2023-01-17 09:04:20
2022-11-04 17:45:46
2022-11-04 15:06:42
816349
From Mistpark to Streams: An attempt at a chronology
Allow me to digress from the usual topic on this channel once more.
I'm pretty sure that no human being on this planet has created nearly as many federated social platforms as @mike. But all these (actually not always so) different platforms can be a bit confusing. Even I may be wrong here and there, but I'll try to make some sense of them by putting them into a kind of chronology.
So first, there was #Friendica. Only that it started out under the name of #Mistpark. I'll get to the name later.
Remember #Diaspora? Remember summer 2010 when the crowdfunding run was launched so that those four guys could spend all their time creating a free, #OpenSource, decentralised, federated social network (a.k.a. #Facebook killer) which they wanted to name Diaspora*?
Well, they unknowingly wanted to re-invent the wheel. #StatusNet was already there, #GNUsocial was already there, and especially, Mistpark was already there with a 1.x release and more powerful than both, actually, more powerful than Diaspora would ever become. I think Mistpark even already had Diaspora*'s aspects, only that they were called groups.
As for its concept, Mistpark went beyond that of Diaspora*. Mistpark didn't only want a bunch of instances ("nodes" in this case) of its own kind to connect with one another, it also wanted to federate with everything else that moved, be it e-mail, be it StatusNet, be it Twitter, be it whatever.
The first name change was from Mistpark to #Friendika. The reason was that the original name sounded repelling to German speakers. "Mist" means "fog" in English, but "dung" or "manure" in German, not to mention that it's a German curse word.
When Diaspora* was finally there, Friendika didn't see it as competition, it saw it as another federation target. To this day, Friendica is fully federated with Diaspora*, and that has exclusively been the work of the Friendika developers who studied Diaspora*'s source code and reverse-engineer it because it didn't have an API.
Probably the biggest coup was the bidirectional federation with Facebook. This was what everyone was waiting for. This, however, was also where the trouble started. Facebook didn't want to be federated with a non-commercial social network and started taking defensive measures. Also, Friendica users (the second name change was through meanwhile) who used the Facebook connector had their entire and often very busy Facebook timelines mirrored onto Friendica nodes, one of the reasons why even nodes on powerful root servers often had to close new registrations even though they only had a little over a hundred users. So there were several reasons why Facebook federation was axed again.
Internally, Friendica uses its own protocol named #DFRN. But I guess Mike had meanwhile seen it as a dead end, also because he had a new idea: #NomadicIdentity, not only the ability to easily take your account from one instance to another, but the possibility to have it on multiple instances at the same time, keeping the copies in sync.
That's why he laid the foundation for a new protocol that could do that: #Zot.
And with it came the next social platform. It was first just simply named Red from Spanish "red" = "net". Red was based on Zot from the beginning, and as an experimental platform, it only understood Zot. On Friendica which was now running at full steam on dozens upon dozens of nodes, and which Mike had passed on to the community, the development was followed with interest. And just like later platforms, I think Red actually got a few small public instances because someone really wanted to try it out. Red eventually changed its name to #RedMatrix.
Also, Red didn't just want to be a social network like Friendica. The idea was rather to have a "social content management system" that could do just about everything you could do with a website and/or a cloud server. Third-party federation was slightly reduced, connections to commercial platforms didn't come back. But as Red evolved, the Diaspora* connector was included which was also used to federate Red with Friendica.
From the Red Matrix emerged #Hubzilla, the Swiss Army knife of the #Fediverse. Still today, its possibilities have rarely ever been fleshed out: not only microblogging, but macroblogging, article publication, websites, wikis (no, I'm not kidding), #WebDAV, #CalDAV and #CardDAV server and so forth.
Next to the nomadic identity that came with Zot, Hubzilla introduced another killer feature: one account, many separate channels. Each one of these channels is basically like one Friendica account. You can have multiple fully separate identities on one account, and nobody (except the instance admin) can tell that they're all you. So this goes way beyond Friendica's multiple profiles. By the way, Hubzilla still has multiple profiles per channel.
