@DaywalkingRedhead I've never really seen #PeerTube as a #TikTok replacement. Maybe the devs could say something about it (@PeerTube).

@EamonnMR I'm not quite sure what exactly you mean with "app".

If you mean whether users of different mobile apps for the #Fediverse can stay in contact with users with the mobile app named "Mastodon" that you install from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, that's the wrong question. But the answer is yes.

If you mean whether users of different projects (platforms, server apps etc.) in the Fediverse that aren't Mastodon can stay in contact with Mastodon users, then: Yes, they can. Each project I've mentioned is federated with Mastodon, i.e. they all connect to Mastodon, and their users can interact with Mastodon users.

That's the magic of the Fediverse. And that's the actual idea behind the Fediverse. After all, the Fediverse is not only Mastodon.

@{mattl@social.mat.tl} They don't have to put up with all these features.

If they want cool new features, they may move to e.g. Akkoma or CalcKey or Friendica or whatever. If they don't, they can stay on good old Mastodon.

What they won't get, though, is a 100%, 1:1 Twitter clone, just without Elon Musk.

@Phoenix Thank you!

@Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; Soni L. Do you mean me myself in my specific situation or "you" as in anyone with whichever app is the most popular on whichever hardware/OS platform is the most popular?

Do you mean which steps I personally would take using Hubzilla through Firefox on desktop GNU/Linux? Or which steps a beginner would have to take, e.g. using the official Mastodon app on an iPhone?

I could tell you the former, but it'd be of little use for most here. I can't tell you the latter because I don't have any practical experience with it.

Funny how, in spite of the rising number of likes, many people seem to misunderstand what I've written.

Here's a short explanation.

People: We want bold type and italics and stuff in the Fediverse! And quote-tweets! And more than 500 characters! Please, #Mastodon, include it!

Me: Join #Akkoma (

), and you've got your bold type and italics and quote-tweets and thousands of characters! And you can still talk to people on Mastodon! Easy as that.

Or if you don't like Akkoma, try #Pleroma (

).
Or #MissKey ().
Or #CalcKey (https://calckey.cloud/).
Or #GoToSocial ().
Or if you don't mind something bigger, #Friendica ().
Or if you don't mind a hard-to-handle feature monster, #Hubzilla (#^https://hubzilla.org/).
And all of them let you stay in contact with your friends on Mastodon.

#MastodonIsNotTheFediverse. Nor is Mastodon the best the #Fediverse has to offer.

I keep seeing lots of people who are totally giddy about the #Fediverse, who are gushing over it, who want to promote it, who want it to spread.

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, strikethrough, 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.

From what I've observed so far, it looks like #Mastodon wreaks quite some havoc on #Hubzilla posts with pictures in them. I guess the same happens to posts from #Friendica and servers based on #Streams.

• 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.

@Kość_W_Eterze Jeżeli faktycznie "z dumą gardzisz korporacyjnym myśleniem" (jak napisałeś w #intro poście) to jakoś tak za szybko się poddajesz wracając na FB. Jedna rada już padła - więcej własnego zaangażowania (~obserwowanych) to więcej "zwrotu z inwestycji". I pamiętaj o czymś czego nie ma w korpo-mediach: o synergii różnych projektów, które tutaj na #fediverse tworzą razem jedną całość. Gdybyś np zamienił (no powiedzmy... na początek sklonował) to co wrzucasz na YT i Instagrama na federacyjne odpowiedniki (#peertube i #pixelfed ) to te same treści zaczynają tu funkcjonować zupełnie inaczej. Owszem - możesz tu wstawiać linki np do swojego kanału na YT. Ale nie dostaniesz z tego linku nic więcej niż jednorazowe zainteresowanie jednym konkretnym odcinkiem. A jeżeli to samo opublikujesz z konta federacyjnego to masz wszystkich , którzy to tu obejrzą jako potencjalnych subskrybentów. Albo potencjalnie komentujących twój film lub podających do dalej - a każdy komentarz/podbicie powiększa zasięg publikacji o nowy krąg ludzi czyli potencjalnych subskrybentów. Jednym słowem jeżeli masz co pokazać (a tego nie wiem bo np twojego instagrama bez mania tam korpokonta nawet nie mogę sprawdzić!) to "kiszenie" tego na korpomediach jest marnowaniem swojego potencjału tutaj.