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2025-04-29 19:15:03

jeanoappleseed@social.vivaldi.net

2025-05-07 22:54:55

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@jeanoappleseed The thing is: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. Nor is everything else like Mastodon. Nor did it start with Mastodon.

Mastodon did not invent the CW field either, nor was it invented for content warnings in the first place.

It was originally invented as a summary field for Identi.ca and taken over by StatusNet, both in 2008, nine years before Mastodon repurposed it as a CW field.

It is still a summary field on Friendica (est. 2010), Hubzilla (est. 2012/2015; that's where I comment from right now), (streams) (est. 2021), Forte (est. 2024) and all pure long-form blogging projects in the Fediverse.

Mastodon has been federated with the StatusNet successor GNU social as well as with Friendica and Hubzilla ever since it was launched itself in 2016. All three were there and federated with one another before Mastodon was there.

Friendica has its own culture which is over a decade older than Mastodon's current culture. Hubzilla has taken over Friendica's culture even before Mastodon's launch, (streams) has taken over Hubzilla's culture, and Forte is so similar to (streams) that it has its own culture. All four, along with the protocols that Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) were built upon, are the creations of someone who has developed software professionally for a living for almost half a century.

All four have it in their culture that the summary field (again, Mastodon's CW field) is just that: a summary field for long posts. Neither of the four is a micro-blogging project. They're all fully capable of long-form blogging with all shebang. Friendica's character limit is 200,000, Hubzilla's is over 16 million, (streams)' and Forte's is over 24 million.

They handle content warnings in their own way: You don't add them to posts when sending them. Instead, you use a simple word-filter-like contraption named "NSFW" to have them automatically generated on your side when you need them, individually just for you. "NSFW" consists of nothing but a filter list. Add keywords, and any post or comment or DM with at least one of these keywords in it will be automatically hidden behind a button for you.

This has been the case since long before Mastodon was made. It is deeply engrained in the culture of all four. And everyone there prefers it greatly over the summary field being misused to force the same CWs upon all recipients all the same.

Mastodon has introduced the same functionality to its own filters with Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022. But nobody knows that this feature exists, also because Mastodon's culture was built against Mastodon 3.x in mid-2022 by those who have escaped from Twitter upon Musk's takeover announcement in early 2022.

In addition, Hubzilla in particular cannot add Mastodon-style content warnings to comments.

All four have full support for threaded conversations and distinguish between "posts" (everything that is not a reply or a DM) and "comments" (everything that is a reply). Unlike Twitter and Mastodon, but like just about everything else out there from all blogs to Facebook, they have separate entry areas for comments, one right below each thread.

Hubzilla still has an entry field for summaries in its post editor (Friendica, (streams) and Forte use tag pairs for that), but it doesn't have an entry field for summaries in its comment editors. Why not? Because a comment on Hubzilla is not like a tweet. It's like a blog comment. Have you ever seen a summarised blog comment? Do you think summaries for blog comments make sense? Neither do I. Neither does the guy who invented Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. Neither do the two guys who maintain Hubzilla right now.

That is, Hubzilla supports the [summary][/summary] tags, too. But they don't work in comments when they go out through ActivityPub.

And that's why I can't add Mastodon CWs to Hubzilla comments. Seriously, I can't. No dice. I have to resort to hashtags instead and hope that enough Mastodon users know how to use filters.

I'm technologically forced to violate the terms of use that you demand, and I'm forced to do so by an intentional design decision based on something not being a Twitter clone and never having been conceived as one. I don't have any other choice here on Hubzilla.

You can believe me that I would otherwise put this comment behind this summary/content warning combination: "Not everything in the Fediverse is Mastodon, and CWs don't work the same everywhere; CW: long (over 8,300 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, content warning meta)". You can believe me that there are actually people out there who demand at least one of these content warnings because long posts over 500 characters and/oder certain meta discussions disturb them. But seriously, do you enjoy these content warnings being forced upon you like I have to force them upon everyone in the Fediverse all the same? See, that's why the users of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte prefer their older, automated, individual, reader-side content warnings.

But now I, as someone who has been using Hubzilla for much longer than 99% of all Mastodon users have been around in the first place, who has experienced Friendica when it was still almost new, I see Mastodon users who either think the whole Fediverse is Mastodon, or who think the whole Fediverse works with Mastodon, or who want the whole Fediverse to be like Mastodon. They try hard to force everything that isn't Mastodon, whether or not they recognise it as not Mastodon, to fully abandon its own culture and replace it with Mastodon's and only Mastodon's culture. Oh, and abandon all features that Mastodon doesn't have.

They try to force Friendica users to abandon a culture that's a) much older than Mastodon's culture, b) even older than Mastodon itself and c) built against and perfectly geared towards Friendica itself. And some 90% of Friendica's features along with it. And the Friendica users must instead adopt a culture that doesn't even fit the software they use.

They behave much like European settlers in new colonies who force the natives to abandon their own culture and instead adopt the settlers' European culture and Catholic Christianity. The only difference is that the European settlers did not firmly believe that it was them who were there first, much unlike many Mastodon users who are fully convinced that everything started with Mastodon.

It gets even worse when they start sanctioning users of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte as well as users of WriteFreely, Plume, WordPress etc. for using the "CW field" for something else than CWs. You know, for example, summaries. Something completely unheard of on Mastodon because it has always been completely unheard of on Twitter. Oh, and of course, no, this is not discrimination. None of this is.

Now you may demand that everything in the Fediverse, including these four, be redesigned to become more like Mastodon, even if that means throwing away their very concepts and entire technological concepts.

Tell you what: The two devs of Hubzilla will both flip you the bird, just like they're ready and willing to flip Eugen Rochko the bird. In fact, one of the reasons why they want to stick with Hubzilla's own Nomad protocol with ActivityPub as an optional add-on is because that makes it possible to raise the drawbridge and lock Mastodon out.

And the guy who invented all four and still maintains (streams) and Forte has added a server-wide user agent filter to these two. It was designed to lock Threads out without having to fumble around with its potentially ever-changing URLs. But it is being advertised as also being capable of blocking entire Fediverse server applications, especially the entirety of Mastodon, in one fell swoop. Since (streams) is based on a newer version of Nomad, its users want it to stay around because it's the only Fediverse server software with two countermeasures against Mastodon. And that developer actually intends to keep it around for exactly this reason.

So much about the notion that it's allegedly possible to force the whole Fediverse into turning into one big Mastodon.

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