Some say that the Red Matrix was renamed Hubzilla. This isn't true. Hubzilla is a fork of the Red Matrix, one could say it was a stable snapshot of the Red Matrix.
For the development of the Red Matrix continued. Planned advancements on Zot couldn't be tested on stable Hubzilla, they needed their own testbed. Eventually, the last Red Matrix instance was Mike's personal one with himself as the only user. It still federated with Friendica and, of course, Hubzilla.
In the meantime, #ActivityPub came along. It wasn't just another obscure networking protocol, though, because #Mastodon made it huge. So at least Friendica and Hubzilla had to adopt it. Friendica firmly integrated it. Hubzilla made it into an app just like all other protocols that aren't Zot because they stand in the way of fully nomadic identity. By the way, both profited from its introduction because the federation between each other no longer had to use the Diaspora* protocol.
For the next advancements of Zot, two new platforms were forked from the Red Matrix or Hubzilla. At this point, Mike wasn't involved with Hubzilla anymore either. First, there was #Osada, an early testbed for what would become #Zot6, but still with ActivityPub. For pure Zot6, #Zap followed suit. Most connectors that are neither Zot nor ActivityPub, including the one to Diaspora*, weren't taken over, as were many of Hubzilla's extra abilities (websites, articles, wiki, CardDAV, two parallel calendar systems etc.) to keep it slim. It did get to keep the various types of channels as well as one CalDAV server and the WebDAV connection, though.
Eventually, when Mike handed them over to the community, they used the exact same code base. The only differences between Osada and Zap was whether or not the admin had ActivityPub on (Osada) or off (Zap) and the name.
As having two different names for the same thing, depending on the instance configuration, Osada was discontinued in favour of Zap which now included ActivityPub itself. In the meantime, Zot6 became stable and was backported into Hubzilla which thereby became fully compatible to Zap, only that what Hubzilla can that Zap can't cannot be mirrored to Zap.
Then Osada re-emerged as Zap's unstable branch. Along with it came a new Red Matrix which, as far as I could see, was now an even more purist, even more unstable branch that only served for testing Zot8 and lacked all other protocols.
To top this off, in 2020, Zap itself got a stable branch even more intended for productive use. For this purpose, the name Mistpark was dusted off. The new stable branch was named #Mistpark2020 or simply #Misty. Misty was the first of its kind to not even get an announcement anymore, though. Its home page on Zotlabs disappeared along with Zotlabs before it could be filled with any useful information.
Two things were interesting: Red Matrix, Osada, Zap and Misty were based on various states of the same code base. It was possible to switch from one to another by rebasing the local code repository on your server. This became obvious through instances that carry the name of one project but run another one.
It must have been in 2021 when #Roadhouse showed up, again, unannounced. It seemed to be nothing more than a concept for the next generation of distributed social platforms. Roadhouse was the first of its kind to use the #Nomad protocol which, I guess, is forked from #Zot because it serves the same purpose. It got its own home page on Zotlabs which remained as uninformational as Misty's.
And then the most recent name popped up: #Streams. At first, it was even less clear what Streams was supposed to be and what set it apart from Roadhouse, not to mention Red Matrix, Osada, Zap and Misty, also because Zotlabs didn't say what Streams was either.
But I guess Streams' purpose has emerged in the meantime through word-of-mouth: It's the experimental successor of all five and the solution to this maze of names. Streams isn't even a product with a name, it's a concept that uses Nomad for nomadic identity and that is in constant flux, hence Streams. The idea was to do away with fixed names to get rid of the previous chaos. Everyone can name whatever they do with Streams however they want.
There is currently only one more or less public Streams instance, but it still carries "Stream" in its name. At least two more instances which may be private are named something with "Streams", too. So whether Mike wants or not, Streams has become a name of its own, and people use it.
