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2025-04-19 05:54:38

WeirdWriter@caneandable.social

I’m watching the discussion that’s taking place today on this page, and people are saying that this platform was never made for long form content. It’s always been shorter form content. I legitimately do not understand the reasoning behind not allowing administrators to change the character limit without complicated configurations. I know this is supposed to be micro blogging, favoring shorter posts, because it’s continuously pointed out, to me, and others, that this platform is not a blog but it’s very clear to me that nobody really wants short post to be locked in for everybody. They just want the ability to change it. You can have your flagship instances that keep character limits at 500. That’s totally fine. You can even pretend like instances with 90,000 character limits simply don’t exist if you don’t want to acknowledge them, which, it seems like there is a extreme dislike of instances customizing things to meet the needs of their own communities. None of these rebukes are holding up and it frankly doesn’t make any sense whatsoever because if nothing was meant to change, the option for even increasing or even decreasing the character limit would not exist at all, even via code. Let the admins easily setup the character limits · Issue #12265 · mastodon/mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12265#issuecomment-2815833860 #Fediverse #Mastodon

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2025-04-23 18:06:44

Matthias

feb@loma.ml

@Robert Kingett That's the point. Mastodon wants to be a microblog. That's fine. But the Fediverse is not. There is no character limit.

What I also can't get my head round. Why should Mastodon be anything other than what it wants to be when there are projects in the Fediverse that are not microblogs?
Why not just switch to a project that has all the things Mastodon doesn't want to have? Why is this fixation?

Unlike the closed systems, we have a choice. Why is it not being utilised?

2025-04-24 03:48:07

utopiArte

utopiarte@tupambae.org

@Matthias

What I also can't get my head round. Why should Mastodon be anything other than what it wants to be when there are projects in the Fediverse that are not microblogs?

To begin with I'm not against such a proposal, do have accounts on mastodon instance that for example have 5k limit and consider that reasonable and better. At the same time I came from diaspora, and wasn't so much looking for microblogging. In any case I loved twitter with only 144 characters, that at least was a challenge. Also the display toot's up to ~500 characters entirely and than go to "see more" already creates a certain self restriction for toots.

That said, to a certain extent this request is just another nail in the coffin of the idea of a #fediVerse. Same as the intent to create a mega instance like #mastodonSocial. #Diaspora* and it's developers made the mistake to create such a death star, and the project kinda went down with it, beginning with changes in the code like skipping "likes" because of the burden on the server. Anyone who really is in favor of the main idea of the #fedi and #activitypub, and that is decentralization, should always consider any idea, proposal or request in terms of "what does this mean for the entire setup"?

We already had, again and again criticism by the community on #mastodon because it doesn't respect activitypub definitions or interprets them in an uncommon way. Only dominance in user numbers makes that possible.
Like to say, you only can say:
"I give a sh** on common agreements because I can allow me to do so".
Same goes for the centralization of the community onto one (or two) server, obviously showing off with the fact that the main problems and bottlenecks in social networks weren't understood. That's just a childish conservative expression of the view that "big is beautiful" and that you are successful if you become a big player. Nothing new and not even a mean criticism, we humans are as we are and are children of our time. So if someone is caught by the Zeitgeist and fashion of the moment, that's just what should be expected.

For me it's fine if mastodon has a 500 character limit and that it takes a little bit more of digging into the code to change that. In any case I'd consider it a problem if because of that an instance gets blocked by "the founding father".

We truly don't need any kind of benevolent dictator, and fostering and supporting any kind of hard or softfork of mastodon, as well as all the other projects out their, is way more important than fighting details of a project that's alive and well as it is. In that context, in any kind a true hardfork is creating incompatibility with the activitypub standards at that's what we really should be aware of.
Your comment Matthias, as well as mine, is in favor of the fediVerse, not mastodon, in favor of diversity not monoteims. And, I hate to bring it to you but, people are tribal, identify with brands and where raised social walled gardens, so the y expect "eierlegende Wollmilchsaue" and that, as of now, is the platform you are on, so .. let them be, we for our selves will always be on the side of those who reach out to create interoperability and understanding. That's how we tick.
:)
.. my few cents ..

