@chava

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.