How many Streams instances exactly exist right now is hard to tell, even from Communities pages on Streams instances or Sites pages on older platforms, because they don't necessarily identify themselves as Streams instances. So if you go through one of these pages, and there are names in the Projects column which you don't know as Fediverse platforms, check out what's behind them. It's often only one instance. Open the instance, click its burger menu, and if there's a Communities link, it's a Streams instance. I've discovered a lot of Streams instances not named anything with Streams this way. Private instances included, I guess Streams must have more than a dozen instances already.
There has even already been a request to launch a Streams support forum much like the one for Hubzilla; after all, Streams still supports forums. It's safe to say that Streams is doing quite well for something so obscure.
Feature-wise, Streams is the same as Zap and Misty.
But what became of the six platforms between Hubzilla and Streams?
As of now, Friendica is still going strong, so is Hubzilla, and Streams seems to be cleaning up the mess that came after Hubzilla.
If you really want to try out something with Zot, my current recommendation is Hubzilla, even if it may seem bloated and cumbersome to you, even if you'll never harness its full power. Many of its extra functions are additional apps and switched off by default; this includes ActivityPub, by the way, this is important to know.
It's hard to find a public Streams instance with open registrations currently, much less multiple ones that'd be required for a nomadic identity. Neither Fediverse.party nor the FediDB nor The-Federation.info nor Fediverse.info even knows Streams, and existing Streams instances usually don't identify to other Fediverse servers as Streams instances. It's still a rather underground and grass-roots project with no publicity at all. As Streams is rather experimental, however, you may want a nomadic home on at least two instances to have an instant backup, should one of them shut down.
Zap has got exactly one instance open to the public, and seeing as Zap may be shrinking rather than growing, I don't expect this to change. Again, due to Zap's still small size and unclear future, I wouldn't recommend using it without nomadic identity as a safety net.
As for Osada or Misty, good luck finding an instance to join, much less one that's here to stay and ideally be upgraded to Streams one day.
Hubzilla may not be as bleeding-edge as Streams, and it may be overkill for your purposes if Zap or Streams would be sufficient, but it's stable, it's big enough, it's established, and it's different enough from Streams to not be endangered by it. I mean, Hubzilla hasn't managed to kill off Friendica either, right?
I'm pretty sure that no human being on this planet has created nearly as many federated social platforms as @mike. But all these (actually not always so) different platforms can be a bit confusing. Even I may be wrong here and there, but I'll try to make some sense of them by putting them into a kind of chronology.
So first, there was #Friendica. Only that it started out under the name of #Mistpark. I'll get to the name later.
Remember #Diaspora? Remember summer 2010 when the crowdfunding run was launched so that those four guys could spend all their time creating a free, #OpenSource, decentralised, federated social network (a.k.a. #Facebook killer) which they wanted to name Diaspora*?
Well, they unknowingly wanted to re-invent the wheel. #StatusNet was already there, #GNUsocial was already there, and especially, Mistpark was already there with a 1.x release and more powerful than both, actually, more powerful than Diaspora would ever become. I think Mistpark even already had Diaspora*'s aspects, only that they were called groups.
As for its concept, Mistpark went beyond that of Diaspora*. Mistpark didn't only want a bunch of instances ("nodes" in this case) of its own kind to connect with one another, it also wanted to federate with everything else that moved, be it e-mail, be it StatusNet, be it Twitter, be it whatever.
The first name change was from Mistpark to #Friendika. The reason was that the original name sounded repelling to German speakers. "Mist" means "fog" in English, but "dung" or "manure" in German, not to mention that it's a German curse word.
When Diaspora* was finally there, Friendika didn't see it as competition, it saw it as another federation target. To this day, Friendica is fully federated with Diaspora*, and that has exclusively been the work of the Friendika developers who studied Diaspora*'s source code and reverse-engineer it because it didn't have an API.
