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#Streams is taking care of #DefederateMeta by raising walls against #Threads dev-side, and the main man behind it is giving advice on how to raise them further.
You don't see stuff like this happen in the #Fediverse often.
Streams shared this post with Y
Mike Macgirvin wrote the following post Wed, 30 Aug 2023 15:18:56 -0700 !Streams Fresh release from the streams repository. Available now. Includes some enhancements to our defenses against Meta/Threads after reviewing their updated ToS.unfediverse.com
W3C: Detailed image descriptions don't belong in alt-text
A detailed #ImageDescription of a complex image does not go into the #AltText. The #W3C says so:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/complex/
If it can be useful for sighted people, or if everyone, sighted people included, needs it to understand the picture, the image description goes elsewhere. That way, everyone can access it, so it's a matter of #accessibility.
The W3C recommends to put it on a separate page. But the W3C implies that everything on the Web is static webpages accessed via standard desktop Web browsers. That's what the W3C is all about.
Obviously, this doesn't work in the #Fediverse. Unless you're on #Hubzilla, you can't put #ImageDescriptions on separate pages because you can't make such pages in the first place. So the image description has to go into the post.
Again, no problem on Hubzilla which has virtually no post length limit. Same for #Friendica and #Streams. Depending on how long your description is, most other projects may not be problematic either.
But then there's #Mastodon. Only one project, but it's 80% of the Fediverse, and many Mastodon users think it is the Fediverse, full stop.
Mastodon limits posts to only 500 characters. If you came over from #𝕏 where you only had 280 characters, that sounds like a whole lot. But in practice, it's way too little, especially for image descriptions. This, by the way, is why "image description" and "alt-text" are synonymous and mutually exchangeable on Mastodon: Everyone puts their image descriptions into the alt-text which offers 1,500 characters. People can't even imagine that it could be any other way.
But it has to, also because any information available only in the alt-text is lost to those who can't access alt-text, for example due to a physical disability.
So on Mastodon with its 500-character limit, detailed image descriptions should go into a thread that follows the post with the image.
In either case, there should still be an alt-text that says that the image is described in follow-up posts (Mastodon) or the post itself (everywhere else).
Complex Images
Accessibility resources free online from the international standards organization: W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) (Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI))
Fully nomadic Mastodon fork!
Someone seems to have succeeded in forking #Mastodon and migrating the fork to #Nomad, the underlying protocol of #Streams which provides #NomadicIdentity. There's little information about what exactly is going on, only a tech demo video exists on PeerTube. It shows two test instances and the exact same account with the exact same identity running on both, remaining fully in sync. So yes, it's nomadic.
The choice of Nomad instead of #Zot is understandable as it has better integrated #ActivityPub support, so there might not be much incompatibility between vanilla Mastodon and the fork, and it'll stay compatible with the rest of the #Fediverse. Compatibility with #Hubzilla and especially (streams) will even be enhanced, not only because the fork finally recognises nomadic channels, but also also because it clearly features text formatting and quotes. It remains to be seen whether the handling of embedded images will be improved, too.
This is still very experimental, and more information has been announced to follow soon.
Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Music Video)
The official video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley
Taken from the album ‘Whenever You Need Somebody’ – deluxe 2CD and digital deluxe out 6th May 2022 Pre-order here – https://RickAstley.lnk.to/WYNS2022ID“Never Gonna Give You Up” was a global smash on its release in July 1987, topping the charts in 25 countries including Rick’s native UK and the US Billboard Hot 100. It also won the Brit Award for Best single in 1988. Stock Aitken and Waterman wrote and produced the track which was the lead-off single and lead track from Rick’s debut LP “Whenever You Need Somebody”. The album was itself a UK number one and would go on to sell over 15 million copies worldwide.
The legendary video was directed by Simon West – who later went on to make Hollywood blockbusters such as Con Air, Lara Croft – Tomb Raider and The Expendables 2. The video passed the 1bn YouTube views milestone on 28 July 2021.
