What really needs contributors are the streams repository and probably also Forte. They're very powerful, they're highly advanced, they're secure and resilient, they're basically what the whole Fediverse should be like, and they can blow not only Mastodon out of the water, but also Pleroma, Misskey and all their forks. But they only have half a maintainer at best because their creator has officially retired.

Allow me to elaborate:

These are the youngest offspring of a family of roughly Facebook-like Fediverse server applications created by Mike Macgirvin. They started in 2010 with Mistpark, later Friendika, now known as Friendica. The focus has never been on aping the UI/UX of something commercial and centralised, like Lemmy apes Reddit, but to create a replacement that's actually better. Toss out stuff that sucks, add features that could be useful like full-blown blogging capability, including blogging-level text formatting, and a built-in file space with its own file manager.

The next in the family was a 2012 Friendica fork originally named Red that introduced the concept of nomadic identity. As of now, and outside developer instances, nomadic identity is a feature exclusive to Mike's creations. Red became the Red Matrix, and in 2015, it was renamed and redesigned into Hubzilla, a "decentralised social CMS" and the Fediverse's biggest feature monster.

What followed was a whole bunch of forks, mostly development forks, only one of which was officially declared stable. This led to the creation of the streams repository in October, 2021. It's a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, but the first fork already lost many of Hubzilla's extra features and a lot of Hubzilla's connectivity.

The streams repository contains a Fediverse server application that is officially and intentionally nameless and brandless ("streams" is the name of the repository, not the name of the application), that is not a product, that is not a project, and that is just as intentionally released into the public domain, save for 3rd-party contributions inherited from Hubzilla that are under various free licenses.

While (streams), as it is colloquially called, may not have Hubzilla's wealth of features, it has to be one of the two most advanced pieces of Fediverse software out there. With its permissions system that is even improved over Hubzilla's, hardly anything can match it in safety, security and privacy. On top comes resilience through nomadic identity. Also, (streams) is more adapted to a Fediverse that's driven by ActivityPub and dominated by Mastodon whereas Hubzilla seems stuck in the mid-2010s in some regards.

At this point, it should be mentioned that while Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can communicate through ActivityPub, none of them is based on it. AFAIK, Friendica is still based on its own protocol, DFRN, which is used by nothing else. Hubzilla is based on an older version of the Nomad protocol known as Zot6. (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad and also understands Zot6 for the best possible connectivity with Hubzilla.

So one of the latest development goals for the streams repository was the introduction of nomadic identity via ActivityPub, a concept that first appeared in 2023. I'm not sure how far this has been developed. But Mike created a new (streams) fork named Forte in August this year which had all support for non-ActivityPub protocols removed, probably also to cut down the maze of ID for everything which blew up on (streams) when support for FEP-ef61 was pushed to the release branch in July. Also, Forte has a name, it has a brand, it has a license, it has fully functional nodeinfo, and it is a project. Otherwise, Forte is identical to (streams).

Currently, there is only one Forte instance with one user, and that's Mike's private channel which mostly only his friends know about. Forte can be considered very experimental at this point, at least until Mike declares it ready for prime-time. After all, Forte has to handle nomadic identity via ActivityPub which, so far, is only proven to work under developer lab conditions at best.

However, there isn't much going on in terms of development. After the hassle that was getting malfunctioning (streams) back on track this summer, Mike officially retired from Fediverse development at the turn from August to September. He hasn't quit entirely, but he only works on (streams) and Forte sparsely. At the same time, the (streams) community was and still is too small to have a willing and able developer amongst themselves, and Forte has no community.

According to Mike, Forte could (and should) be "the Fediverse of 2030". It only needs more people working on it.

You mean as an end user or as a hub admin?

Hubzilla is my main daily driver in the Fediverse and has been since before the big Twitter migration of 2022. In fact, I've never used Twitter.

A few attributes that could describe Hubzilla are "powerful", "complex", but also "unusual".