Probably the biggest coup was the bidirectional federation with Facebook. This was what everyone was waiting for. This, however, was also where the trouble started. Facebook didn't want to be federated with a non-commercial social network and started taking defensive measures. Also, Friendica users (the second name change was through meanwhile) who used the Facebook connector had their entire and often very busy Facebook timelines mirrored onto Friendica nodes, one of the reasons why even nodes on powerful root servers often had to close new registrations even though they only had a little over a hundred users. So there were several reasons why Facebook federation was axed again.
Internally, Friendica uses its own protocol named #DFRN. But I guess Mike had meanwhile seen it as a dead end, also because he had a new idea: #NomadicIdentity, not only the ability to easily take your account from one instance to another, but the possibility to have it on multiple instances at the same time, keeping the copies in sync.
That's why he laid the foundation for a new protocol that could do that: #Zot.
And with it came the next social platform. It was first just simply named Red from Spanish "red" = "net". Red was based on Zot from the beginning, and as an experimental platform, it only understood Zot. On Friendica which was now running at full steam on dozens upon dozens of nodes, and which Mike had passed on to the community, the development was followed with interest. And just like later platforms, I think Red actually got a few small public instances because someone really wanted to try it out. Red eventually changed its name to #RedMatrix.
Also, Red didn't just want to be a social network like Friendica. The idea was rather to have a "social content management system" that could do just about everything you could do with a website and/or a cloud server. Third-party federation was slightly reduced, connections to commercial platforms didn't come back. But as Red evolved, the Diaspora* connector was included which was also used to federate Red with Friendica.
From the Red Matrix emerged #Hubzilla, the Swiss Army knife of the #Fediverse. Still today, its possibilities have rarely ever been fleshed out: not only microblogging, but macroblogging, article publication, websites, wikis (no, I'm not kidding), #WebDAV, #CalDAV and #CardDAV server and so forth.
Next to the nomadic identity that came with Zot, Hubzilla introduced another killer feature: one account, many separate channels. Each one of these channels is basically like one Friendica account. You can have multiple fully separate identities on one account, and nobody (except the instance admin) can tell that they're all you. So this goes way beyond Friendica's multiple profiles. By the way, Hubzilla still has multiple profiles per channel.
Some say that the Red Matrix was renamed Hubzilla. This isn't true. Hubzilla is a fork of the Red Matrix, one could say it was a stable snapshot of the Red Matrix.
For the development of the Red Matrix continued. Planned advancements on Zot couldn't be tested on stable Hubzilla, they needed their own testbed. Eventually, the last Red Matrix instance was Mike's personal one with himself as the only user. It still federated with Friendica and, of course, Hubzilla.
In the meantime, #ActivityPub came along. It wasn't just another obscure networking protocol, though, because #Mastodon made it huge. So at least Friendica and Hubzilla had to adopt it. Friendica firmly integrated it. Hubzilla made it into an app just like all other protocols that aren't Zot because they stand in the way of fully nomadic identity. By the way, both profited from its introduction because the federation between each other no longer had to use the Diaspora* protocol.
For the next advancements of Zot, two new platforms were forked from the Red Matrix or Hubzilla. At this point, Mike wasn't involved with Hubzilla anymore either. First, there was #Osada, an early testbed for what would become #Zot6, but still with ActivityPub. For pure Zot6, #Zap followed suit. Most connectors that are neither Zot nor ActivityPub, including the one to Diaspora*, weren't taken over, as were many of Hubzilla's extra abilities (websites, articles, wiki, CardDAV, two parallel calendar systems etc.) to keep it slim. It did get to keep the various types of channels as well as one CalDAV server and the WebDAV connection, though.
Eventually, when Mike handed them over to the community, they used the exact same code base. The only differences between Osada and Zap was whether or not the admin had ActivityPub on (Osada) or off (Zap) and the name.
