use all features of everywhere everywhere (go ahead, try to edit a Hubzilla wiki or article or webpage on Lemmy, haha), but it’ll be the same identity. Still, it would require one account on each server on which you have an instance of your identity.

But what you’re talking about is full, unlimited user write access to over tens of thousands of instances of over 100 projects. Like, visiting any one of these tens of thousands of servers and being able to do absolutely everything a locally registered user can do, no exceptions, right away.

Like it or not, but this will require a local account. Even OpenWebAuth doesn’t grant you full local user write access, nor does it allow for drive-by, on-the-spot creation of full-blown local user accounts on any instance, regardless of registration of local user accounts is allowed or not. Like, you can’t just visit hub.netzgemeinde.eu and, within a split-second, have a local user account with the same login credentials as on lemy.lol and a nomadic clone of matcha_addict@lemy.lol so it’s the exact self-same Fediverse identity on Lemmy and Hubzilla.

So it’s either this. Immediate drive-by nomadic cloning of your logged-in Fediverse to any instance that you visit for the first time.

Or every Fediverse user must have a user account on every instance of every project out there, and their Fediverse identity must be nomadic everywhere and cloned to everywhere all the same.

Like, you register an account on lemy.lol. Simultaneously, the same account with the self-same credentials will be created on all other Fediverse instances out there. Immediately afterwards, whatever will contain your identity on Lemmy will automatically be cloned to all these other instances of everything. That way, you can immediately use all instances of all projects of the Fediverse just the same.

Or the Fediverse has only one central login server which controls the credentials for all instances of everything out there. You don’t register with lemy.lol, you register with this central behemoth. And all tens of thousands of Fediverse instances connect to this central server for login credentials. And, again, your identity with all your data will have to be cloned and mirrored all across the Fediverse.

By the way, I’ve cloned Hubzilla and (streams) channels before. One channel from one server to one other server. This can take multiple minutes even with not so much content. Guess how long it’ll take to clone one identity container from one Lemmy instance to 20,000++ other instances out there.

Reminds me of when Aeris Irides tried to connect (streams) (2021’s umpteenth fork-of-a-fork of 2010’s Friendica, to dumb it down) and OpenSimulator (free, open-source server application for 3-D virtual worlds very similar to Second Life, est. 2007, interconnected 2008).

Okay, this wasn’t to go as far as federating the OpenSim local chat or even only the OpenSim in-world instant messaging system via ActivityPub because both (streams) and OpenSim were to remain untouched. So you couldn’t post from OpenSim to Mastodon or vice versa.

But the planned features included

• tying together the creation of channels on (streams) and the creation of avatars in OpenSim
• forwarding notifications from (streams) to OpenSim as a message
• syncing the avatar profile picture in OpenSim with that on (streams) bidirectionally
• automatically uploading snapshots taken in OpenSim to the (streams) file space and generating image-only posts

Nothing came out of this, though. The HoloNeon (streams) instance is gone the HoloNeon grid is gone, and Aeris has moved to another OpenSim grid.

So neither the idea of interweaving the Metaverse with the Fediverse is new, nor is the free, open, decentralised Metaverse.

I don’t think it’s wise to start a Lemmy community and then ask for other people to moderate it while being absent for weeks myself.

In case you haven’t read, I’m not primarily a Lemmy user. I’m mostly on Hubzilla and second-mostly on (streams). It may actually occur that I’m not on Lemmy for multiple weeks in a row.

Also, I don’t really want to take care of rules and that stuff.

Just a pity that the community is pretty much dead.

It’s basically like a Hubzilla channel which, in turn, is somewhat like a Friendica account. Which, again, is very vagely like a Mastodon account.

To my best knowledge, you can’t follow individual accounts outside the Threadiverse on Lemmy.

In addition, (streams) has recently switched to decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61. This could be the reason why Lemmy can’t find my (streams) channels, but it can find my Hubzilla channels: It doesn’t understand DIDs.

I’ve started a new (streams) channel for Fediverse memes, but I thought Lemmy could be another, even better place to post them.

I’ve already posted two creations of mine there, One does not simply implement FEP-ef61 with very extensive explanations and What if I told you the Fediverse is not only Mastodon? with only one link to explain it. I’m still trying to find the right amount of explanation for an audience that shall be mostly on Mastodon.

Beyond that, I’ve got loads of ideas. But I don’t want to post more of them here than on (streams). So I’ll first have to define my way of posting them on (streams) to what will be a largely Mastodon audience in a way that satisfies Mastodon’s accessibility requirements the best. I hope to speed up my meme-posting rate then.

No time to run and moderate it. I’m not primarily a Lemmy user, I’m mostly on Hubzilla and (streams). It can happen that I’m absent from Lemmy for weeks.

What I meant weren’t screenshots from social media that are treated like memes.

I rather meant original memes made in the Fediverse for the Fediverse, lampooning the Fediverse, parts of it or certain aspects of it. Even if they’re based on existing templates, no matter how old.

Also, it’d be nice if there was a place where such memes can be posted in the first place.

Any bets this will only work with Mastodon because it was built and designed only against Mastodon?

I wouldn’t even be surprised if other Fediverse server apps could simply circumvent sub.club if sub.club assumes that everything else out there works like Mastodon, too.

It isn’t just types of content that makes a fully featured, unified Fediverse client nigh-impossible. It’s features in general.

It all starts with having one unified timeline for any arbitrary number of Fediverse identities on any arbitrary number of different Fediverse servers. Nicely convenient. You only open one app, and you’ve got them all. Not even separated timelines within the same app, TweetDeck-style. No, you have posts on your three Mastodon accounts under posts on your Pixelfed account under posts on your Lemmy account under posts on your Friendica account, maybe even under posts on your Hubzilla channel if the app isn’t limited to the Mastodon API, and if it supports multiple identities under one login.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Maybe you want to reply to a post. Or you want to post something yourself.