Hubzilla is basically Facebook on coke and 'roids (without what sucks on Facebook) meets a full-blown blogging engine meets Google Cloud or iCloud services meets Dropbox with a small Web hoster on top, a simple wiki engine etc. etc. plus federation into all kinds of directions (Twitter if your hub admin has the money, diaspora*, WordPress cross-poster etc.), and that still isn't all that Hubzilla can do.

If Friendica is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, then Hubzilla is a full-blown Leatherman.

There's little that you couldn't possibly do with Hubzilla. You can use it for Facebook-style social networking, actually even better than Mastodon. You can run moderated forum/discussion groups on it. You can use it as a blog with all the shebang (except it sends Note-type objects rather than Article-type objects over ActivityPub, and text formatting is done in BBcode), and you don't even have to worry about where to upload your images because Hubzilla has a built-in file space, complete with subdirectory support and file managers. You can use it as your personal WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV server. You can run simple websites on it (hubzilla.org, the official Hubzilla website, is built on a Hubzilla channel itself).

Friendica, which Hubzilla was forked from back in 2012 (although it didn't become Hubzilla before 2015), already has multiple profiles per account. You can assign profiles to contacts so that different people can see different sides of you. You can have a public profile with only basic informations. One profile for work and colleagues. One LinkedIn-style career profile. One profile for your family. One profile for your booze buddies or nerd friends or whatever. All with different information about you.

Hubzilla goes even further: Your identity is not tied to your account anymore. Your identity is containerised in what Hubzilla calls a "channel". And you can have multiple channels on one account. Each channel is like a separate account mostly everywhere else, a fully separate Fediverse identity, but all on the same login. And each channel can have multiple profiles.

For example, you can run one channel as your personal daily-driver channel. Three channels as forums/discussion groups (think Lemmy communities/subreddits) for different topics. One channel with a webpage on it. Whatever. And nobody can tell that these channels are on the same account, save maybe for the hub admin if they're eager to do some SQL-fu in the database. (Or everyone if all these channels are on a private, single-user hub.)

Or what if you need another Fediverse identity for special purposes? On Lemmy or Mastodon, you need another account. On Hubzilla, you create a new channel on your existing account. You don't even have to log off and on again to switch between channels.

The channels system was basically introduced to make one of Hubzilla's killer features possible: nomadic identity. What most Fediverse users consider utter science-fiction was actually already introduced in 2012. Granted, this is only possible because Hubzilla is based on its own protocol rather than ActivityPub, but still.

Nomadic identity makes it possible to have a channel, one and the same channel, on multiple hubs at the same time. Not with dumb copies, but with real-time, live, hot, bidirectional backups of just about everything. You can have as many clones as you want to/as you can find appropriate hubs to clone to.

Your channel always has one main instance which also defines its ID (at least from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla) and one or several clones (which, from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla, all have the same ID as the main instance). Whatever happens on your main instance is copied to the clones within seconds. You can also log onto your clones and use them. E.g. when the hub with your main instance is offline, you lose nothing. Whatever happens on one of the clones is copied to the other clones and to your main instance.

Oh, and if the hub with your main instance goes down for good, or if you want to move, you can define one of your clones your main instance, and your old main instance is demoted to clone. This means that if your channel is nomadic, one server going down won't take your channel with it. You'll still have the self-same channel elsewhere. Your home server gives up the ghost, you lose nothing.

But don't expect Hubzilla to be easy to get into. It's nothing like Reddit, it's nothing like Twitter has ever been, and it's nothing like most of the rest of the Fediverse. The closest would be (streams), a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork)? of Hubzilla itself, and everything in this chain is/was by the same creator. Followed by Friendica and Forte, still by the same creator, and Forte's only instance is currently the private instance of said creator. But everything else in the Fediverse is nothing like Hubzilla.

First newbie obstacle: You can't follow anyone on Mastodon. Or almost anywhere else in the Fediverse. That's because ActivityPub is optional, and it's off by default so that your new channel only supports that one nomadic protocol at first. Non-nomadic protocols kind of disturb nomadic identity, mostly because you have to re-connect non-nomadic contacts manually, one by one. And back when Hubzilla was made, it was actually a tempting idea to run a purely nomadic channel.