As having two different names for the same thing, depending on the instance configuration, Osada was discontinued in favour of Zap which now included ActivityPub itself. In the meantime, Zot6 became stable and was backported into Hubzilla which thereby became fully compatible to Zap, only that what Hubzilla can that Zap can't cannot be mirrored to Zap.
Then Osada re-emerged as Zap's unstable branch. Along with it came a new Red Matrix which, as far as I could see, was now an even more purist, even more unstable branch that only served for testing Zot8 and lacked all other protocols.
To top this off, in 2020, Zap itself got a stable branch even more intended for productive use. For this purpose, the name Mistpark was dusted off. The new stable branch was named #Mistpark2020 or simply #Misty. Misty was the first of its kind to not even get an announcement anymore, though. Its home page on Zotlabs disappeared along with Zotlabs before it could be filled with any useful information.
Two things were interesting: Red Matrix, Osada, Zap and Misty were based on various states of the same code base. It was possible to switch from one to another by rebasing the local code repository on your server. This became obvious through instances that carry the name of one project but run another one.
It must have been in 2021 when #Roadhouse showed up, again, unannounced. It seemed to be nothing more than a concept for the next generation of distributed social platforms. Roadhouse was the first of its kind to use the #Nomad protocol which, I guess, is forked from #Zot because it serves the same purpose. It got its own home page on Zotlabs which remained as uninformational as Misty's.
And then the most recent name popped up: #Streams. At first, it was even less clear what Streams was supposed to be and what set it apart from Roadhouse, not to mention Red Matrix, Osada, Zap and Misty, also because Zotlabs didn't say what Streams was either.
But I guess Streams' purpose has emerged in the meantime through word-of-mouth: It's the experimental successor of all five and the solution to this maze of names. Streams isn't even a product with a name, it's a concept that uses Nomad for nomadic identity and that is in constant flux, hence Streams. The idea was to do away with fixed names to get rid of the previous chaos. Everyone can name whatever they do with Streams however they want.
There is currently only one more or less public Streams instance, but it still carries "Stream" in its name. At least two more instances which may be private are named something with "Streams", too. So whether Mike wants or not, Streams has become a name of its own, and people use it.
How many Streams instances exactly exist right now is hard to tell, even from Communities pages on Streams instances or Sites pages on older platforms, because they don't necessarily identify themselves as Streams instances. So if you go through one of these pages, and there are names in the Projects column which you don't know as Fediverse platforms, check out what's behind them. It's often only one instance. Open the instance, click its burger menu, and if there's a Communities link, it's a Streams instance. I've discovered a lot of Streams instances not named anything with Streams this way. Private instances included, I guess Streams must have more than a dozen instances already.
There has even already been a request to launch a Streams support forum much like the one for Hubzilla; after all, Streams still supports forums. It's safe to say that Streams is doing quite well for something so obscure.
Feature-wise, Streams is the same as Zap and Misty.
But what became of the six platforms between Hubzilla and Streams?
- Red Matrix kept having only this one single-user instance because nobody else dared to touch it and set up another instance. It's a Zap instance now as far as I can see.
- Osada never really took off, Zap probably did only after Osada was merged into it, and some Osada instances became Zap instances. This explains why Zap has got comparably many instances. Most of them, however, are tiny, probably private and utterly undermaintained as they run rather old Zap versions. Zap only lives by numbers, and it's the only one of the five listed on Fediverse Observer. Also, while the FediDB lists all five, it only knows that one Dominican public Zap instance and none of the others (looking through its connected sites reveals many unlisted instances of Zot-based networks, by the way). Still, it seems to be on the deathbed, being superseded by Streams, experimental as the latter may be.
There still seem to be a very few running Osada instances, but Osada can be considered dead as the focus is on Streams now. - Misty didn't take off either, even though it was considered more stable and more production-grade than Zap. This time, the reason may simply be because Misty got zero advertising, so nobody heard about it, probably not even some of the Zap crowd. Misty never had many instances, they weren't properly advertised either (the same applies to most Zap instances, by the way), and Misty's death knell may have been the unannounced shutdown of its largest instance. Basically, there was little room for Misty next to less obscure Zap.