Subscribe to the official Rick Astley YouTube channel: https://RickAstley.lnk.to/YTSubID
Follow Rick Astley:
Facebook: https://RickAstley.lnk.to/FBFollowID
Twitter: https://RickAstley.lnk.to/TwitterID
Instagram: https://RickAstley.lnk.to/InstagramID
Website: https://RickAstley.lnk.to/storeID
TikTok: https://RickAstley.lnk.to/TikTokIDListen to Rick Astley:
Spotify: https://RickAstley.lnk.to/SpotifyID
Apple Music: https://RickAstley.lnk.to/AppleMusicID
Amazon Music: https://RickAstley.lnk.to/AmazonMusicID
Deezer: https://RickAstley.lnk.to/DeezerIDLyrics:
We’re no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do I
A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of
You wouldn’t get this from any other guyI just wanna tell you how I’m feeling
Gotta make you understandNever gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt youWe’ve known each other for so long
Your heart’s been aching but you’re too shy to say it
Inside we both know what’s been going on
We know the game and we’re gonna play itAnd if you ask me how I’m feeling
Don’t tell me you’re too blind to seeNever gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you#RickAstley #NeverGonnaGiveYouUp #WheneverYouNeedSomebody #OfficialMusicVideo
Fe-Diversity, no, thanks?
So you want quote-tweets? Stop pestering Eugen Rochko for including something in Mastodon which he firmly rejects. Go join e.g. #Akkoma instead, and you've got your quote-tweets. And you can always reconnect with all your Mastodon friends just the same as on Mastodon.
Many are positively surprised when they learn that. They've spent some four months in the Fediverse, thinking Mastodon is all there is to the Fediverse. It feels like a whole new world to be explored.
But I've come to the realisation that millions of Mastodon users don't want any of that. They don't want to know about other projects in the Fediverse. It confuses them. They've spent their entire online lives in monolithic, centralised, corporate data silos like #Facebook, #Instagram and #Twitter. It was hard enough to wrap their minds around Mastodon's decentralised architecture with lots of independent #instances, now called #servers.
All they wanted was a Twitter clone without #ElonMusk, but otherwise identical to Twitter. When someone showed them mastodon.social (which isn't even the official Mastodon website; this is), they expected to find just that. And then they first had to learn what instances are and afterwards choose one because mastodon.social didn't let them in. They're still shell-shocked from that. In fact, many of them still wish there were no instances, and Mastodon was a centralised silo like Twitter, for that'd make things easier.
Worse yet, there isn't that one fully-featured mobile app on Apple App Store and Google Play Store that bears the same name as the whole project. There is one, but it sucks, and everyone urges them to use a third-party app that isn't even named Mastodon. So they have to pick something again, and then they have to remember the name of their Mastodon app because it doesn't have "Mastodon" written under the icon.
And then folks like me come along and tell these people that the Fediverse is #NotOnlyMastodon. That some of the instances out there aren't on Mastodon, but parts of wholly different projects. Now, they've just gotten used to the Fediverse being decentral and made up of lots of independent instances of Mastodon. But then someone overthrows this hard-to-grasp world view once again by mentioning that it is, in fact, not only Mastodon that the Fediverse is made of. Worse yet, that someone starts rattling down name after name of other Fediverse projects.
Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. That's too much. Too much information for someone who came to Mastodon expecting an iPhone app for another black-box internet platform.
Mastodon had just started feeling cosy to them. Well, except for too much #Linux and #FLOSS technobabble. And except for still being hard to use with all these instances and a lack-lustre official mobile app. In fact, except for this lack-lustre official mobile app being the only available iPhone app for Mastodon until recently because everyone only made apps for Android for reasons that don't belong here. They feel like they finally know the Fediverse, that they don't have to learn anything about it anymore, and they've come to love what they know.
But all of a sudden, all these other Fediverse projects burst into their lives. All at once. More nerdy tech information is being shoved down their throats. And the Fediverse doesn't feel the same anymore, now that they know that not everything is Mastodon.
Again, yes, some may look at me in curiosity, their chin resting on their palms, and say, "That's intriguing, tell me more!"
But many others reject this entirely. They cover their ears and go, "La la la la la, I don't want to hear it!" They're those people who speak of the Fediverse as if it's only Mastodon, whom you tell that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon, and who then continue speaking of the Fediverse as if it's only Mastodon. They want it to only be Mastodon because that's easier to understand, and they ignore everyone and everything that says otherwise.