@Robert Kingett

Fediverse diaspora activityPub mastodonsocial

2025-04-24 04:26:35

Robert Kingett

WeirdWriter@caneandable.social

Number of users doesn't make Mastodon behave in unexpected ways related to activityPub. That's all on the developer of Mastodon, not it's users. A truly open Fediverse will make it easier to stay here, not harder. @utopiarte @feb

2025-04-24 15:23:02

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Robert Kingett Indirectly, it does.

Mastodon still makes up some 60% of all active Fediverse users, more than everything else combined. Within Mastodon itself, it even feels like Mastodon is at least 99% of the Fediverse.

So the point that's being made is, "Mastodon is the biggest, so Mastodon is the standard." Just like Microsoft can define de-facto IT standards just by having the biggest market share.

For one, this means that Mastodon can get away with completely ignoring the ActivityPub standard as well as FEPs while at the same time developing its own non-standard technology. The Mastodon developers have only recently started proposing FEPs. For the longest time, Mastodon didn't have to care about making new developments compatible with anything else. After all, practically everyone who is invited to Mastodon is also implied to or outright told that Mastodon is its own enclosed network. And truth be told, due to its sheer dominance, it can appear to Mastodon users to be just this for months or even years.

Besides, it means that Mastodon doesn't have to adopt existing technology or change its own technology to make itself compatible with anything else out there. If something else than Mastodon behaves differently from Mastodon, Mastodon users are quick to assume it's broken or otherwise faulty. And since almost all of them are living in filter bubbles and echo chambers in which next to or actually everyone else is only on Mastodon, too, this impression is soon considered a fact.

I still think that the majority of Mastodon users believe that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. And that the majority of the rest think that Gargron has invented the Fediverse along with ActivityPub, Mastodon was there first, everything else in the Fediverse is an add-on to Mastodon, and Mastodon is the one and only ActivityPub reference implementation.

At least one of Mastodon's own developers is brainwashed in the same way. At least for a while, he kept insisting that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete server software in the Fediverse. He even claimed that to me, a Hubzilla veteran. I could have inquired him about text formatting, about built-in cloud file storage, about three-level permission management, about nomadic identity and about magic single sign-on. I didn't. But in retrospect, I should have.

All this also means that Fediverse server software developers have to choose between adhering to the ActivityPub standard and making their software compatible with Mastodon, and they often choose the latter. And this is the reason why diaspora* absolutely refuses to adopt ActivityPub. In the words of one of the developers, Fediverse projects don't "implement ActivityPub", they "implement Mastodon".

It's only very recently, very slowly and very reluctantly that Mastodon is moving away from this. And that isn't because Mastodon's market share in the Fediverse is shrinking due to more and more WordPress blogs activating ActivityPub and Instagram users fleeing to Pixelfed. It's because more powerful players with more money behind them are showing up in the Fediverse. And they're making demands.

In particular, they demand Mastodon display the content they generate exactly like they generate it, namely with full HTML text formatting and any number of in-line images. And they demand that Mastodon display their content at all in the first place, even if they send it as Article-type objects as intended in the ActivityPub spec.

Currently, Mastodon refuses to do either. It simply isn't purist microblogging, and Mastodon wants to stand for purist microblogging. This has caused some head-butting between Gargron and Mike Macgirvin in 2017 when first Hubzilla and then Mastodon had adopted ActivityPub. Macgirvin demanded Mastodon stop defacing Hubzilla's fully-formatted long-form posts by removing not only all text formatting, but also all embedded images. Gargron refused. This went back and forth until Gargron changed the way that Mastodon handled Article-type objects. Ever since then, Mastodon has only shown the title of an Article-type object and, right below, linked to the original. Macgirvin understood this as intentionally spiting him and Hubzilla by hiding Hubzilla content behind links. And so, Hubzilla reacted by switching from Article-type objects to Note-type objects which Mastodon has kept on butchering to this day. The current Hubzilla developers would gladly stick to the ActivityPub spec and go back to Article-type objects if Mastodon started showing Article-type objects in all their glory instead of as links that no-one opens.