- Roadhouse didn't even manage to get much limelight before Streams appeared shortly afterwards. In both cases, the only way to find out what they were and what they did was by either studying the source code or installing a private instance. Streams, however, had the advantage of being even newer. The-Federation.info knows exactly one German Roadhouse instance which was originally set up as Misty and has meanwhile been upgraded beyond Roadhouse to Streams, and there only seems to be one remaining unlisted Roadhouse instance.
- I've seen another result of an upgrade from Zap to Misty. So it's safe to assume that you can upgrade all five to Streams. If this is the case, then now that Streams is here, it probably isn't worth spreading the developer community across six almost identical platforms. Basically, Streams has become the latest version of Red Matrix, Osada, Zap, Misty and Roadhouse.
- At least Red Matrix, Osada, Zap and Misty are still being maintained in a sense, though. All four got the same small Git commit from Mike a good month ago. Roadhouse got one four months ago.
As of now, Friendica is still going strong, so is Hubzilla, and Streams seems to be cleaning up the mess that came after Hubzilla.
If you really want to try out something with Zot, my current recommendation is Hubzilla, even if it may seem bloated and cumbersome to you, even if you'll never harness its full power. Many of its extra functions are additional apps and switched off by default; this includes ActivityPub, by the way, this is important to know.
It's hard to find a public Streams instance with open registrations currently, much less multiple ones that'd be required for a nomadic identity. Neither Fediverse.party nor the FediDB nor The-Federation.info nor Fediverse.info even knows Streams, and existing Streams instances usually don't identify to other Fediverse servers as Streams instances. It's still a rather underground and grass-roots project with no publicity at all. As Streams is rather experimental, however, you may want a nomadic home on at least two instances to have an instant backup, should one of them shut down.
Zap has got exactly one instance open to the public, and seeing as Zap may be shrinking rather than growing, I don't expect this to change. Again, due to Zap's still small size and unclear future, I wouldn't recommend using it without nomadic identity as a safety net.
As for Osada or Misty, good luck finding an instance to join, much less one that's here to stay and ideally be upgraded to Streams one day.
Hubzilla may not be as bleeding-edge as Streams, and it may be overkill for your purposes if Zap or Streams would be sufficient, but it's stable, it's big enough, it's established, and it's different enough from Streams to not be endangered by it. I mean, Hubzilla hasn't managed to kill off Friendica either, right?
Fediverse Observer checks all servers in the fediverse and gives you an easy way to find a home using a map or list.
Zap Servers Status. Find a Zap server to sign up for, find one close to you!zap.fediverse.observer
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Hypolite Petovan, Oliver, Rolf Wagner, Jakub Urbanowicz, Marc, Jean-Philippe Baril and Scott M. Stolz like this.
Hypolite Petovan
•like this
Elena ``of Valhalla'', Scott M. Stolz and Fabio like this.
Jupiter Rowland
•But if #Streams is the future, and it looks like it...
Hypolite Petovan likes this.
RockyIII
•thanks for this summery
the details about zap and osada are a bit different -
Osada and Zap were announced at the same time.
Osada was the attempt to get ZOT, Diaspora and AP working in one App by sacrificing nomadic identity ... after trying hard ,Mike had to give up this project, because it just did not work out right.
ZAP was announces to be an App with nomadic identity and NO AP Support but much simpler than Hubzilla. But after it got clear that nomadic identity is also an option to be combined with AP Mike drooped Osada and started to develop ZAP as the first nativ AP App with nomadic identity...
From my point of view you seam to misunderstand what Mike is trying to archive. Lately he said that he is producing prototypes to come up with solution. Zap, Redhouse and Misti were just this kind of projects...
... show more
thanks for this summery
the details about zap and osada are a bit different -
Osada and Zap were announced at the same time.
