calls them “notes” is because that’s what they are actually called in #ActivityPub - there are also other types, that other platforms use as well, including “article”, although, instances like #qoto have set the character count for notes at 65535 🙂

It’s been covered in this thread already that Quote Posts are simply beyond the control of mastodon devs, Eugen’s edicts, or local mastodon users or admins, because most other platforms support it and there isn’t anything #mastopub can do about it. In Misskey, users can disallow it, but that only affects other local users, so it’s s moot point (except for silo instances).

There are very few Fediverse platforms that aren’t taking advantage of most things that are possible, for example, #Soapbox now has federated events, and introduced custom emoji reactions like Misskey has, and live chat - Misskey’s traditionally led the way with these federating features with #Calckey going even further.

Some platforms however, intentionally incorporate a leaner set of features; #Smithereen is one example, it doesn’t even sccomodate boosts, which harkens back to #Myspace, #VKontakte (aka, “VK” - not sure I spelled that right), and very early #Faceplant days. #Epicyon has anti-silo capabilities baked in.

#Mitra has #Substack style subscriptions at it’s core. Anyone can subscribe remotely from any Fediverse server instance where the user can receive DMs - and in congruence with privacy concerns that are typically expected for Fediverse implementations, it’s based on #Monero (XMR).

Most platforms also support #Markdown, with Cakckey being perhaps supporting the greatest superset IIRC, including #LaTEX, and #Friendica, being much older than msstodon, has continued to evolve over the past decade and still has support for #BBCode too, and direct links for uploading images for those who prefer to.

I didn’t see any mention of Markdown support when I bothered to look at the mastopub roadmap, yet even on that platform, Quote Posts are all throughout the stream and people boost and reply to them as the time - and, as mentioned earlier, anyone can create a post, simply pasting the link from someone else’s post, and then boost that… Voila! Local #Quote_Post.

mastodon was successful in its arrogance of leveraging some pretty graphics and welcoming verbiage into a brand that Eugen weaponized against virtually all other Fediverse platforms, and now, with all of the fine forks like #Hometown and several newcomers, we’ll soon be seeing hardforking as a result of that hostility.

But not just forks, funding and ambitious development as evidenced by existing and emerging platforms like #Cloudflare’s #Wildebeest, Tumbler, and the very unique, #Django based Takahē Fediverse server that I wrote about here:

https://tallship.writeas.com/takahe-a-new-fediverse-paradigm

Average people are already migrating in larger numbers everyday away from the archaic mastodonian resource hog to other, more capable and promising (and friendlier) platforms elsewhere in the Fediverse that have integrated and fully support #masto_migration, and even ones that don’t (yet) haver that feature.

Unlike other dinosaurs and the eponymous mammal for which Eugen chose the namesake of his #TootSuite product, we shouldn’t expect extinction for his platform, but the apathy and indifference levels are rising, as is the enmity in many sectors of the community for what others perceive as a betrayal (or sellout), and that kind of self-inflicted damage is often difficult to mitigate, with waves of disenchantment reverberating get into the future… Just look at what happened to #SourceForge - it still technically exists, but never recovered after the community betrayal it committed years ago.

And finally, there’s a irony so obvious that’s it’s not even plausible to deny… Eugen subverted the very rudimentary principal that the Fediverse network is ideologically predicated upon - #DeSoc… There’s no question that his goals shifted to that if building a silo for himself, at least to some great degree. Very sad.

An interesting thing about condescending others, you find yourself alone and isolated in an otherwise vibrant, busy world.

#tallship #Takahe #ActivityPub #privacy #community_values #FOSS

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tallship

2023-01-20 02:02:49

takahē - A new Fediverse paradigm

takahē – A new Fediverse paradigm

Fresh out of the oven is #Takahē, introducing a very interesting basic functional motive for development and delivering a beautiful #UX. It also derives inspiration in the form of its #mascott from a species once thought extinct for about a century.

That is, until a single man obsessed with the saga of this large, flightness bird since his early childhood, endlessly sought out and eventually rediscovered it was actually extant 75 years ago through his tireless efforts.

In recent years, and not without some particularly problematic attempts in the management of this #endangered_species, the population of these magnificent birds has more or less stabilized at around 100 members living in the wild, thanks to the committed efforts of a government sponsored #refoliation, hatching, and rearing program; in conjunction with a comprehensive scientific tagging, tracking, and monitoring effort of those members released into the wild alongside the wild-born members of the #population.