And, of course, you don’t want to stick with the basics that Mastodon offers. Maybe you want to use text formatting.

So text formatting has to be implemented. But it has to be deactivated if you want to post to one of your Mastodon accounts, but it has to be reactivated if one of them is actually on Glitch.

Next trouble: Not everything that supports text formatting supports standard Markdown. Misskey and its various forks use “Misskey-flavoured Markdown”. On Friendica, Markdown is optional and off by default, and BBcode is the standard. On Hubzilla, Markdown is not available at all, only BBcode is, and it comes with a whole slew of extras specific to Mike Macgirvin’s nomadic projects from Red (2012) to Forte (2024). So yes, you may want support for things like [zmg][/zmg], [zrl=][/zrl] or [observer.baseurl].

Of course, if you are on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams), you’re used to having a post preview. Code-heavy posting like on these three makes it a requirement; pure plain-text posting like on Mastodon doesn’t. But the preview button must be able to faithfully render any post just like its native server application would render it. No matter what it’ll be. Oh, and if you’ve got NSFW activated on your Friendica account or your Hubzilla or (streams) channel, the preview must be hidden behind an automatically generated content warning.

Speaking of which, Mastodon-style CWs aren’t unified either. Depending on the server, they would have to go into the CW field, the summary field, [abstract=apub][/abstract] (Friendica), [summary][/summary] (streams) or nowhere at all (e.g. Lemmy, replies on Hubzilla).

The Fediverse has various different ways of quote-posting, and Mastodon doesn’t have quote-posts at all. The Threadiverse has dislikes/downvotes/thumbs-down, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) optionally have them, too, but others don’t. Misskey and the Forkeys have emoji reactions. Hubzilla has only twelve emojis, and clicking one creates a whole new comment with only that emoji in it. Friendica lets you hashtag other people’s posts, so does (streams) optionally, but only they themselves even understand this feature.

Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) also have categories, much like a blog, next to hashtags. At least on Hubzilla and (streams), they’re optional. But they require their own text field which the app must have, too, depending on the availability of this feature.

This goes further and further. After all, you may not just want basic functionality for when you aren’t on your computer. Maybe you don’t have a computer. Maybe your phone is the only digital end-user device you possess. So the app would have to cover not only the bare necessities (read, reply, post etc.), but everything.

For example, someone wants to follow you. On Mastodon, you just confirm it if you’ve set your account up to do so manually, and you’re done.

On Hubzilla with enough optional features activated, you assign a contact role to the new contact to give it the permissions you want to grant it, you add it to one or multiple privacy groups, you choose which profile that contact can see, you adjust the affinity slider, you may even want to pre-fill the per-contact filter lists (one allowlist, one blocklist), and then you confirm the new connection. Upon which Hubzilla automatically follows that connection back. Oh, and then you can still block or ignore or archive a connection or set it to invisible. On (streams), it’s somewhat similar, but since you can grant individual permissions to specific contacts in addition to a pre-defined permission role, you’ve got even more options.

A unified, daily-driver Fediverse app that’s supposed to fully replace Web interfaces would have to offer UI elements for all these settings. And only when they’re actually needed.

Don’t get me started about settings and options. Again, the app would have to mirror all of them. Many people have never touched the Web UI of their Fediverse servers, and they don’t intend to. They do everything on their phones with dedicated apps.

On Hubzilla, this would include access to Hubzilla’s built-in “apps”. “Install”, “uninstall” and configure them. Many important optional features are “apps”. But amongst these “apps”, there are also things like articles, wikis and Web pages. And what would being able to turn these features on and off be worth if you couldn’t use them in the app? And so the app will also have to provide access to Hubzilla’s articles and wikis and Web pages with all bells and whistles.

Of course, whenever a Fediverse server app changes in a way that makes changes in the UI necessary, this unified mobile app would have to follow suit immediately.

Even Fedilab is limited.

Sure, most “Fediverse apps” are Mastodon apps which allow you to use anything that supports the Mastodon API, but which only offer you Mastodon’s feature set, maybe even only the feature set of Mastodon 3 if the app is old enough.

Fedilab has specific features of other projects coded in. After all, it’s made by Pixelfed’s creator and developer, so it has to support as many Pixelfed features as possible, even if Mastodon doesn’t have them.

But Fedilab doesn’t have all features of all supported projects. For example, Fedilab does not have the necessary extra entry field for post titles on Friendica.

At least hardly anyone on Lemmy believes the Fediverse was invented by Eugen Rochko in 2022 as a reaction upon Elon Musk’s announcement to buy Twitter.

Late, but still: I dare say that what Mike Macgirvin has done.

Mistpark/Friendika/Friendica looks like and is marketed as a Facebook alternative. But it comes with extra features on top like a built-in file storage, and its actual killer feature has always been that it federates with everything that moves.

Red a.k.a. the Red Matrix used to handle much like Friendica on the surface, but it introduced nomadic identity and permissions as early as 2012.

Hubzilla, into which the Red Matrix was turned in 2015, is probably the most powerful of all Fediverse projects. It was the first Fediverse project to implement ActivityPub, two months before Mastodon. And it was the first nomadic one to actually kind of take off.

Finally, the latest offspring of 14 years (plus two days) of development since Mistpark is the streams repository which isn’t as feature-heavy as Hubzilla, but the most innovative one, and it’s constantly evolving. It will be there first that nomadic identity and even permissions beyond what Hubzilla has to offer will be implemented in ActivityPub. And it’s likely that this will happen this year.