Truth be told, they may have an additional justification. And that's the kind of people who are in the Fediverse, but not on Mastodon, and whose posts come "flooding" into Mastodon. Weeaboos, furries and other weirdos on #Pleroma. Worse tech geeks on #Akkoma and #CalcKey than even those on Mastodon. On top of that, even worse tech geeks in the shape of the "supremacist" old guard from #Friendica, #Hubzilla and #Streams who play key roles in all rallys against centralised services that'd make Mastodon easier to use for former Twitter users.
A closer look may reveal that all their projects are "unusable" for someone who is used to Mastodon, even more so for someone who freshly comes over from Twitter or Facebook. And yet, all of them even claim that what they use is better than Mastodon. Another reason to not like a not-only-Mastodon Fediverse.
Another reason, in fact, to want the Mastodon-only Fediverse "back" that never even existed in the first place.
However, you can't really protect these people from the parts of the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, even if you want to. For a user of something that isn't Mastodon, this is even more difficult. In particular, you can't pretend to them that you're on Mastodon when what comes out of your instance clearly doesn't look like it came from Mastodon. And I'm not necessarily only talking about character counts. You can't help but go on confusing them. That is, unless you want to sacrifice all the extra features of the project you use and move to Mastodon itself.
In all honesty, I expect a campaign for fediblocking everything that isn't Mastodon to emerge before the end of the year. And no, the campaigners won't want to hear that this is nigh-impossible. They'll want it to happen, no matter how.
Mastodon - Decentralized social media
Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.joinmastodon.org
Re-inventing the federated wheel because you don't know that wheels exist
And who want it to advance. To learn new abilities. To grow new features.
That's all fine and dandy.
But almost all of these people are still fully convinced that the Fediverse equals #Mastodon. And nothing else. At least not until Tumblr and P92 join the fray. Okay, maybe the #WordPress plug-in that's the talk of the town now that it has become official. Okay, maybe a few of them have also heard of #Pixelfed and/or #PeerTube because their makers are all over the Fediverse.
When these people are talking about the Fediverse, they mean Mastodon. And when they're thinking about the Fediverse, they're only thinking about Mastodon. Because that's all they know.
So these people want new cool features or even new cool use-cases in the Fediverse, stuff that Mastodon doesn't have. They want Mastodon to have it, or they want new projects to be launched that have these features.
If only they knew.
If only they knew that everything, literally everything they propose has already been done. Yes, in the Fediverse. In projects which are fully federated with Mastodon. Why don't they know? Because they've never heard of any of these projects, much less what they can do.
So they want "quote-tweets" in the Fediverse. Which means they want Mastodon to introduce them.
Tell you what: Mastodon is the only microblogging project in the Fediverse that doesn't have quotes. Not only will Eugen Rochko never introduce them, but all the other projects have them with Mastodon forks #GlitchSoc such as being the exception. #Pleroma has them. #Akkoma has them. #MissKey has them. #CalcKey has them. #FoundKey has them. #GoToSocial has them. The old heavyweights #Friendica and #Hubzilla have them, and so does Hubzilla's youngest decendant, the #Streams project. Et cetera.
You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".
Or text formatting in posts like bold type, italics, underline,
code blocks
etc. Would be great if Mastodon had that, in spite of other people saying they don't want it.Again: Pleroma already has it. Akkoma already has it. MissKey already has it. CalcKey already has it. FoundKey already hasit. GoToSocial already has it. Friendica already has it. Hubzilla already has it (look at this post at its source in a Web browser and weep). (streams) already has it. And so forth. This time, even Mastodon forks have it.
It has been done. It has been done many times. It has actually been done before Mastodon.
Next, long-form blog posting. We need something like #Medium in the Fediverse that isn't Medium itself. Mastodon's 500 characters are too few, and Twitter-like threads are inconvenient.
Except we already have that, too. #Plume and #WriteFreely are about as close to Medium as Mastodon is to Twitter, including clean and distraction-less layouts. Oh, and Hubzilla can do that, too.
By the way: Again, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that can do microblogging that has a 500-character limit. Pleroma, Mastodon's oldest direct competitor, raised it to a default of 6,000. MissKey and its forks have 3,000 as a default. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have character limits of "go ahead, drop your short story in one post in its entirety," so virtually none at all. And yes, Hubzilla has long-form writing on top of that.
