Where’d you encounter that?

If you only want to visit OpenSimFest, you don’t need an avatar on OpenSimFest’s own grid. You can do that with an avatar on any other OpenSim grid as OpenSimFest’s grid is connected to the Hypergrid.

Unannounced by the Firestorm devs, Firestorm 7.1.11 Beta has been released already. At least from my POV, it has sped up a few things such as teleporting.

The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total. Seriously, what did they expect?

As many followers as they’ve built up in the Birdcage? With maybe 1% of users altogether? In a much shorter timespan?

And by running the accounts as pure shoutboxes with no interaction with replies that could just as well be unmarked crossposter bots?

The irony is that all it would take is one high profile person or a nation state to commit to using Mastodon, and slowly you would see the numbers start to increase.

Um, nope.

George Takei is on Mastodon. I’ve yet to see masses of Trekkies piling into Mastodon.

Greta Thunberg is on Mastodon. There has never been a huge influx of FFF members. Or Zoomers, for that matter.

The Dutch government has its own instance. The Federal German government has its own instance. Doesn’t lure anyone into the Fediverse.

The main cost is probably the extra workload put on their social media team having to publish to and interact with even more platforms.

They’ve yet to be caught actually interacting with someone. They’ve run the whole instance as nothing but a shoutbox.

The Fediverse is not only Lemmy and Mastodon. Even the microblogging side is not only Mastodon.

Mastodon itself has a whole bunch of forks such as Ecko, Hometown and the very popular Glitch.

There’s also Pleroma with its probably even more popular fork Akkoma.

There’s Misskey with literally dozens of forks, including but not limited to Firefish (formerly Calckey), Iceshrimp (its rewrite Iceshrimp.NET won’t be a fork anymore, though), Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon etc. etc.

If you want something with more power, something that’s much more like Facebook, there’s Friendica and has been since 2010.

If you want something with vastly more power, think Facebook meets WordPress meets Google Cloud Services meets Fandom etc., there’s Hubzilla. Whenever someone thinks “the Fediverse” needs to introduce a certain new feature just because Mastodon doesn’t have it, chances are Hubzilla has had it for longer than Mastodon has even been around.

And so forth.

We’ll see what comes out of this.

Mike has already implemented FEP-ef61 on (streams), and it seemed to have worked well under lab conditions. But then he rolled it out to release in July. Channels created on accounts registered after that point have decentralised IDs already. And surprisingly, it caused tons of bugs to the point of these channels not properly federating with anything. And since he’s the only (streams) developer, he had to iron everything out himself. And quickly so because a few dozen people use (streams) as a daily driver.

In mid-August, he forked Forte from the streams repository. It was his vision of “the Fediverse of 2030”: basically (streams), but only supporting ActivityPub anymore, with both (streams)’ own Nomad and Hubzilla’s Zot6 ripped out. Guess the idea was to have something with no extra protocols standing in the way of straightening FEP-ef61 and nomadic identity via ActivityPub. But this caused even more of a workload.

On August 31st, Mike sent a private post to his immediate connections (his channel is set up to send private posts by default) that said that he quits. He wanted to stop developing for the Fediverse because it got too much. The community could carry on if they want.

Trouble is, there’s nobody among the few dozen (streams) users who has got what it takes, namely both the time and especially the skills to take over as a lead dev. One guy is ambitious, but he has only recently taught himself git just to make his own pre-FEP-ef61 branch for personal use. Then there are a few people who do know git, who may also know how to code, but who don’t have the time.

We got one offer by a guy who wanted to rewrite (streams) from scratch. He had taken a look at the (streams) code, and he said that some of it is very old and crufty and mouldy. Of course, a lot of code probably still dates back to 2012 when Mike forked Red from Friendica to implement nomadic identity and rewrote the entire backend against Zot. Problem was, I think that guy came from Mastodon, he probably hadn’t even seen Friendica in action, much less Hubzilla or even (streams), and he described himself as “thick”, so we’d have to explain everything to him. Nobody even reacted.

Luckily, Mike is still Mike. He can’t keep his fingers off improving the Fediverse. Every couple days, we see commits to the streams repository and/or Forte. It’s just that things are moving forward very slowly now. The community is trying to figure out what and where the bugs can be by examining log files and whatnot, but nobody can track them down in the source, much less fix them and submit a PR, and that isn’t talking about merging the PR.

I hope this Join the Fediverse Wiki article can help you. I’ve written it myself.

