@ Evan Prodromou

- Dozens of FEPs under development

...and they're usually only implemented by those who maintain them. These and their works, in turn, mostly stay in the shadows while the bigger players in the Fediverse remain blissfully unaware of them.

Pretty much exactly what @silverpill has been doing for a while now.

- New work like quote posts from Mastodon

Technology taken over from GoToSocial.

The principle of how these quote-posts are done taken over from Misskey.

And quote-posts themselves were introduced to the Fediverse as early as May, 2010, by what's known as Friendica today.

This is what @silverpill meant with:

Features that already exist somewhere in Fediverse presented as new inventions.

Mastodon presented their quotes as if they had just introduced an all-new, totally revolutionary feature to the Fediverse. In fact, however, the Fediverse had had quote-posts for a decade and a half at that point.

Let's all face it: The main hindrance in Fediverse development is Mastodon. It's a painfully incomplete implementation of a hopelessly outdated version of the ActivityPub spec. At the same time, its cult-like followers see it as the one and only gold standard and the reference implementation of ActivityPub. They believe that Gargron has invented both ActivityPub and the Fediverse because, frankly, that's what the Mastodon folks want everyone to believe.

If the Fediverse had some fair competition, then Mastodon would have to catch up with software like Misskey or Akkoma or Mitra and eventually powerhouses like (streams) or Forte. But what Mastodon lacks in features, it makes up for with sheer market power. The loudest voices that promote the Fediverse don't actually promote the Fediverse; they only promote Mastodon.

The features of the non-Mastodon Fediverse are unknown and outright unimaginable both on Mastodon and outside the Fediverse. And just about everyone believes that Mastodon is as perfect and fully-featured Fediverse software as it ever comes. Pretty much the only ones who don't are those who daily-drive non-Mastodon Fediverse software.

This actually goes as far as Mastodon users trying their hardest to force e.g. Friendica users to throw away their own culture, switch to Mastodon's culture and abstain from using some 80% of Friendica's features because they aren't covered by Mastodon's culture. At the same time, Mastodon users staunchly refuse to adopt any part of any non-Mastodon Fediverse culture. This means that even if non-Mastodon Fediverse devs introduce new features, they'd better not let Mastodon users know.

And so Mastodon can get away both with a laughable set of features, with completely ignoring not only FEPs, but also large parts of the ActivityPub spec, with advertising features which just about the whole rest of the Fediverse has had for years as completely new original inventions of their own, and with implementing non-standard stuff and forcing the rest of the Fediverse to implement "proprietary", non-standard Mastodon developments.

CC: @ julian

# Long # LongPost # CWLong # CWLongPost # FediMeta # FediverseMeta # CWFediMeta # CWFediverseMeta # MastodonCentricity # MastodonNormativity

@ Rob Ricci @ caterpillar @ Stefan Bohacek @ Ericka Simone This is exactly the problem.

I'm on both Hubzilla and (streams) with multiple channels, and I've been on Hubzilla under various guises for longer than the vast majority of Mastodon users have been on Mastodon. I guess you can say that I know both very well.

I can tell you that the possibilities of Hubzilla's permissions system are staggering. It works on up to three levels: for the entire channel (that's "account" in Mastospeak), for individual connections (that's "followers and followed" in Mastospeak), for individual content (posts and and entire conversations, but also images and other uploaded files and documents).

For example, you can grant or deny permission to

• see your public profile (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
• see your connections (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
• see your public posts in your stream (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected)
• send you their posts (this means public posts that aren't replies because replies are not posts on Hubzilla)
• like (that's "fave" in Mastospeak; you know, the star), dislike and comment on your posts
• send you DMs
• see your uploaded files (this requires OpenWebAuth magic sign-on which Mastodon has rejected, but this also extends to images and other media embedded into posts, comments and DMs)

All in all, Hubzilla has 18 such permissions, but these are the ones that matter from a Mastodon point of view. They can be granted or denied for your entire channel at seven or eight levels, and if they're denied at channel level, they can be granted for individual connections. Imagine that, on Mastodon, you could allow only certain followers to see your profile and your toots. Or you could only allow certain followed accounts to send you their toots. All of this is reality on Hubzilla right now.

Better yet: You know that you can send toots only to mentioned accounts on Mastodon. Hubzilla exceeds and improves upon this in three ways. First of all, you can send posts to individual connections. Or to a certain privacy group (from a Mastodon POV, that's a list on steroids). Or to a custom selection of individual connections and privacy groups while even being able to exclude certain other connections or privacy groups. This goes way beyond Mastodon's "mentioned = allowed to see".

But this doesn't only define who will receive your post. It also defines who is permitted to see your post.

And: The permissions of a post are inherited by the entire conversation. Comments always have the same permissions as the top post. There's no restricting the permissions in a comment, and there's no relaxing the limitations of a comment. It's impossible to pull other Fediverse users into a private conversation by mentioning them if the top post wasn't targetted at them.

Even better yet: You can allow or disallow comments on individual posts (remember that a post on Hubzilla is only a post if it starts a conversation, not if it's a reply).

On top of all this, Hubzilla's filters are both vastly more powerful than Mastodon's filters and easier to use. Mastodon requires you to set up one new filter for each word that you want filtered. It's always blocklisting. And it's always account-wide.

Hubzilla covers Mastodon's entire filter functionality with one or two text fields. You have one blocklist for the whole channel. And you have an optional extra feature named "NSFW" with its own filter list that generated individual, reader-side content warnings for you. The equivalent of defining a new filter on Mastodon is to add a new line to one of these filter lists. Want to back them up? Just copy-paste them into a text file.

But wait, there's more: Hubzilla also has a channel-wide allowlist. If you only want to see certain content in your stream, you can allowlist certain keywords.

Hubzilla even optionally has one blocklist and one allowlist per connection. Imagine you could filter individual followed accounts on Mastodon.

Hubzilla's filter lists support regular expressions. There is also a "filter syntax" that lets you filter by whether a message is a top post or not, whether a message is public or private, whether it's a repeat (that's "boost" in Mastospeak or "retoot" for those of you who still have Twitter on the brain). The filter syntax even lets you use Boolean operators.

(streams) and Forte are similar. Their permissions are somewhat different (you don't need permissions for wikis and websites if you don't have wikis and websites). The permissions system is vastly easier to use because it's no longer template-based. You can simply switch permissions on and off for your channel as well as for connections. And you can choose to have even more options for reply control.

Again, all this exists in the Fediverse right now. And most of it has existed for longer than Mastodon. Some of this dates back to the earliest days of Friendica in May, 2010.

Unfortunately, next to nobody knows.

For most Mastodon features, the features that Mastodon has are the features that the Fediverse has. If Mastodon doesn't have it, the Fediverse doesn't. Not only is Mastodon the default, but there's nothing that strays from this default. That's why Mastodon users keep wishing for "the Fediverse" to introduce features which Friendica has had for almost 16 years already. Or which Hubzilla has had for over a decade.

In addition, probably not even 10% of all Mastodon users have ever heard of Hubzilla. Probably not even 1% of all Mastodon users know what Hubzilla can do. And even only the existence of (streams) and Forte is almost entirely unknown outside of (streams) and Forte themselves and Hubzilla.

# Long # LongPost # CWLong # CWLongPost # FediMeta # FediverseMeta # CWFediMeta # CWFediverseMeta # Fediverse # CW # CWs # CWMeta # ContentWarning # ContentWarnings # ContentWarningMeta # Hubzilla # Streams # (streams) # Forte # Permission # Permissions # ReplyControl # ReplyControls # Filter # Filters # MastodonCentricism # MastodonNormativity