But now there are new players in the Fediverse, commercial, for-profit players like Flipboard or the WordPress and Tumblr owner Automattic. They intend to follow the ActivityPub spec to a tee. They intend to send their posts as Article-type objects and with all kinds of formatting in them, including formatting that Mastodon still refuses to render like in-line images. They want their posts to look on Mastodon like they look at the source. They take their posts being concealed behind links even less kindly than Hubzilla, and they can put a whole lot more pressure on Mastodon.

Say about them and their Fediverse presence what you want. But it's them who are slowly but steadily pressuring Mastodon into adhering to the ActivityPub spec, laying its homebrew solutions open in FEPs and introducing features like full HTML rendering support which Mastodon has been oh-so-staunchly refusing to do for years.

CC: @utopiArte @Matthias

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #ActivityPub #MastodonNormativity #MastodonCentricism

2025-04-24 15:52:31

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@utopiArte Tribalism and brand worship are key factors in all this, yes. While some Fediverse users choose the software they use by what suits them best, especially feature-wise, others behave more like fanbois and fangurls. They cling hard to what they use like someone who has been driving the same car brand for decades out of principle and out of being convinced that everything this brand makes is superior to all the competition.

This seems particularly wide-spread amongst Mastodon users. First, when they joined, they were eager to defend Mastodon against 𝕏 as much better. When they learned about Bluesky and Threads, they started defending Mastodon against these two as much better. But the more they learn what else exists in the Fediverse, like Misskey and its forks or Friendica and its family, they even feel compelled to defend Mastodon against these as well as much better.

In addition, there's instance tribalism. "My home instance is better than yours" or even "my instance is better than all the others!" Not the only reason why Mastodon users refuse to move to a better-suited instance, much less better-suited software, but one of them. That is, this seems more of an issue on Lemmy where users are being judged according to which instance they're on.

But there's also convenience. Moving instances is inconvenient. Always staying on the same instance is convenient. Also, having to configure your account is inconvenient. The default settings being perfect is convenient.

Why do Mastodon users demand all kinds of features be added to Mastodon although they're readily available elsewhere in the Fediverse? Not only because most of them don't know that these features are available in the Fediverse outside of Mastodon, but also because they want these features without going where the features are. They want the features to come where they are. They want the features on the instance that they're on right now.

And if these features are optional, they have to be activated by default on their home instance. Oh, and if they don't like a feature, Mastodon must not add it, or at the very least, it must be off by default on their home instance. Yes, even if it's mastodon.social that they refuse to move away from, home of over 20% of the Fediverse's population. See full-text search. See federation with Threads. See the Bluesky bridge. And so on.

From the point of view of a veteran of Mike's nomadic software, this has to look hilarious. Granted, there is some sticking to brands there, too, even on (streams) where the intentional lack of a brand has become a brand of its own, although (streams) users seem to constantly be ready to jump ships to Forte or back to Hubzilla, should (streams) go under. But there is no instance tribalism. For one, there are only so many instances. Besides, if you go nomadic, you're on multiple instances at the same time anyway.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #NomadicIdentity #Tribalism

2025-04-24 21:45:15

utopiArte

utopiarte@tupambae.org

@Jupiter Rowland
jupiter rowland schrieb:

In addition, there's instance tribalism. "My home instance is better than yours" or even "my instance is better than all the others!"
..
That is, this seems more of an issue on Lemmy where users are being judged according to which instance they're on.

requeteche schrieb:

2012-01-06 on diaspora:
"The sporial Guide to D*'s Cyberspace #TSGDC"
Chapter 1
[li] The underlying structure of D* combined with the unhidden laws of human civilization will create a new world in which different citizens stick together on different pods to attack other distant pod's and their pod members meanwhile they raise flags of the countries their pod belong to on their desks.

@Robert Kingett
@Sean Tilley