To add to the difficulty, there is no ActivityPub switch in the settings. ActivityPub is an "app" that needs to be "installed". Hubzilla is very modular, and so are its channels where not all its features are enabled by default.

And then there's the permissions system. Something like this exists nowhere in the Fediverse that isn't made by the Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte creator Mike Macgirvin. Not even Friendica has it to such an extent. It's extensive, it's fine-grained, and it's powerful.

But unlike everything in the Fediverse not created by Mike, it does not default to "everything is allowed to everyone unless muted or blocked". Its default settings are still geared towards 2012 when it was still named Red (from spanish la red = the network), when the Federation, the precursor of the Fediverse, was still small, and four years before Mastodon was launched. In those days, the idea of a purely Red/Red Matrix/Hubzilla network that offers a maximum of privacy, safety and security was not too far-fetched.

And so, by default, certain things are disallowed unless explicitly allowed to certain contacts by means of contact role. By default, your posts all only go to a privacy group (think Mastodon lists on more coke and even more 'roids) instead of to everyone. Before you can really get going, you'll have to install multiple apps of which you don't know what they do and adjust things of which you don't know that they exist, much less what they're for. It takes months to become a halfway routined user, and it takes years to be come a power user who realises that setting everything to public is actually stupid, and who knows how to tone down the settings again while not keeping your existing contacts out.

Yeah, the UI/UX is far from top notch. But keep in mind that Hubzilla is a fork of Friendica. Which is from 2010. In 2010, social networks and social media were still mostly geared towards the desktop, and phone apps were gimmicks rather than bare necessities. Both Friendica and Hubzilla were created by only one person. And he's a protocol designer and not a full-stack Web developer. Mike can make UIs work, but he can't make them as pretty as what Apple whips up.

Hubzilla is very themeable, but it currently has only got one official theme. Its name "Redbasic" indicates its origin: Red. As in Hubzilla, three years before it was Hubzilla. 2012. It hasn't changed much since then, except it became more configurable with Hubzilla 9 this year.

There used to be more themes, but even after the community took over from Mike in 2018, Hubzilla never had more than two core developers. And, again, it's an utter monster. The devs invested most of their time into the vast backend, consisting of the core and the more essential apps. Over time, not only several apps fell to the wayside (including a chess game which was dropped in 2020 because of a big protocol upgrade), but so did all themes except Redbasic. The devs only had time to upgrade one theme to new or changed features, and so the other themes became incompatible and were eventually dropped.

Brand-new third-party themes are in the making, and a few will soon be rolled out. But I wouldn't count on them being included into every new Hubzilla installation, much less all existing hubs.

Speaking of apps: There's no official Hubzilla app, neither for iOS nor for Android. There's one app for Android named Nomad. It's only available on F-Droid. And it hasn't been updated in a whopping five years. On more recent devices, it doesn't even work anymore. And, in fact, it's a Web app. It integrates Hubzilla's Web interface instead of having everything on a dedicated, native mobile UI. In other words, there aren't that many advantages of using Nomad over using a browser.

There's also a very, very, very bare-bone Android app, I think it was made by Hubzilla's main dev, that can only post to Hubzilla and nothing else. You can't even use it to read anything. It isn't available in any app store.

The best you can do if you want to use Hubzilla on a phone is install it as a Progressive Web App.

Facebook alternative from 2010. Pre-dates diaspora* by a few months.

Remember diaspora*? In summer 2010, four young fellows asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding so they could spend the summer developing a free, open-source, decentralised Facebook alternative. Mind you, summer 2010 was when Cambridge Analytica was still a hot topic. So they got $320,000, and the mainstream media wrote about a "Facebook killer" in development.

They started in May, 2010. It was in late autumn when they delivered a first, very early alpha release that was very incomplete and only ran on Mac servers. It took years until even a first beta release, not to mention replacing the whole dev team.

