Jupiter Rowland

This can be the consequence, yes.

It’s one thing to build free, decentralised alternatives to mainstream silos.

It’s something else to outright clone them and even adopt their shortcomings. Either because their shortcomings allegedly are part of the very concept (e.g. microblogging isn’t microblogging if it isn’t enforcing a purist Twitter style), or because aspiring users could be irritated if these shortcomings weren’t there, or because the devs don’t even see them as shortcomings because they’ve never experienced anything without these shortcomings.

See also Pixelfed that’s specialising in posting images so hard that it silently drops any posts from outside with no image in them.

Feddit.org is a German server that sticks to German laws.

Germany has a special historical guilt towards Jews. You know, what with having murdered half of all Jews on the planet within less than a decade and intended to cull the other half as well.

Anti-Judaism is a capital Federal crime in Germany, just like using Nazi symbolism. And it is for very good reasons.

In America, it doesn’t make much of a difference whether you burn down a synagogue with a service going on inside or a barn with a hoedown going on inside. You’ll get sentenced for arson and either manslaughter or murder either way.

In Germany, if you burn down the synagogue, you’ll get a whole shit-ton of a sentence piled on top of that if your intentions were clearly anti-Semitic/anti-Judaist.

Google “Night of Broken Glass”. Can you even imagine the U.S. National Guard raiding and burning synagogues, Jewish-owned shops, Jewish retirement homes and the like, murdering at least 1,000 Jews, all in one single night in 1938, ordered by (a precursor of) the NSA and at the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself?

It’s the same everywhere in the Fediverse, and it always has:

Newbies always join the biggest server. Unless, of course, the biggest server is being hidden by most of the other servers (pawoo.net used to be the biggest of all Fediverse servers until newbie zerg rushes onto mastodon.social demoted it).

It’s a no-brainer. Don’t know where to go? Just go where everyone goes. Don’t know what to do? Just do what everyone does. Also explains the success of the iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy S, the Ford F-150, the VW Golf, the Toyota Corolla…

Back in the day, when Reddit charged app devs $20M for their API, which killed 3rd-party apps, which enshittified Reddit, which caused the first migration wave to Lemmy, Lemmy still was so small that lemmy.ml was the biggest server, being run by Lemmy itself and all. So naturally, everyone went to lemmy.ml.

Eventually, in spite of people from all walks of life and with all kinds of attitude being there, lemmy.ml had become so unabashedly Tankie that countless users decided to move elsewhere. It had become blatantly clear that .ml, actually the TLD of Mali, stands for МДЯ☭ЇꙄМ-LЭИЇИЇꙄМ. Back then, lemmy.world was the largest non-Tankie server, so they went there.

It was due to that migration within Lemmy that lemmy.world outgrew lemmy.ml and became the biggest Lemmy server. Being #1 on the list of the biggest Lemmy servers, it also became the #1 destination for newbies, and the feedback loop started anew.

A side-effect was that the Tankie-to-non-Tankie rate on lemmy.ml grew because it was almost exclusively non-Tankies who left whereas the Tankies stayed.

I mean why would a leftist like ANYTHING about current day Russia?

Because they unironically believe that Russia = the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. That Putin literally is the Premier of the USSR and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Maybe even that what Putin is trying to do in the Ukraine is reconquer his own territory from CIA-driven Western insurgents.

Basically, just because Putin is a Russian, he automatically is a ☭★✊ СФММꙠИЇꙄТ СФМЯДDЭ ✊★☭, therefore he must be anti-Capitalist, therefore he has to be a good guy.

These people completely distrust any and all Western media because it’s capitalist, imperialist propaganda, but they take everything from Russia Today and Sputnik News at face value because the good guys wouldn’t ever lie, right?

They say they’re against wars. But if Putin started a full-on invasion in Germany (while the country is in a state in which it’ll be defenceless within three days), I can guarantee you that they’ll cheer for the Red Army finally coming and purging capitalism and imperialism.

Seriously, we have a political party in Germany whose very principles appear to be based on this belief, and that tried to get a new Chancellor of their own into office.

Let’s not forget the 15-year-old nihilistic edgelords who, for a change, aren’t outright Nazis, if only for the reason because there were so many nihilistic outright Nazi edgelords and Wehraboos out there that it had become too mainstream. Also, they read somewhere that the Red Army destroyed the Wehrmacht which automatically makes the Soviet Union superior to the Third Reich. So they went full Stalinist instead.

There must be at least some who have found their way from WoT to Reddit and from there to Lemmy.

At least those who used to run in Tumblr’s “more leftist than thou” rat race that apparently suggested that being enby is more leftist than being trans to such a degree that trans isn’t leftist enough are usually too feeble to go full Tankie and support genocides if committed in the name of communism.

But those questions have been on my mind too for a few months; Is the fediverse good but too complicated for this world?

Probably.

Let’s face it: Hardly anyone has an actual computer anymore. People do everything with phones nowadays. For them, everything is an app. They don’t know what’s happening behind the app, like, whether that app is just a remote control for a website. They don’t want to know. And they don’t care. It works. That’s all.