The software project itself has struck me as rather special too, and not just for its two functionally unique characteristics amongst other #Fediverse platforms – first, and similar to name based #SSL hosting on #HTTP servers with #SNI, Takahē provides multi-domain virtual hosting capabilities to #ActivityPub – this is huge, and opens the door for for even the casusl home self-hoster to provide #turnkey #SaaS offerings to their friends and family members in the form of small and #single_user “virtual Fediverse server instances”, in consumer based home #LAN environments – let alone the potential for commercial hosting endeavors.

To my knowledge, *this is the very first time* this novel approach to Fediverse networking over ActivityPub has been broached.

https://jointakahe.org/

If you hurry, you might still be able to secure for yourself an account in their limited beta program.

Go ahead, you can do that now, I'll still be here when you get back 😎

And as if that alone were not enough to revolutionize the paradigm and dynamic of the Fediverse, Takahē also introduces multiple account (alt) identities for each user user account on the server. This can only be described as freaking groundbreaking!

A single user account for a person might be the base for say, both @userone@SLD01.TLD01 AND @userone@SLD02 .TLD02 AND @usertwo@SLD02 .TLD02 – that, at least to me, can only be described as, “The Bees Knees”.

I'm sure that many will cite, and of course it is not only possible but quite likely, that this will lower the bar for abusive actors to engage in shenanigans. However true as that may be, such potential (and existing practice) exists already within the Fediverse so the ease with which bad actors will avail themselves of such toolings only is only trivially simplified, not introduced; besides, complaining about such a thing is irrelevant – the cat is already out of the bag.

Indeed, there are already other Fediverse server platforms (such as the Hubzilla (ZOT) and Misskey families of forks and variants that already support the creation and management of multiple identities under a single account anyway – but Bringing the SNI shared hosting experience into production with a single Fediverse server instance is truly unprecedented in Fediverse space.

There's a lot more. Did I mention the beautiful, and exceedingly intuitive UI? Of course I did!

There's another corollary that I alluded to. Did you miss it? It was right there, before your eyes.

Yes, there's a metaphor, craftily scripted between the lines of everything you just read (that is, if you didn't tl;dr).

The impetus for much of #decentralization (DeSoc) and the #Genesis of the Fediverse is arguably the notion of what was indeed a #decentralized #WorldWideWeb over the fully decentralized #Internet, having falling victim to capture by special interests – the #deprecated, #proprietary, #privacydisrespecting and #legacy #monolithicsilos – owned, spawned, and managed by mega surveillance-capitalism #data_mining corporations.... IOW, the so-called, Sunnyvale Syndrome.

This effectively killed of much of the notion that there even still existed an independant, #distributednetwork of services and sites truly belonging to the #individualparticipants, i.e., average #schmoes like you and me.

For sometime now, many have even claimed and argued that the kinder, friendlier #web of days gone by, where small #communities of #people and #websites belonging to #individuals and small businesses were actually #extinct in reality – with only those well heeled analytically correct, SEO optimized, #subjugated websites and #chattel in the form of people that had sworn #fealty to their lords and masters remaining. #Apple, #Amazon, the #Google and #Faceplant having long since taken #possession of their souls and #identities.

It's dark, so incredibly dark. And you have awakened to find yourself at the bottom of a well that you apparently have fallen into. There's plenty of water, you're knee deep in it, and a voice from above booms aloud that food will be delivered so long as, “It puts the lotion on its skin!”

And in a manner of speaking, following an “Internet century” (think, 'dog years') of a #dystopian #feudal Institution where Homo sapien drones existing in #LordsandVassals lockstep, told what to think, how to believe, where to shit, and when to wake up and punch the time clock, had completely replaced the actually extinct human race... Well?...

Fast forwarding to the scene where...

Some awkward little child in a dimly candlelit bedroom, many children, truth be told, consumed with the dreams of, and empowered with an obsessive belief that, a world where real, unique and independently diverse human beings actually existed, grew up and many years later rediscovered that they really did still walk the earth.

Kinda like the true story of the Takahē. And we too, are beautiful.

I'm leaving the rest for you to discover for yourselves, and look forward to many discussions on this invigorating topic. In the meantime, you can follow:

@takahe@jointakahe.takahe.social

I can be reached on Matrix at:

@tallship:matrix.org

via XMPP at:

tallship@jabber.org

and in the Fediverse at:@[url=/@/tallship@public.mitra.social]tallship@public.mitra.social[/url]

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #virtualhosting #multipleidentity #DeSoc #SunnyvaleSyndrome #AOLEffect

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Welcome | Takahē

Takahē is an ActivityPub server designed for efficient use on small- to medium-size installations, and which allows you to host multiple domains on the same infrastructure.

