Good to know.
Strangely, people don’t seem to mind.
I guess then a key difference is that Bluesky is presented to 𝕏 users as the same kind of monolith as 𝕏 whereas Mastodon is presented to them as a huge number of instances from which they absolutely have to pick one.
If it randomly mentions other users, and if it comes in such masses that Mastodon admins have to raise the shields and Fediblock the hell out of dozens of instances, then it’s spam all right.
That said, the last spam wave was organised on Misskey again, but carried out by bots from Mastodon instances largely abandoned by their admins. At least partially, this was the case for the first big spam wave as well.
As an administrator, the only time you would want to turn on the public stream is if you are a public hub and accept new signups. It makes it easier for administrators and moderators to moderate the public content on their own server since they can see all public posts in one place. If someone is posting illegal content or spam, a moderator can see it, and remove it (and perhaps the user too).
Even then, it wouldn’t be a federated public stream that’s in plain sight for any visitor. At most, it’d be a local pubstream in plain sight for anyone. Or a federated public stream only visible to local users.
At least by German law, hubmins can be held liable for what’s happening on the pubstream because it’s happening on their “website”, and so they’re responsible for it. And remember that most public Hubzilla hubs and the two biggest ones are German.
And they can only connect to Threads because Meta doesn’t want to go after thousands of private single-user instances, clutter their blocklist with them and check every once in a while if they still exist to keep it from being clutterted too much.
Also, at least on Hubzilla and (streams), it’s the single-user instances that are likely to have an actually public pubstream. But not necessarily the federated one that Threads wants.
If you decide to make it public. Or if you’re on something that doesn’t leave you any choice like Lemmy.
If you’re on Hubzilla or (streams), and you’ve grokked it enough to use it accordingly, then you can actually post content in private to only selected users.
There are two common fallacies. One, the Fediverse is inherently private because it isn’t corporate. Two, the Fediverse is inherently public because everything on Mastodon or Lemmy or whatever is the only Fediverse project you’re familiar with is public.
Don’t have a publicly-viewable federated timeline. Bam, blocked.
BTW: Public instances of Hubzilla and (streams) never have such a thing. They could, they do have the technology, but the admins always decide against activating it in order not to be held liable for content that comes in from the rest of the Fediverse.
Essentially, the title of the post/thread comes first.
Then comes a blank line.
Then come the mentions, all in one line. They must always start with the Lemmy community, and you can only mention one Lemmy community. If you want to crosspost to a Friendica group, a Hubzilla forum or a (streams) group, it comes next, and AFAIK, that can only be one, too. Guppe groups come afterwards, as many as you want.
Then comes another blank line.
And then comes your actual post.
Another blank line.
Lastly, hashtags so that Mastodon has them where it expects them.
Always post in this format:
Thread title
(Blank line)
@Lemmy_community @Friendica_group/Hubzilla_forum/(streams)_group @Guppe_group (optionally more Guppe groups)
(Blank line)
Post bodyHubzilla. Closely followed by the intentionally nameless fork of a fork… of Hubzilla that’s colloquially being referred to as (streams).
Perks of both (excerpt):
Extra perks of Hubzilla:
Extra perks of (streams):
It technically still is in development. But all the devs lack time, and the devs themselves officialy recomment WriteFreely on the Plume website.
Even though Plume has features that are nothing but TBD plans for WriteFreely (e.g. comments, built-in image storage).
Ackchually, most of the Fediverse runs on professionally-operated Hetzner rack iron at huge data centres in Germany.
Even if this comes from 22% of the Fediverse being mastodon.social.
Many Mastodon users are against both Bluesky and Threads federation because they want the Fediverse to remain only Mastodon.
Little do they know that the Fediverse has never been only Mastodon.
I’d pretty routinely have federation issues, missing posts from my TL, and posts that would just repeat endlessly in the TL until I reloaded the page. And those are problems I experienced on every fork I tried.
From what I’ve heard, they’ve all inherited these very same issues from Misskey. And apparently, they aren’t trivial to fix, otherwise either Misskey or any of the Forkeys would have succeeded.
I guess your best bet is to wait for Iceshrimp.NET going fully public and ideally stable. It’s no longer a Forkey. It’s rather a complete re-write from scratch of Iceshrimp, no longer in TypeScript and Vue.js, but in C#. Apparently, Misskey’s codebase (plus what Calckey/Firefish added) was so bad that this was the most promising step to take.
Also, app support isn’t great.
Found the former Sharkey user.
Sharkey’s Mastodon API implementation is infamously terrible. The Sharkey community is still waiting for someone to step in and re-write the Mastodon API implementation from the ground up, so bad is it.
But another issue is that everyone who could theoretically develop a mobile Fediverse app is on Mastodon. And so, instead of a good *key app, you get yet another Mastodon-only iPhone app and yet another Mastodon-only iPhone app from people who don’t even know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon.
Bluesky:
If Mastodon wanted to compete with this, it would have to
You can choose. But you don’t have to.