This may be why Google is putting all bets on Gemini. Nobody Googles anymore when nobody uses the Web anymore because everybody uses dedicated apps for everything.

These people are often easy to spot on Mastodon because they hold on to Mastodon’s official app for their dear lives. It’s the most lack-lustre Mastodon app of all. But they don’t know because they’ve never tried anything else. Above all, however, they couldn’t use Mastodon with an app that isn’t named “Mastodon”.

Then there are the more old-school people who do still use the Web. Most of them still actually have a desktop or laptop computer.

But they are caught in a principle that has ruled over the Web from 1994 to today: One service, one up-front website. And that website is usually www.<Insert the name of the service here>.com or www.<Insert the name of the service here>.org or maybe www.<Insert the name of the service here>.net.

And if it’s a “network”, it’s one network, one service, one up-front website.

The concept of one network, one service, many websites that are also connected to each other and communicate with each other is incomprehensible to them. You keep seeing this with Lemmy newbies. Although e-mail is literally this. But then again, for what appears to be the vast majority of people out there, e-mail = Google Mail.

The concept of one network, multiple services is just as incomprehensible. Following a YouTube channel or a Facebook user or a subreddit from Twitter? Impossibru!

Consequentially, the concept of one network, many different services, each in turn with many websites, all of which are connected to each other and communicate with each other is nothing short of eldritch to them.

“You mean… like… there’s… like… 9,000 Twitters? And you can be on one Twitter website and follow someone on another Twitter website? How’s that even possible?! And… like… there’s 400 Facebooks? And you can be on one Facebook website and befriend someone on another Facebook website? And… you can follow… Facebook users? From, like, Twitter?!?” Minds equal blown. Like, heads a sploding.

This is why estimated 50% of all Mastodon users are geeks, and so are estimated 99% of all non-Mastodon, non-commercial-silos Fediverse users.

Seriously: Mastodon on-boarding is already for dumb-dumbs in practice. Load the app. Name. Password. Go. Toot away. You may or may not know that you’re on a website named “mastodon.social” now (the official app defaults to mastodon.social). You may or may not know that it’s only one of over 9,000 Mastodon “servers”. Doesn’t matter for getting on board.

Still, there are many many calls for making Fediverse on-boarding even easier, even more “for dumb-dumbs”. Either whoever calls for this hasn’t seen the official Mastodon phone app from up close and the way it railroads everyone to mastodon.social. Either they think that it’s still a hard requirement to manually, consciously choose a server. Or they still find the way the Mastodon app handles it too complicated, too confusing, too scary.

Seriously, if the Fediverse needs to be simplified even further and made more comfortable for those who are scared of any technology beyond a toaster, those who need ChatGPT to work a washing-machine, it has to become like in my Chirper proposal: presenting itself as a centralised silo to the point of sanitising or culling any and all content that hints at the technology behind it.

Then all newbies will be Kazims as far as Fediverse knowledge goes because the software won’t let them look behind itself. But it’ll be as easy-peasy as joining and using WhatsApp.

What’s important to know here is the distinction between Article-type objects (meant to be formatted, long-form content; e.g. blog posts) and Note-type objects (meant to be short messages, e.g. tweets, Mastodon toots).

What’s also important to know is: Mastodon’s very concept is to specialise in being a classic, purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging application. And Mastodon tends to stretch the ActivityPub spec until it breaks to live this concept.

Mastodon absolutely refuses to ever render more complex content in all its glory. For example, Mastodon refuses to show images embedded in content. Mastodon also refuses to support any lists except for bullet-point lists, and it sanitises e.g. numbered lists into bullet-point lists. Mastodon refuses to support horizontal rules. Etc.

Up until Mastodon 4.0, released in October, 2022 (right after Mastodon’s current culture had been coined), Mastodon flat-out refused to support any text formatting. Its HTML “sanitiser” would “sanitise” all content down to plain text.

Why? Because text formatting isn’t classic, purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging.

What Mastodon is doing right now: It shows Note-type objects, but after “sanitising” them. As for Article-type objects, it renders them with their title (if there is any), their summary (if there is any; this is literally the first time ever that Mastodon acknowledges the summary field as a summary field) and a link to the original. Comments on this preview end up comments on the original. But nobody on Mastodon understands.

This came to pass around 2017/2018, after first Hubzilla and then Mastodon became the first two Fediverse applications to adopt ActivityPub.

Hubzilla, capable of both showing and generating the full set of HTML text formatting, mostly implemented the official W3C spec by the book. It sent its posts as Article-type objects and its comments as Note-type objects.

Mastodon, intentionally incapable of any text formatting, sent Note-type objects, but it “sanitised” the text formatting out of both Note-type objects and Article-type objects. It completely defaced especially the latter. Mastodon users wouldn’t know what the latter were supposed to look like because nobody ever looked them up at the source.

The Hubzilla side asked Gargron to stick to the official W3C ActivityPub spec, respect what Article-type objects are and implement full HTML rendering for them instead of defacing them. He refused.