Osada was the attempt to get ZOT, Diaspora and AP working in one App by sacrificing nomadic identity ... after trying hard ,Mike had to give up this project, because it just did not work out right.
ZAP was announces to be an App with nomadic identity and NO AP Support but much simpler than Hubzilla. But after it got clear that nomadic identity is also an option to be combined with AP Mike drooped Osada and started to develop ZAP as the first nativ AP App with nomadic identity...
From my point of view you seam to misunderstand what Mike is trying to archive. Lately he said that he is producing prototypes to come up with solution. Zap, Redhouse and Misti were just this kind of projects...
#^https://unfediverse.com/display/?mid=https%3A%2F%2Funfediverse.com%2Fitem%2F67ce5f6a-5f6b-43c9-a0d5-6566feee879d
Mike is actually a protocol developer, much different to Hypolite or Eugen who are more adopter of protocols
my 2cent
mike shared a comment of this post/conversation
unfediverse.comJupiter Rowland
•RockyIII
•I have to correct me: not sure if Osada had never diaspora support.
chava
•Mike still provides critical updates for Zap, Misty, Osada, and Red Matrix, but only until the end of the year (as I recall). After that they're EOL unless anyone decides they wanna fork 'em and keep 'em alive. The PHP version (7.2?) they use will be unsupported soon.
Streams requires PHP minimum version 8 which should be supported for the foreseeable future.
Mike did provide instructions for anyone who runs a Zap/Misty/Osada/RedMatrix site to migrate over to the Streams repository.
I don't think you're gonna end up seeing streams sites in federation-info, fedidb, etc. because, as I recall, those fediverse statistics bits were remove... show more
Mike still provides critical updates for Zap, Misty, Osada, and Red Matrix, but only until the end of the year (as I recall). After that they're EOL unless anyone decides they wanna fork 'em and keep 'em alive. The PHP version (7.2?) they use will be unsupported soon.
Streams requires PHP minimum version 8 which should be supported for the foreseeable future.
Mike did provide instructions for anyone who runs a Zap/Misty/Osada/RedMatrix site to migrate over to the Streams repository.
I don't think you're gonna end up seeing streams sites in federation-info, fedidb, etc. because, as I recall, those fediverse statistics bits were removed.
Additionally, "Streams" as a fediverse project name doesn't exist. It's just the name of the repository. Once a new site is installed, the software/project name changes to whatever the site admin wants it to be. Check out the streams README. It's a good read.
There's currently no public streams sites per se, but rumbly.net and webs.node9.org both have open registration at the moment.
streams
Codeberg.orgJupiter Rowland
•As for the other two, my perception was that #... show more
As for the other two, my perception was that #Osada ended up the unstable to Zap's testing and Misty's stable, and #RedMatrix was a technology testbed.
But it's hard to tell when there were times when Osada and Zap literally ran on the exact same codebase, and the only difference was the branding and whether or not #ActivityPub was on for a given instance.
Maybe there hasn't been a fixed concept which project is how (un)stable. Maybe exactly this was part of @mike's plan to confuse even us. Only that the community seemed to prefer to pump new things into Zap because that was what they used.
This actually goes to show how similar these projects are. This instance was installed as Zap and is now Misty. Digitalesparadies was instaled as Misty, then became #Roadhouse, and now it's #Streams while still reporting back as being a Roadhouse instance. You can only tell that is isn't really Roadhouse because it doesn't show the Roadhouse logo, and because it looks like Streams rather than Roadhouse (which looks the same as Zap) when you open it.
Yep, there's exactly one instance that identifies as Streams. Amongst more than a dozen and counting.
A downside of this is that if everyone else renames even vanilla Streams instances differently, each one of them creates an own entry in the Community Types column on your typical Communities page, making Streams instances hard to find. But maybe that's intentional, maybe the idea behind this is for people to set up their own instances because they can't find any to join.
