Draft preamble for posts that go out to Mastodon; CW: long (over 2,850 characters), fedisplaining, Fediverse meta, Mastodon vs non-Mastodon meta, mentioning features that Mastodon doesn't have and not refusing to use them
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I'm tempted to add the following preamble to all my posts and comments. This would answer a lot of questions right away and maybe leave nothing unclear.
Preamble
IMPORTANT: I am not on Mastodon. I am on Hubzilla. Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance. Hubzilla is a wholly different project in the Fediverse. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. The Fediverse has never been only Mastodon. And Hubzilla is not a fork of Mastodon either.
Mastodon was not even here first. The first was StatusNet from 2008 which later became GNU social. Then came Friendica in 2010. And Hubzilla is from 2015 and based on a project from 2012. Mastodon was launched in 2016. It was immediately federated with all three because it spoke a language that these three spoke, too. Except for GNU social, all are still federated with one another to this day. And this is normal, legal and fully intentional.
We aren't the intruders. Technically speaking, Mastodon is the intruder.
Hubzilla has features that Mastodon doesn't have. Hubzilla has an unlimited character count where Mastodon has a limit of 500 characters. Hubzilla can create various ways of text formatting such as bold type, italics, code blocks, lists or headlines; Mastodon can display them now, but it can't create them. Hubzilla can embed hyperlinks; Mastodon toots only support URLs in plain sight. Hubzilla can do both quotes and "quote-tweets", and it doesn't have to resort to screenshots for either. And Hubzilla always mentions users by their full name, not by their short name like Mastodon.
When Mastodon was launched with its self-imposed restrictions, Hubzilla had had all these features for almost four years already. Friendica had had the same features for almost six years already. And many of these features, including longer posts and text formatting, have been available on all other Fediverse projects since they were created.
Thus, I will use features that are not available on Mastodon even though Mastodon users could read this. I will not refrain from writing over 500 characters in one post, and I will not refrain from using text formatting just because Mastodon users aren't used to that.
We were here first. And we won't limit ourselves just because you're limited by the software you're using. We will continue to make use of features that you don't have. Deal with it.
Unfortunately, the target audience of this, Mastodon users, won't read it because it's too long. Not to mention that it'd require a boatload of content warnings and filter-triggering hashtags; see below.
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