The result was that Gargron showed Article-type objects as links to the original with the title above. The Hubzilla devs considered this censoring and silencing of a Mastodon competitor and resorted to switching from Article-type objects to Note-type objects until Mastodon supports full HTML rendering.

Fast-forward about seven or eight years or so. Actual long-form blogging with all shebang was growing in the Fediverse, partially powered by commercial actors (WordPress, Ghost, Flipboard). In a strange twist of faith, they didn’t “implement Mastodon” because they knew nothing about Mastodon’s peculiarities. Instead, they went by the book and sent Article-type objects.

They were quite surprised to find out that Mastodon linked to their posts instead of rendering them. I guess they were also surprised that Mastodon wouldn’t go render their post with all their formatting, even if it did render them. And they weren’t pleased. So another round of discussions started.

Result: Mastodon added the summary to the preview. Wow. Just wow.

GoToSocial, on the other hand, happily renders everything it receives as it is to my best knowledge. At least with an appropriate frontend that hasn’t forced all of Mastodon’s limitations upon itself, and that actually supports full HTML rendering even if Mastodon itself doesn’t.

Why? Because GoToSocial isn’t driven by that “everything on here must be classic, purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging” mindset.

Come to think of it:

I still remember when Lemmy was fairly new. Before $20M for the client API killed off all third-party Reddit apps, enshittifying Reddit to such a point that people left for the Threadiverse in droves in protest (and looking for something that didn’t require either Reddit’s Web interface or the official Reddit app). When /kbin was still experimental (as opposed to dead), when Mbin and PieFed didn’t exist yet, but Lotide still did (although it was more or less a zombie).

Back then, federation was optional on Lemmy. As in, Lemmy servers weren’t federated with anything by default. The admins had to manually add every single last Fediverse server, be it Lemmy, be it /kbin, be it something else, to an allowlist to allow it to federate with their server.

Lemmy servers actually had public lists of servers they federated with (as opposed to lists of servers they had defederated, available on third-party websites).

Not being federated with any given Lemmy server was the default back in the day. Most Fediverse servers were defederated from Lemmy servers because the admins of the Lemmy servers simply didn’t know that they existed. If you were lucky, then the admins occasionally checked their server logs, discovered Fediverse servers that they had never heard about, checked them and then added them to the list.

It was only a while later that a new Lemmy version switched to federating by default, simply because the above was tedious and impractical.

Any instance, mastodon.world for instance, is NOT Mastodon itself.

It’s this very thing that especially those who only came to Mastodon for reach often don’t understand.

All Fediverse newbies, except for those who escape from Reddit to Lemmy those very few who escape from Instagram to Pixelfed, are being railroaded to Mastodon without being told a thing about the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. That’s because those who on-board them either think that Mastodon is hard to understand already, what with being decentralised and having “instances” and stuff, and the Fediverse, as a network of tons of wholly different stuff, is incomprehensible level: eldritch. Or they don’t know about the Fediverse outside Mastodon itself.

In fact, most Mastodon newbies seem to not even be told about Mastodon being a network of lots of independent websites. They may think that Mastodon is a network in the same sense as Facebook being a network.

So for those who joined via the Web interface, Mastodon tends to be a website. Namely the server that they’ve joined.

For them, mastodon.social = Mastodon = the Fediverse. Or mastodon.world = Mastodon = the Fediverse.

For those who joined by loading and using the official app without taking a glance at any Mastodon server’s website even only once, Mastodon is a phone app, just like Telegram is a phone app, and Facebook is a phone app. They don’t know fuck all about what’s happening behind the app, and they don’t care as long as it works.

For them, the Mastodon app on their phone = Mastodon = the Fediverse.

Private, spare-time Mastodon users will eventually learn that Mastodon is, in fact, not one website or simply an app, but made up of many such websites called “servers” or “instances”.

The next step will be for them to learn that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon. That all these Mastodon “servers” are fully connected to other wholly different websites a.k.a. “servers” (or whatever the respective Fediverse server application calls its servers). For example, this happens when they receive an answer to one of their toots that’s way over 500 characters long (which they deem technologically impossible in the Fediverse because Mastodon can’t do it), and that contains stuff like text formatting (which they deem technologically impossible in the Fediverse because Mastodon can’t do it).

Even private, spare-time Mastodon users may be stuck in such a Mastodon-only bubble that they take two years or more to learn the latter.

Now, professionals, that’s a wholly different matter. They don’t have time to engage with the community. They can barely catch up with the comments on their posts. If they read them at all, that is. They don’t read what the community has to say outside these comments either because they don’t follow anyone who’s really engaged in the community.

Thus, they never come across a message that even only gives them a hint on what the Fediverse actually is. Nothing that they actually pay attention to on Mastodon tells them that Mastodon is not just one website or a phone app that neatly hides what’s happening behind itself.

They can have joined in early November, 2022, days after Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover and still think that Mastodon is one website. And either they’ve never heard the term “Fediverse”, or they think that “Fediverse” is another name for Mastodon, i.e. that one website that they think is Mastodon.

Kazim probably was too professional and too busy to see what the community was posting about. So he kept on “knowing” that mastodon.world = the Mastodon website = the Fediverse.