This ties in with the removal of statistics: It keeps people from "going where everyone is" and overrunning one and the same instance. Not only don't they know which one is the biggest, they're likely to not even know the instance which is the biggest because they can't find it. Being on an instance as big as possible has become rather pointless starting with at least #Hubzilla anyway: The public stream, similar to either the local timeline or the federated timeline on #Mastodon, seems to be optional per instance, few instances actually have one, and so there goes one major reason for joining a huge instance.
streams
Codeberg.orgmike
•Brand worship is the cornerstone of capitalism, which is the foundation of planetary destruction. If you're going to slow down climate change and reverse the long terms effects of wealth accumulation and inequality, you've got to start at its source.
I tried to make brands and brand worship irrelevant by creating a half dozen brands at a time and spinning up new brands out of thin air. Nobody got it.
So I got rid of them completely. You can call the software anything you want.
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Adam Dalliance
•Content warning: This is how I witnessed the development of Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams & Co.
mike
•And yet this is precisely what people expect/demand from software developers.
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/M_Patton/albums_without_the_title_or_the_artists_name_written_on_the_cover/
Albums without the title or the artist's name written on the cover - RYM/Sonemic
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André França, Jupiter Rowland, chava and A.min like this.
Jupiter Rowland
•And maybe, instead of everyone just building stuff for themselves, we'll get add-on repositories from which third-party add-ons can be installed. This would mean that Streams gets more powerful without whoever identifies as core devs having to develop and maintain this extra power.
Scott M. Stolz
•Jean-Philippe Baril
•For more than ten years I have been following from distance the development of decentralized federated social networks, and especially Hubzilla since around 2014, but it got off my radar by around 2018.
I now understand why I was totally lost and could not find any information when I suddenly remembered and decided last week to check back on Zot protocol development progress. It was because there is barely no public info on that other than maybe some few quiet announcements written on dev instances that are probably not online anymore.
So now it's not anymore only Hubzillia UX that is confusing, the development of its derivative work is too...
Hopefully this great technology masterpiece will finally take off soon.
But since developers are humans too, to help them not get lost would probably be a good start.
The bit I'm still confused about is that from what I read above Streams would apparently use Zot version "8", or rather, "Nomad", which is either its new name or an evolution of it.
Where can I read informatio... show more
For more than ten years I have been following from distance the development of decentralized federated social networks, and especially Hubzilla since around 2014, but it got off my radar by around 2018.
I now understand why I was totally lost and could not find any information when I suddenly remembered and decided last week to check back on Zot protocol development progress. It was because there is barely no public info on that other than maybe some few quiet announcements written on dev instances that are probably not online anymore.
So now it's not anymore only Hubzillia UX that is confusing, the development of its derivative work is too...
Hopefully this great technology masterpiece will finally take off soon.
But since developers are humans too, to help them not get lost would probably be a good start.
The bit I'm still confused about is that from what I read above Streams would apparently use Zot version "8", or rather, "Nomad", which is either its new name or an evolution of it.
Where can I read information on what is Zot8/Nomad, and what's new compared to Zot6 ?
Thank you
Jupiter Rowland
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Scott M. Stolz and Jean-Philippe Baril like this.
RockyIII
•Zot / Nomad works very similar to AP but offers features AP does not have. So what ever the future of AP looks like we can do thinks independently of AP
Finally Zot / Nomad functions could become part of AP or seen as an extension of AP.
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Scott M. Stolz and Jean-Philippe Baril like this.
Jean-Philippe Baril
•@RockyIII That forum and so thread are not public...
We should definitely have a clear website with a list of main forums to follow.
@RockyIII That would be awesome!
P.S. Very weird, I never received any notification for replies from both of you, and this thread was no where to be found in my stream/feed -- and I did scroll a lot. I noticed your replies when I looked at my Friendica feed and since that account has my hubzilla account as a friend then that's how I saw them. What is strange, is that my Streams account also has my Hubzilla as a friend but again, it's nowhere in my feed.