First, Bluesky’s nomadic identity isn’t worth shit if nobody knows that there’s more than one instance.

Next, it has yet to be proven to work because nobody has daily-driven it yet.

Finally, if you want nomadic identity that’s actually proven to work, don’t join Bluesky. Join Hubzilla. Nomadic identity, established in 2012, some four years before Mastodon, daily-driven by probably hundreds or thousands of people since then.

I’m not even kidding. The Fediverse had nomadic identity four years before it had Mastodon.

No, but it used to. And that’s enough for some people.

I bet you that there are people who steer clear of anything related to BASIC not because it’s a kiddy language, but because it was invented by Bill Gates.

Misskey and the actual Forkeys are in TypeScript and Vue.js. And they all have the same bugs that you can’t just simply get rid of.

Iceshrimp.NET is a rewrite of Iceshrimp in C#, that’s why it’s named Iceshrimp.NET. It promises to get rid of all issues inherited from Misskey because it doesn’t have a bit of Misskey left in it anymore.

But maybe we need more rewrites in more languages to satisfy as many people as possible. A Catodon rewrite in Ruby on Rails for Mastodon fanbois and fangurlz, no matter what a chonker it’ll end up being. Sharkey rewritten in PHP to satisfy those who like things as easy and lightweight as Friendica & Co. And even more because not few say that both C# and Ruby on Rails and PHP suck.

Or is there anything that doesn’t suck at all? Go sucks because Google. Rust sucks because Mozilla. Python sucks because it’s Python being Python. And so forth.

People want a 100%, 1:1, perfect clone of immediate pre-Musk Twitter. They want Twitter without Musk.

Bluesky is a 100%, 1:1, perfect clone of immediate pre-Musk Twitter. It is Twitter without Musk.

It looks exactly like Twitter, it feels exactly like Twitter (both the Web interface and the official app), and it’s for tech-illiterate dumb-dumbs.

Only recently has an instance selector been added to the sign-up process of the official app, but Bluesky still markets itself to its users as the self-same kind of centralised monolithic silo as Twitter and Facebook.

Mastodon has a vastly different UI and UX from immediate pre-Musk Twitter, but people don’t want to learn anything new. And truth be told, I’ve read from Misskey/Forkey users that Misskey and the Forkeys actually have an easier-to-use Web UI than Mastodon.

Also, Mastodon advertises the fact that it’s decentralised with lots of instances to choose from, even though the gGmbH would rather want everyone to be on mastodon.social. This freaks people out.

Joining Mastodon is actually no more difficult than joining Bluesky in practice because the official app railroads everyone to mastodon.social without forcing them. But people won’t know until they’ve actually installed and opened that app.

The only reason why Mastodon grew so quickly to such an enormous size in late 2022 was because it was the only alternative to Twitter that anyone knew, including those who pulled Twitter users onto Mastodon. The only other advantage it had over anything else was that, unlike Twitter, it didn’t have Musk and uncontained droves of Nazis. Had people been sent to Akkoma or Calckey instead of Mastodon, it would have exploded the same.

Inb4 “How can people use e-mail then?” That’s because everyone’s on Gmail, and many think e-mail is a proprietary Google product.

Both Hubzilla and (streams), in practice the only Fediverse server apps that have a “public stream” and users other than the dev, can do a lot to keep content private.

But tell that to the Mastodon users who only know Mastodon and the Lemmy users who only know Lemmy, both of whom “know” that nothing in the Fediverse is private because nothing on Lemmy and effectively nothing on Mastodon is private.

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.

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 body

Hubzilla. Closely followed by the intentionally nameless fork of a fork… of Hubzilla that’s colloquially being referred to as (streams).

Perks of both (excerpt):

• not based on ActivityPub, it’s actually optional; you can turn/keep it off if you want to
• nomadic identity; my channels are resilient against instance shutdown because they aren’t restricted to one instance
• multiple channels = IDs on one and the same account/login; no need to register additional user accounts for this, and you can easily switch back and forth between channels
• OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on, both client-side and server-side support
• very extensive permission settings that let me control what I see, what I don’t see and what others can see and do
• per-contact permission settings
• per-channel blacklist/whitelist filter plus per-contact blacklist/whitelist filters plus keyword-triggered, automatically generated, reader-side content warnings, supporting regex and (except the latter) a special filter syntax for extra features
• what’s “lists” on Mastodon is actually useful because you can use it both to filter your stream and to limit whom you send a post to, not to mention much easier to maintain
• a concept of conversations, you can follow entire discussions, and you generally receive all replies to a post (something that at least Mastodon doesn’t have, by the way)
• not only native support for discussion groups/forums, but they can and do host their own moderated discussion groups/forums (Mastodon has neither)
• no arbitrary character limits, characters only limited by the instance database (on (streams), that’s theoretically over 24,000,000 characters for one post)
• probably more text formatting options than your typical blogging platform and definitely more than any microblogging project in the Fediverse
• full-blown blog posts rendered gracefully
• non-standard BBcode tags for special features, often observer-aware
• embedded links; no need to plaster URLs into your posts in plain sight
• images can be embedded “in-line” within the post with text above them and text below them
• no limit on how many images a post can have
• unlimited poll options
• multiple-word hashtags
• post categories in addition to hashtags
• tag cloud plus category cloud/list
• quotes
• “quote-tweets”
• extensively customisable Web UI
• built-in file storage with a built-in file manager, per-file and per-directory permissions settings and WebDAV support that’s used for images and other media you embed in your posts (unlike on Mastodon and Lemmy, you know where your uploaded images land, and you can delete them yourself if you need to)
• federated event calendar with support for Event-type objects
• built-in CalDAV calendar server (headless on (streams))
• built-in CardDAV address book server (headless)
• support for OAuth and OAuth2
• modular; can be extended with official or, if available, third-party “apps”, widgets and themes

Extra perks of Hubzilla:

• currently more reliable
• more active development
• easier to get new users on board because hubs are listed on various Fediverse sites, and more public hubs are available
• newer and more configurable version of the Redbasic theme
• switchable night mode
• multiple profiles per channel which can be assigned to certain connections
• you can configure new connections before you confirm them
• can also connect to diaspora*
• can also subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds
• event calendar also doubles as a basic frontend for the CalDAV server
• non-federating, long-form articles
• “cards” that work largely the same
• built-in wiki engine based on either BBcode or Markdown for as many wikis of your own as you want to, each with as many pages as you want
• support for webpages (the official Hubzilla website is on a Hubzilla channel itself)

Extra perks of (streams):

• more advanced
• better integration of ActivityPub into the two supported nomadic protocols
• contact suggestions also include ActivityPub contacts
• new default theme in addition to an older Redbasic version
• reworked, more powerful but easier-to-use permissions system
• easier to use once you’re on board
• supports BBcode, Markdown and HTML within the same post
• can set Mastodon’s sensitive flag for images
• built-in announcement/boost/repost/renote/repeat remover, no need to use filter syntax for that
• extra protection against both mention spam and hashtag spam
• alt-text can be added to images upon upload, no need to graft it into the image-embedding markup code
• verification of external identities (available on Mastodon as well, but not on Hubzilla)

• https://joinfediverse.wiki/Main_Page (admittedly quite Mastodon-centric)
• https://fediverse.party

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.

• https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Mastodon%3F
• https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Misskey%3F

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.