The official Mastodon app has a box where you can pick one out of several hard-coded instances. It defaults to mastodon.social. You can pick a different instance if you want to. But you can also ignore it, scroll past it and let yourself be conveniently railroaded to mastodon.social without even knowing what an instance is.
If you’ve never in your live chosen anything that has to do with IT, if all you know is centralised, monolithic silos, then you can’t be expected to first choose one out of literal dozens of microblogging projects in the Fediverse and then one out of dozens, hundreds or thousands of instances.
The Fediverse would be a whole lot smaller if not all newbies who didn’t come from Reddit were railroaded hard to mastodon.social. Oh, and Lemmy would be a whole lot smaller without Redditors having been railroaded first to lemmy.ml and now to lemmy.world.
Firefish will be discontinued around the end of the year.
Here’s the context: Calckey/Firefish, a direct Misskey soft fork was mostly a one-person show, entirely run by Kainoa who was also the sole tech admin of the lighthouse instance. There were other devs, but Kainoa was the sole maintainer and the only one who could merge patches into production code. Nobody else was ever authorised to do so. Calckey/Firefish was Kainoa’s baby.
In late 2023, Kainoa largely disappeared from the face of the Earth. No engagement with the Fediverse at all anymore. There were sparse signs of life, but that was all. Turned out Kainoa had graduated and started a job and didn’t even have a few seconds to post anything into the Fediverse. In the meantime, Firefish didn’t follow Misskey’s development and got stuck on Misskey 12 level while Misskey went to version 14. Also, the lighthouse instance whose only tech admin was Kainoa completely crapped off and became entirely unuseable.
All other devs jumped ship. I think both Iceshrimp and Sharkey were launched by former Firefish devs (at least one of them was, Iceshrimp being a former hard fork of Firefish which was quickly rebased into a more up-to-date Misskey soft fork whereas Sharkey started out as a Misskey soft fork right away.
After about half a year, Kainoa came back and promised that things would continue. But someone else had to continue it. And that was Naskya. It was up to her to continue, but with zero help from Kainoa. The latter didn’t want to continue any of the existing Firefish sites, not the website, not the lighthouse instance, not even the code repository because all three ran on Firefish-specific domains which Kainoa probably couldn’t be bothered to transfer. All three were scheduled to shut down which is why many people think Firefish is dead: The old links no longer work.
So when Naskya took over, she had to set up a wholly new code repository, essentially fork Kainoa’s repository as long as it still existed (Naskya’s Firefish is a hard fork of Kainoa’s Firefish, technically speaking) and set up a new llighthouse instance. But since she ended up the only dev, it became much too much work. And so she announced to discontinue Firefish by the end of 2024.
Iceshrimp was designed for stability which is also why a number of Firefish features had been kicked out. It itself is on maintenance for as long as it will continue to exist, which won’t be that long.
The reason: Iceshrimp.NET. The Iceshrimp devs decided to no longer put up with Misskey’s mangled, faulty code base and no longer try to patch what’s broken on Misskey’s side. And besides, a Fediverse server application entirely based on JavaScript (TypeScript + Node.js) doesn’t sound that much like a good idea. Instead, the Iceshrimp devs decided to re-write all of Iceshrimp from scratch, from the ground up, in C#. This is far from done which means it’s even farther from being daily-driveable.
So you’ve got two Iceshrimps now: One is a Forkey and only receives bugfixes or security patches anymore, if anything. One is not a Forkey and not ready for public deployment yet either.
Sharkey used to be the king of features, but at the cost of reliability. Especially Sharkey’s Mastodon API implementation is infamously bad. The Sharkey community has been waiting for someone to step up and develop a completely new Mastodon API implementation for Sharkey for I don’t know how long.
Also, the Sharkey devs lost a whole lot of community support when they collected donations for a server for Sharkey purposes and then took the money to set up a Minecraft server. Make of that what you want.
News on Catodon are sparse, if there are any. But then again, Catodon is Iceshrimp dumbed down for Mastodon converts’ convenience with a UI that’s as close as possible to the default Mastodon Web UI. That’s probably not what you’re looking for.
And it being Iceshrimp-based may pretty well mean that the Catodon development is halted and waiting for Iceshrimp.NET to be released so that Catodon can be rebased from the dead TypeScript/Node.js Iceshrimp codebase to the new C# Iceshrimp.NET codebase.
And then there’s CherryPick. AFAIK, it’s a Japan-based Sharkey soft-fork in which a whole lot of Misskey and Sharkey issues have been fixed; don’t ask me for details, I only know this stuff from hearsay. Basically, CherryPick is Sharkey in good. Or in better.
Caveats: Like Misskey, CherryPick is developed in Japan. I wouldn’t count on any of the devs, much less all of them, being fluent in English or anything else that isn’t Japanese. Also, there’s one (1) public instance outside of East Asia; it’s located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. All the other instances are in and around Tokyo and Seoul.
All this combined may be why next to nobody in the West even knows that CherryPick exists.
My point is that not everything in the Fediverse is public. Unlike what Mastodon and Lemmy users keep claiming because that’s all they know.