It’s mostly written to pick up Mastodon users who don’t know much about the rest of the Fediverse, so it doesn’t really explain how Hubzilla relates to Lemmy. I hope it helps anyway.

I don’t think a nomadic identity is the same as an instance-less identity.

It isn’t. (Source: I’ve been using nomadic stuff since long before any of you has even heard of the Fediverse.)

Nomadic identity always requires one main instance of an “identity container” with a valid Fediverse ID. That Fediverse ID carries in it the domain name of the server on which the main instance of the “identity container” resides. You need something behind the @. The clones have the same Fediverse ID.

So if you have a Hubzilla channel on hub.foo.social, hub.bar.social and hub.baz.social, one instance of that channel has to be the main instance, and the others are the clones. If the instance of the channel on hub.foo.social is defined as the main instance, it’s hub.foo.social that defines the idea (e.g. bob@hub.foo.social). From a Hubzilla POV, the clones on hub.bar.social and hub.baz.social are bob@hub.foo.social all the same.

Instance-less would require a fully decentralised, peer-to-peer approach like Briar where (ideally) each user name only exists exactly once. And with no domain name attached to it.

And peer-to-peer in social networking sounds like an awesome idea until you have to run a full-blown, fully-hardened Web server on your iPhone on a wonky 4G connection, simultaneously sending a message to and receiving hundreds of messages from hundreds of other devices out there because you’ve got, like, 647 connections on your friends list. And then you wonder why your phone is so hot, and the battery craps off within hours.

What I’d much rather see is instance based accounts, however, with the ability to take over/migrate them from other instances, so that if an instance goes down, people can still keep their identity. It would also allow instances focused on protecting minority communities to keep doing that.

This exists right now. It has existed for longer than Mastodon, much less Lemmy.

Established by Mike Macgirvin in 2011 when he invented nomadic identity. First implemented in his Zot protocol from 2012 and a Friendica fork named Red, later Red Matrix, known as Hubzilla since 2015. Also available on (streams).

Not just a vague concept or an experiment, but daily-driven on stable servers since over a decade.

Nomadic identity goes even further than migration. Nomadic identity allows you to have the same Fediverse identity with everything in it (name, posts, connections, settings, files etc. etc. pp.) on multiple servers simultaneously. Not dumb copies. Bidirectional, near-real-time, live, hot backups. Whatever happens on one instance of a channel will be sync’d to all others almost immediately.

One of the clones goes down, doesn’t matter. The main instance goes down, doesn’t matter, you can use the clones just the same. The main instances goes down and stays down, doesn’t matter, you make one of the clones your new main instance. All your nomadic connections are automagically changed to your new identity based on your new main instance. Yes, even on remote servers.

Even migration is based on the same concept. If you move from one server to another, first a clone is created, then the clone is declared the new main instance, thus demoting the original instance to clone, then the old original instance is deleted and the account with it. Not only can you move with absolutely literally everything, but you don’t leave any rubbish behind on the old instance.

Only downside: It does not work on ActivityPub. Yet. It requires a special protocol, either Zot (Hubzilla) or Nomad ((streams)). ActivityPub-based projects don’t even understand nomadic identity. So when you move, you have to reconnect all your non-nomadic followers.

ActivityPub implementation is being worked on, at least in theory. But the guy behind all this has, well, apparently not fully quit, but dramatically slowed down.

It’s basically like a Hubzilla channel which, in turn, is somewhat like a Friendica account. Which, again, is very vagely like a Mastodon account.

To my best knowledge, you can’t follow individual accounts outside the Threadiverse on Lemmy.

In addition, (streams) has recently switched to decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61. This could be the reason why Lemmy can’t find my (streams) channels, but it can find my Hubzilla channels: It doesn’t understand DIDs.

It would just either have to be on a server that also offers all server applications covered by the Web client so that everything has the same domain.

Or you would have to tell people to register accounts on foo.social, bar.social and/or baz.social, but the Web UI is on qux.social. Bit confusing for newbies who only knew centralised silos five minutes ago.

