Just because it works under your very limited and controlled lab conditions, doesn't mean it will work just as well under real-life conditions.

A few may remember the summer of 2024 when (streams) rolled out FEP-171b. It broke federation in every imaginable way because, as it turned out later, (streams) suddenly confused the many different IDs it had to juggle. Granted, the byproduct of trying to fix this was Forte, the first Fediverse server software to provide nomadic identity via nothing but ActivityPub.

Now Hubzilla rolled out FEP-e232. And there's breakage again. Not quite as badly, but in places that really hurt.

So the talk of the town in the Fediverse is Mastodon 4.5 introducing quote-posts. (Mastodon 4.5 allegedly introducing quote-posts to the Fediverse, and how that's wrong, is another story.)

Interestingly, almost at the same time, Hubzilla 10.6 was rolled out. Money quote from the announcement:

• Implement FEP-e232 (object links) for quote posts

FEP-e232 Object Links in practice usually = "quote-posts like Misskey" = linking to the original with "RE:" before the link.

Apparently, rather than what Hubzilla had been doing since 2012 when it was still Red. What Friendica has been doing since its own inception in 2010. Namely insert a dumb copy of the quoted post into the quoting post.

While (streams) and Forte have been supporting FEP-e232 under the bonnet for quite a while while still quote-posting with dumb copies, Hubzilla has decided to go all the way and replace the old-fashioned Friendica way of quote-posting entirely with the Misskey way that's all the rage in the Fediverse now.

Yes, this has its advantages. If the original is edited, then the edit (in theory) is reflected in all posts that quote-post it.

But here on Hubzilla, this switch causes trouble.

Mastodon rolled out rendering support for Misskey-style quote-posts before rolling out quote-posts themselves, so those Mastodon servers that can't render these quote-posts are hopelessly outdated.

Hubzilla, on the other hand, rolled out Misskey-style quote-posts with version 10.6 while 10.4 and older can't even render Misskey-style quote-posts, not even when they come straight from a *key. In this regard, it would have been smarter to first make sure that Hubzilla renders this kind of quote-posts, then wait for a few minor releases and then change the way Hubzilla quote-posts.

You may see this as just a minor nuisance. But on top of that, it breaks Hubzilla's forums.

See, Hubzilla's forums are based on quote-posts. You start a new thread by DM'ing to a forum, and the forum will automatically share (quote-post) your start post to all forum members. If it's a private, limited-access forum, only the forum members are permitted to see the post with your quoted post in it.

I guess it's kind of obvious that this can only work by quote-posting a dumb copy of the start post unless a few more stops are being pulled.

Now, however, forums on Hubzilla 10.6 quote-post start posts by linking to the original. Remember that the original is a DM to the forum. As in only the forum is permitted to see it. You can click the link to the original all you want. But unless you run the forum, Hubzilla will not let you see it, not even with all the OpenWebAuth magic sign-on that you have on yourself as a Hubzilla user. In fact, I'd be very worried if I could see it now.

If there was even only one active forum on one of the two public hubs that run development versions, this critical bug would have popped up earlier and been fixed before it would have hit a release. But apparently, nobody is crazy enough to run a forum on a dev-grade hub, not to mention how few active Hubzilla forums there are in the first place. Seriously, I wonder if there's any feedback coming from the two dev hubs because I never see any hit the Support Forum. Does it all go straight to Framagit?

Good thing hubzilla.org is still running Hubzilla 10.4. hubzilla.org is not only the official Hubzilla website, it's actually a Hubzilla hub itself. The official Hubzilla website is built on a Hubzilla channel, using the Webpages app. And hubzilla.org is home of the Hubzilla Support Forum. It would have been a disaster, had this forum been broken, too.

I guess there's a hotfix due now, even if it means reverting FEP-e232 support (although changing the permissions of a DM to a forum channel would do the trick, and looking at how (streams) and Forte do it would be even smarter). And I hope it'll come before hubzilla.org is upgraded to 10.6.

By the way, while it's at it, maybe Hubzilla could also permanently set that GoToSocial/Mastodon flag that allows being quote-posted. I mean, if you come to a place that has been able to quote-post for a whopping 13 years, that can quote-post any public content from anywhere in the Fediverse with zero resistance, and that has no control over whether or not your stuff can be quote-posted (other than not posting in public), it's safe to assume that you're okay with your stuff being quote-posted anyway.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Misskey #GoToSocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Forums #Groups #FediverseGroups #FediGroups #FEP_e232

fep/fep/e232/fep-e232.md at main

fep - Fediverse Enhancement Proposals

^Codeberg.org

@Peter Vágner @Dieguito 🦝🧑🏻‍💻🍕 How conversations work is not unified all across the Fediverse. Even how connections work is not unified.