^{jointakahe.org}

• Mastodon is a 1:1 #Twitter clone, just without Elon Musk, but otherwise absolutely identical to Twitter. I mean, how could a microblogging service possibly be any different from Twitter? That's just as strange an idea as a desktop operating system that isn't exactly like Windows. Unless you're a Mac user, that is.
  
• Mastodon.social is Mastodon. Because that's the website you've been pointed at on Twitter.
  
• Also, the Fediverse = Mastodon. Only Mastodon.

• You've got three timelines. Next to your personal timeline which lists whatever your contacts have tooted or boosted, there's the local timeline which lists what the other users on your instance have tooted or boosted (this is how and why special interest instances or local instances make sense), and there's the federated timeline which is the local timeline plus what local users' contacts on other instances have tooted or boosted.
  There is, however, no timeline for the entire Fediverse.
  
• There's no full-text search for the entire Fediverse. Deal with it.
  
• There's no secret algorithm telling you what to read or whom to follow. All timelines are strictly chronological.
  
• This also means that there's no secret algorithm shoving your toots into other people's faces. If you want people to discover your toots, use #hashtags. On Twitter, hashtags are a gimmick. In the Fediverse, they're vital.
  
• There's a #newhere hashtag. It matters. As someone who is new here, you're expected to write an introduction, use the #newhere hashtag in it and then pin your introduction so that it's always on top or near the top of your personal timeline for others to read.
  
• There's no quote retweet. And there will never be. Eugen Rochko has a very strong opinion on that, he doesn't want that popular trolling tool on Mastodon, so this won't happen.
  
• Privacy settings per toot. You can choose who can read your toot. If you write threads, it's common practice to only set the first toot to public and all other ones to unlisted so that they don't clutter the public timelines.
  
• Delayed toots. You can choose when your toot goes out.
  
• Content warnings (CW) that blank out your toot. And yes, they're taken very seriously. People are likely to demand you use them when you don't.
  
• Alt-text for images. Again, people are likely to demand you create them when you don't. Some people on the Fediverse are blind and use screen readers, and they, too, want to know what that picture in your toot is.
  
• Not to mention that toots can be almost twice as long as tweets, namely 500 characters. Unless the owner of an instance has changed that number.

• Not all of them are "not Twitter clones", i.e. microblogging services. Pleroma is another one which was created out of disagreements with how Mastodon works. Akkoma is a Pleroma fork which came to exist because someone didn't like where Pleroma went. There's also Misskey. Obviously, they aren't "Mastodon clones" either, they were designed to be different from each other. And there's GNU social, the oldest one on the list.
  
• Pixelfed is "not an #Instagram clone".
  
• Friendica is definitely "not a #Facebook clone" because, while created for a similar purpose, it's still vastly different. And it federates with just about everything that moves including e-mail or WordPress. It even used to federate with Facebook itself eons ago. By the way, #Friendica makes everything possible that I've done in this post which is also why it's usually filed under "macroblogging". But I'm not on Friendica; I'll get to that. Also, Friendica is the second-oldest one on the list.
  
• Mobilizon is "not a #GoogleCalendar or #Doodle clone".
  
• Funkwhale is "not a #SoundCloud or #BandCamp or #Spotify clone", also because you're unlikely to find mainstream commercial music on it. Castopod: ditto, but specialising on podcasts.
  
• PeerTube is "not a #YouTube clone".
  
• Owncast is "not a #Twitch clone".
  
• Lemmy is "not a #Reddit or #HackerNews clone", although the "not a Reddit clone" part can be debated.
  
• WriteFreely and Plume are "not #Medium clones".
  
• BookWyrm is "not a #GoodReads clone".
  
• Flockingbird is "not a #LinkedIn clone" at all, also because rather than being a service of its own, it piggybacks on the rest of the Fediverse by picking up hashtags.
  
• Hubzilla was a successor to Friendica, but it's much more than "not a Facebook clone". It's also not a clone of whichever CMS and/or cloud service you use. It can provide you with your own personal organiser including a #CalDAV calendar (next to the public event calendar) and a #CardDAV addressbook, your own #WebDAV cloud space, your own online photo album, your own website, your own blog and/or your own wiki on top of just about everything that Friendica does. It's the third-oldest on the list and still older than Mastodon.
  
• And there's much more.