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.

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Okay, so you're part of the #TwitterMigration. You wanted to get away from the #birdsite as it started to gradually turn into another Nazi hive after the #TwitterTakeover. Luckily, you've been pointed at the #Fediverse, i.e. #Mastodon. You go there with the following mindset:

• 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.

Now you try to register an account on Mastodon. Which means on mastodon.social. And you discover you can't do that because registrations on mastodon.social are closed, because mastodon.social is full.

Either you can't be bothered to read what the pop-up says. Then your understanding is that Mastodon itself is full. And you're back at Twitter. Avoidable mistake; see right below.

Or you can be bothered to read what the pop-up says. Then you discover the blue button that takes you to a list of public Mastodon instances on the actual Mastodon website.

Um, instances? Servers? What the...? What's that?!

Okay, this'll be hard to wrap your mind around if the entire IT world has only consisted of commercial, corporate-owned walled gardens so far. Windows/macOS, iOS/manufacturer-provided Android, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer/Edge/Safari/Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Maps, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Spotify, maybe iTunes, your Microsoft/Apple/Google cloud etc. You couldn't even imagine that alternatives to these exist, much less alternatives that don't belong to yet another U.S. gigacorporation. Or even alternatives that aren't as monolithic as these.

Mastodon feels like a revelation to you, an epiphany. All this commercial, corporate-owned stuff is, in fact, not the entire IT world. It's a bubble. And there's a world outside this bubble. And this outside world is strange.

For starters, Eugen Rochko is the core developer of Mastodon. And yes, he is also the admin of mastodon.social. But that does not make him the owner and overlord of the entirety of Mastodon, just like Elon Musk is the owner and overlord of Twitter.

Also because Mastodon is, in fact, not mastodon.social. Not only. Mastodon.social is only one out of many Mastodon servers or instances. Thousands of them. Literally. Those listed on the official website are only those recommended by "the makers" of Mastodon. Here are even more.

There are instances for all kinds of special interests. There are also instances for lots of places in the world. People have set up instances for cities; Chicago actually has two of these.

Mind-blowing, right?

Okay, so you still absolutely have to join mastodon.social because that's where people went whom you know from Twitter. You want to stay in contact with them. So you can't join a different instance.

Wait, wait, wait, calm down. You can. And you can still get back in contact with your acquaintances on mastodon.social.

Even more mind-blowing, right? How can this possibly work?

Well, I take it you use e-mail. You need an e-mail account to use Mastodon after all. Most likely, you're on Google Mail. Are all your e-mail contacts on Google Mail, too? Do you only ever receive mails from accounts on Google Mail? Does Facebook send mails from a Google Mail account?

No, Facebook doesn't send mails from a Google Mail account. Facebook runs its own mail service. And yet, Facebook's mails get through to your Google Mail account. And that has probably been perfectly normal for you.

This is made possible through a technological miracle known as "federation". Basically, all e-mail servers in the world can communicate with one another, send mails to one another, receive mails from one another.

It's the same with the Fediverse. After all, the "Fed" in "Fediverse" comes from "federation". Generally, all Mastodon instances can communicate with each other. Unless one instance has "defederated" (completely blocked) another instance. There are actually Mastodon instances which are defederated by most other public Mastodon instances. But otherwise, everything connects to everything.

Once you've joined an instance, you'll discover first-hand that you can, in fact, follow people who are on mastodon.social. Or just about any other instance, all without having accounts there.

There goes the second bullet point.

And the first one will quickly start to crumble, too. First of all, Mastodon looks nothing like Twitter. Also, everything is named differently. Tweets aren't named "tweets" but "toots". You don't retweet, you don't even "retoot", you "boost".

And Mastodon works quite a bit differently from Twitter.

• 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.

Speaking of the latter: As the first bullet point from the beginning crumbles to dust, the one about Mastodon being Twitter minus Elon Musk, you may have been rubbing your eyes in disbelief already.

How can I possibly write more than 500 characters in a toot? How can you write in italics on Mastodon? Or use lists with bullet points in a toot? Where on Mastodon are the buttons for that?

Well, you are right now having a glimpse at the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. As in: There is a Fediverse beyond Mastodon. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. There are other projects out there which are federated with Mastodon just like Mastodon instances are federated with one another. This is possible because they speak one common language: #ActivityPub. And they're all decentralised themselves with multiple instances each. For example:

• 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.

Thanks to ActivityPub, these services are federated with Mastodon which means that you can follow their users from your Mastodon account. You don't necessarily need accounts on these services. Okay, you need them to fully make use of them. You can't start discussions on #Lemmy or upload videos to #PeerTube without having an account there, but you can follow and comment on PeerTube channels and reply to discussions on Lemmy from your Mastodon account.

Want proof? Well, this post came from a #Hubzilla channel. You can still read it on Mastodon. And if you reply to it, I can still see it on Hubzilla.

And there went the misconception that the Fediverse is only Mastodon.

Stay tuned until next time when I explain to you how "Facebook's #Metaverse" (it's called #HorizonWorlds, in case you don't know) is not and will never be #TheMetaverse, and that free, open-source, (largely) non-commercial, decentral #VirtualWorlds exist already now.

Obligatory hashtags: #Pleroma #Akkoma #MissKey #Pixelfed #Mobilizon #Funkwhale #PeerTube #Owncast #Lemmy #WriteFreely #Plume #Flockingbird