Mastodon has taken over the follower/followed principle from Twitter which is always illustrated with arrows with one point. A following B is illustrated with an arrow from A to B. A being followed by B is illustrated with an arrow from B to A. A and B following each other mutually is illustrated with one arrow from A to B and one arrow from B to A.

It appears to me that Friendica has adopted this to become more compatible with Mastodon. But its several descendants, created by Friendica's own creator, starting with Hubzilla, haven't.

Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte still have the bidirectional "connection" or "contact" as the default. It's illustrated with one arrow, but with one point on each end.

Also, all three understand a threaded conversation as an enclosed contruct entirely owned by the conversation starter. Everyone on these three who has the start post on their stream always actually has the whole thread on their stream.

In fact, all three have Conversation Containers implemented. This feature was originally created in the streams repository in 2022. Forte has had it from the get-go as it started out as a fork of (streams). It was eventually turned into FEP-171b and backported to Hubzilla last year.

All three make sure that everyone who has a post on their stream also always has all comments on that post, at least those that are made after they have received the post.

This works on two basic principles:

• All comments go directly to the original poster because the original poster owns the thread.
• Those who have the post automatically receive all comments from the original poster.

In a pure Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte system, your above example would look like this:

• User 1 and User 2 are connected.
• User 1 and User 3 are connected. (This doesn't even matter.)
• User 2 and User 3 are connected.
• User 2 and User 4 are connected.

Much simpler than explaining everything with "following" and "being followed", isn't it?

Now, the conversation works like this.

• User 2 sends a public post, thus creating a Conversation Container of which they are the owner.
  User 1, User 3 and User 4 receive the post.
• User 3 comments on User 2's post.
  The comment goes from User 3 to User 2, who is the owner of the conversation, and it is automatically forwarded to User 1 and User 4 who already have User 2's post on their streams.
• User 4 comments on User 3's comment.
  The comment goes from User 4 past User 3 straight to User 2, who is the owner of the conversation, and it is automatically forwarded to User 1 and User 3 who already have User 2's post on their streams.

The only mentioning that occurs here, if any, is User 4 mentioning User 3. This is not necessary for User 4's post to reach anyone. This is only necessary to make sure on Hubzilla (which doesn't have a tree view) that User 4 is replying to User 3's comment and not to User 2's post.

On Mastodon, for comparison, everything depends on who follows whom, who mentions whom and whose instance knows whose instance.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Conversations #FEP_171b #ConversationContainers

feps/171b/fep-171b.md at main

feps - My FEPs

^Codeberg.org

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.

- 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}

@caos

Mit #Hubzilla konnte ich dem Account zwar folgen und als Kontakt hinzufügen. Wenn ich den Foren-Account jedoch von Hubzilla aus mit @ adressiere (als öffentlichen Beitrag), kommt der Beitrag zwar bei den Followern des Hubzilla-Accounts an, jedoch nicht im Forum und wird von diesem auch nicht geteilt.

wenn das bei Dir so aussieht kann es nicht klappen:

Das Friendica Forum muss Dir erst Rechte zum posten gewähren bzw. den Kontakt bestätigen.

@Friendica Support
Ich habe ein öffentliches Forum erstellt, also einen Account mit diesen Einstellungen:

Dabei bin ich nach dieser Anleitung vorgegangen:
wiki.friendi.ca/docs/forums
Hier wird ja erläutert, wie Foren für Friendica-User funktionieren.
Ich frage mich nun, wie es mit anderer Fedi-Software aussieht:

Mastodon-User können mW keine neuen Beiträge erstellen, sie können nur den Foren-Account taggen, der dann als Verteiler diesen Beitrag (automatisch?) teilt. Und sie können dem Account folgen, und erhalten dann die Beiträge des Forum bzw. die von ihm geteilten.
Es verhält sich also ähnlich wie aguppe.
- Ist das soweit richtig?
- Und wie sind die Funktionen für andere User, bspw. von #Misskey #Calckey #Hubzilla #Pleroma #Lemmy ?

There are a bunch of other social apps, but to be honest #Mastodon for me seems to be the most polished & has the most users (so it's the most social).

If you can think of a good reason to check out the others please let me know why 🙂

Some aren't just microblogging, but do other things too.

These are the other apps available:
#Diaspora #Pleroma #Friendica #GnuSocial #HubZilla #Misskey