Here’s some stuff that I’d meme about:

• Mastodon users thinking the Fediverse is only Mastodon
• Lemmy users thinking the Threadiverse is only Lemmy
• Mastodon users thinking the Fediverse started with Mastodon
• Mastodon being ridiculously underpowered in comparison to just about everything else, particularly Hubzilla and (streams)
• Mastodon users wishing Mastodon (or, better yet, “the Fediverse”) had certain features which are readily available just about everywhere outside of Mastodon
• Mobile apps built against only Mastodon
• Fediverse tools built against only Mastodon
• Pleroma being lightweight
• Mastodon’s culture which Mastodon users are trying to force upon the rest of the Fediverse
• Forkey antics such as “Speak as cat”
• Forkeys in general
• Forkeys inspired by Blåhaj vs Mastodon’s mastodon plushie
• Mastodon users still uploading videos to YouTube and not to PeerTube
• Hubzilla’s UI
• Sharkey’s infamously bad Mastodon API implementation
• Friendica federating with everything, especially juxtaposed with some Mastodon users not wanting to federate with anything that isn’t vanilla Mastodon
• Hubzilla’s ability to host Web pages
• Nomadic identity
• Bluesky’s AT protocol seeming like a cheap knock-off of the Zot and Nomad protocols in parts
• Self-proclaimed Fediverse experts who actually barely know anything about Mastodon and don’t know anything about the rest of the Fediverse
• Character limits
• Threads perhaps wanting to EEE the Fediverse vs Mastodon actively trying to EEE the Fediverse right now
• Mastodon’s poster-side content warnings set in stone in what they want to be the Fediverse culture vs Friendica’s, Hubzilla’s, (streams)’ and Forte’s automated, reader-side content warnings which have been around for longer
• Generally, the Fediverse being older than Mastodon
• Lemmy only barely federating with everything else
• /kbin essentially being dead
• Permissions on Hubzilla and (streams)
• “Conversations” on Mastodon vs conversations on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams)
• Certain points in the Fediverse history

Granted, I guess almost all of this will fly even over most c/Fediverse users’ heads due to how detached Lemmy is from the rest of the Fediverse. But I don’t really expect that many more Mastodon users to understand it, and those who do may be offended. Oh well.

I’ve started a new (streams) channel for Fediverse memes, but I thought Lemmy could be another, even better place to post them.

I’ve already posted two creations of mine there, One does not simply implement FEP-ef61 with very extensive explanations and What if I told you the Fediverse is not only Mastodon? with only one link to explain it. I’m still trying to find the right amount of explanation for an audience that shall be mostly on Mastodon.

Beyond that, I’ve got loads of ideas. But I don’t want to post more of them here than on (streams). So I’ll first have to define my way of posting them on (streams) to what will be a largely Mastodon audience in a way that satisfies Mastodon’s accessibility requirements the best. I hope to speed up my meme-posting rate then.

No time to run and moderate it. I’m not primarily a Lemmy user, I’m mostly on Hubzilla and (streams). It can happen that I’m absent from Lemmy for weeks.

For one specific Fediverse project each, yes.

But what the OP is looking for is a Web client that lets you log into Mastodon and Lemmy and PeerTube all the same. Probably one that unifies your Mastodon, Lemmy and PeerTube timelines into one, rather than listing your Mastodon timeline next to your Lemmy timeline next to your PeerTube timeline in three separate columns, TweetDeck-style.

Or maybe what the OP is looking for is a Web server and client that unites all features of Mastodon and Lemmy and PeerTube in one Fediverse project so that only one single login is needed for everything.

Neither of these exists.

What I meant weren’t screenshots from social media that are treated like memes.

I rather meant original memes made in the Fediverse for the Fediverse, lampooning the Fediverse, parts of it or certain aspects of it. Even if they’re based on existing templates, no matter how old.

Also, it’d be nice if there was a place where such memes can be posted in the first place.

But where would a unified Web client run in the first place? It would have to be installed on a Web server and, from there, access the Web servers of the various different server apps which would still be entirely different and independent installations.

For a Web client with no actual server backend, the same would go as for a mobile app: It would have to cover pretty much all features of everything. If uniting Lemmy and Mastodon in one UI seems tricky already, try adding Hubzilla and (streams) to the mix.

If you’re actually looking for a unified Web server and client, i.e. one Fediverse project that literally covers everything the Fediverse can do with one login on one server and one identity: This won’t happen.

This would be way too much for one Fediverse project to tackle. You’d basically have to start with (streams), add back all functionality that has been removed since the first fork from Hubzilla (and that’s a whole lot), make all kinds of non-nomadic protocols compatible with nomadic identity via Nomad and ActivityPub, and then gradually add all kinds of features from all over the place, from PeerTube to Funkwhale, from PieFed to Owncast, from Mobilizon to BookWyrm. And you’d have to soft-fork everything and keep them in-sync with their respective upstreams.