Friendica (originally Mistpark) was developed by one man. In four months, from March to July, 2010. With zero budget. And Mistpark, as it was when it was first released in July, 2010, could have easily mopped the floor with today's diaspora*, feature-wise, without even breaking a sweat.

Friendica does not try to be a Facebook clone. It tries to be "like Facebook, but way better". With lots of unnecessary cruft not taken over, but with all-new features integrated. For example, Friendica can be used as a full-blown blog with all text formatting shebang you could possibly imagine a blog to have, all the way to an unlimited number of images that can be embedded within the text, like, with text above the image and more text below the image.

By the way, Friendica comes with a built-in file storage complete with a file manager where you can upload images or whatever. Unlike on Mastodon and Lemmy, your images don't sink into some data nirvana.

Unlike all the microblogging stuff in the Fediverse, Friendica does not have any arbitrary character limit.

Remember Google+? It was a full-on diaspora* rip-off. Everyone things Google+ had invented circles. Google+ had actually stolen diaspora*'s aspects. But Friendica had them first, even before diaspora*, and calls them lists.

Also, Friendica has been supporting moderated discussion groups at various levels of privacy from the get-go.

But Friendica's biggest killer feature is and has always been that it can connect to a whole lot of stuff. It can connect to the entire ActivityPub-using Fediverse, it can connect to diaspora*, it can connect to anything that uses OStatus, it can cross-post to WordPress and compatible blogs, it can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds while generating its own Atom feeds, it can "federate" via e-mail, its built-in chat is XMPP-compatible. You can also integrate a Bluesky account, you can integrate a Tumblr account, you can integrate an 𝕏 account (but the node admin still has to shell out a couple million dollars for a full API key to be able to make full use of it), and for a few months around 2012, you could even integrate a Facebook account into Friendica until Facebook made extracting content to third parties illegal.

The idea was that your friends are all over the place, you're on Friendica, and you can stay in touch with all your friends without having to use all the stuff that your friends use. You can stay in touch with them on Friendica even though they're all over the place.

misskey.io is a Japanese instance under Japanese law. With pretty lax rules, and only under Japanese law. Which means that just about everything in the West blocks misskey.io, and I think misskey.io doesn't let Westerners join.

Why?

Because lolicon is allowed on misskey.io.

Thing is, lolicon may or may not count as CSAM by Western standards. Western lawmakers haven't decided about it yet, hence "may or may not". But "may or may not" may mean "yes, it is".

And so, to be safe, Western instances block the hell out of misskey.io to keep what may or may not be CSAM from coming in. Remember that Mastodon caches any and all media. One lolicon post being washed up on Mastodon.social may be enough for Gargron to end up behind bars for "having child pr0n on his Web server".

In Japan, on the other hand, lawmakers have decided. Lolicon is not CSAM, and it's legal.

Thus, misskey.io, being hosted in Japan under Japanese law and only Japanese law, allows lolicon all over the place.

Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could buy Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances.

Or going someplace in the Fediverse that's neither Mastodon nor Lemmy nor Pixelfed.

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.

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.

A lot is going on in and around Hubzilla recently. Version 9.4 has only been released a couple of weeks ago, and it already got four bugfix releases. We might actually be approaching Hubzilla 10 in the not-so-distant future which will adopt a few features from (streams).

Scott M. Stolz is back at developing his new third-party themes which we expect to improve Hubzilla's UX. On top of that, he plans to launch a bunch of new public hubs, also so aspiring users in North America won't have to resort to overseas hubs.

The re-writing of Hubzilla's entire help in German and English is on-going.

Most recent surprise: Someone has managed to integrate the Bandcamp alternative Faircamp into a Hubzilla channel.

If only (streams) had more people taking care of it...

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.

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.

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.

Any bets this will only work with Mastodon because it was built and designed only against Mastodon?

I wouldn't even be surprised if other Fediverse server apps could simply circumvent sub.club if sub.club assumes that everything else out there works like Mastodon, too.