Speaking of Hubzilla: Most recently, there has been the idea to uncouple one's online identity from a specific instance. Your online self should no longer be firmly tied to any one server exclusively. Now, this sounds so ambitious, it might just as well be science-fiction.
What if I told you that just this very thing already exists as well?
No, really. No, I'm not making this up. But you should know by now that I'm not.
Better yet: It was conceived as early as 2011. By the guy who launched Friendica in 2010. He invented a new principle named #NomadicIdentity and a new protocol named #Zot. In its early stages already, even with no technical implementation yet, Zot was more powerful than ActivityPub is today.
In 2012, Zot became reality as the basis of a Friendica fork which later became known as #RedMatrix and, upon its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, which is still prior to Mastodon's initial release, Hubzilla. Hubzilla is still being developed and improved, and it has a fledgling but growing "successor of a successor" named (streams) which offers nomadic identity, too.
Now, what does this nomadic identity even look like? Well, not only does it let you move your channel(s) around from instance to instance with ease and, unlike on Mastodon, with absolutely everything on it. No, it also lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once. Identical clones, automagically kept in sync in real-time, all with the same identity, the same content, the same connections.
Your identity is no longer strapped down to one instance. Not only that, but your channel, your posts, your content is no longer hosted on only one server. This means that if one instance with one of your clones goes down, you still have spares.
Okay, so how about community groups/forums? That'd be cool.
Well, for one, there's #Guppe. It's basically bolted on Mastodon, and in practice, it's centralised because there's only one instance. But it's impractical to use.
Besides, this is becoming a running gag here, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have exactly this built-in and open for the rest of the Fediverse.
Better yet: There's also #Lemmy which amounts to a federated #Reddit or #HackerNews clone. So not only does Lemmy offer this, it specialises in it.
Hubzilla alone can provide Fediverse feature suggestions with "has been done" for years to come. Not to mention what else the Fediverse has to offer. Even if someone should want a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated #GoodReads clone in the Fediverse, it has been done: #BookWyrm.
- Fediverse.Party - explore federated networks
Let's make social media free, federated and fun! Fediverse.Party is your guide into the world of decentralized, autonomous networks running on free open software on a myriad of servers across the world. No ads and no algorithms.fediverse.party
Picture placement compatibility test
- It probably only shows a maximum of four pictures.
- It moves them to the end of the post, regardless of where they are in the original post.
- It most likely reverses their order.
- It leaves them outside the summary (Hubzilla)/CW (Mastodon), so they're always in plain sight.
Here's a post to demonstrate what happens. This post should have five pictures of 7-segment digits embedded between paragraphs; vertical arrows mark where which digit should go.
↓ 1 should go here. ↓
↑ 1 should go here. ↑
↓ 2 should go here. ↓
↑ 2 should go here. ↑
↓ 3 should go here. ↓
↑ 3 should go here. ↑
↓ 4 should go here. ↓
↑ 4 should go here. ↑
↓ 5 should go here. ↓
↑ 5 should go here. ↑
If you don't see this the way it was intended, it's proof that there's still quite some inconvenient incompatibility within the #Fediverse.
The more recent branches Misty, Osada, and Red Matrix, as i recall, were essentially more stable versions of Zap. They didn't get all of the changes in Zap right away. Misty and Osada were essentially identical except for branding and they came with ActivityPub enabled by default. Red Matrix was Nomad only... that just meant that AP was off by default. In any of those variants, AP could be turned on or off in the Admin panel.I recall #Misty being more stable than #Zap, yes. That might be one of the reasons why it never took off: Zap was considered stable enough, it didn't blow up in anyone's face, and people didn't want to wait until new cool features that were already available on Zap arrived on Misty.
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.
Mike did provide instructions for anyone who runs a Zap/Misty/Osada/RedMatrix site to migrate over to the Streams repository.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.
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.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
Public domain federated communications server. Provides a feature rich ActivityPub and Nomad communication node.Codeberg.org
But if #Streams is the future, and it looks like it...
From Mistpark to Streams: An attempt at a chronology
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?
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