The outcome would be too complex for most. People would have to deal with their account/their login not being their identity because their identity is containerised in a channel. They would have to wrap their minds around nomadic identity. They would have to deal with fine-grained permissions settings. They would have a post editor that’s every bit as powerful as those on big blogging platforms when all they want to do is tweet and retweet and occasionally watch a video. And they would have tons of features on top.

The whole thing would be an utter nightmare for its developers as well, seeing as they’d constantly have to track over 100 Fediverse projects and implement any upgrades which they’ve rolled out.

The Fediverse is not one enclosed, unified entity under one centralised rule.

It’s a common misconception that “the Fediverse” is a network platform created by whomever, usually Eugen Rochko. And Mastodon, Lemmy, Misskey, Friendica, Pixelfed, PeerTube etc. are Web UIs for the Fediverse, and Mona, IceCubes, Tusky, Fedilab etc. are mobile UIs for the Fediverse which mimic the functionality of certain Web UIs.

This is complete non-sense. None of this is true.

Instead, the Fediverse is a patchwork of many different things that work together by speaking common languages. And with “work together”, I mean “work together ever so barely” in many cases. Mastodon and Lemmy are not different clients for the same server thing. They connect, but they can hardly interact.

These “apps” aren’t client apps. They’re server applications. They provide a whole slew of very very different server backends.

There is no “Fediverse suite of apps” either. Just about everything in the Fediverse is developed and offered separately from one another.

Mastodon, in particular, ignores the whole rest of the Fediverse and tries to present itself to its users and Fediverse novices as “the Fediverse”. And when Mastodon users discover that Mastodon is, in fact, not “the Fediverse”, Mastodon makes them believe that everything that doesn’t work exactly like Mastodon is broken.

Oh, and no, Eugen Rochko didn’t invent the Fediverse. Evan Prodromou did. In 2008. That was when he took his recently launched Twitter alternative Identi.ca, open-sourced its technology under the name Laconi.ca (later StatusNet, now part of GNU social) and laid its protocol open under the name OpenMicroBlogging (now OStatus).

The Fediverse consisting of multiple different kinds of interacting servers came to exist in 2010 when Mike Macgirvin launched his Facebook alternative named Mistpark (now Friendica). He built it on top of a whole new protocol, but he gave it the ability to speak OpenMicroBlogging as well, thus connecting it to StatusNet. One key feature of Friendica is still to be able to connect to everything that moves and then some.

Mastodon was built on top of OStatus, too. But the intention was not to connect it to already-existing StatusNet, Friendica, Hubzilla (a much more powerful Friendica fork by Mike Macgirvin himself) and Pleroma (which had started out as an alternative UI for StatusNet). The idea was rather that using an already existing protocol was easier for a young and barely experienced coder than designing an all-new protocol from scratch. Mastodon never intended to be interoperable with anything else.

Even when Mastodon introduced ActivityPub as early as September, 2017, it was not to be able to interact with Hubzilla which had it first, two months earlier. By the way, ActivityPub is another one of Evan Prodromou’s creations, but this time, he wasn’t alone.

The idea behind Lemmy seemed to be similar: Build a Reddit clone, but without the hassle of designing a brand-new communication protocol. The difference was that Mastodon was already quite well-known when Lemmy was launched. When Mastodon was launched, StatusNet was considered dead after its only really known instance, Identi.ca had switched from OStatus to pump.io. As for Friendica, Hubzilla and Pleroma, nobody knew they existed, much less that they spoke OStatus. OStatus was there, ready to use, but to most people who came across it, it felt unused. So I guess that when Eugen Rochko created Mastodon, he unironically and sincerely believed that he was now the only one using this protocol, nobody else ever would again, and Mastodon would only ever connect to itself. Mastodon’s whole very concept is to be a “federated walled garden”, decentralised on the inside, but not letting anything else connect.

It literally started in 2010, almost six years before Mastodon.

If you’re looking for something that is to Facebook what Bluesky is to pre-Musk Twitter, it doesn’t exist.

Otherwise, “the Facebook ones” are:

• Friendica (intended to be a Facebook alternative from the very beginning, designed to federate with everything that moves)
• Hubzilla (fork of (a fork of?) Friendica by Friendica’s own creator, currently the most powerful piece of server software in the whole Fediverse, basically a federated Swiss army knife that can do Facebook as well)
• the nameless thing in the streams repository (not in this graph, fork of a fork of a fork of a fork… of Hubzilla by Friendica’s and Hubzilla’s creator, less feature-laden than Hubzilla, but more modern and evolving at a rapid pace, the most advanced piece of server software in the whole Fediverse, but instances are hard to find)