How a small bunch of German-speaking non-Mastodon Fediverse users is fighting back against the spreading sectarian belief that the Fediverse is or at least should be only Mastodon

Mastodon can't be growing that slowly. After all, it's turning into a "Fediverse equals Mastodon" echo chamber more and more. This can only mean that there are many more newbies coming on board who have learned prior to joining that the Fediverse is "the Mastodon network" than there are Mastodon users who learn, or rather are taught, that this is not the case.

Because this is not the case. There is no Mastodon network. Oh, and what I've just linked to is in the Fediverse itself. It's on a Hubzilla channel, @pcw⁠@hub.hubzilla.hu (manually gave this "mention" a more traditional look). Hubzilla is part of the Fediverse, and it has been federated with Mastodon for as long as Mastodon has been around.

Now, there are two more phenomena going on in the Fediverse concerning this.

On the one hand, there is a resistance movement forming against the spreading "Fediverse equals Mastodon" notion. Interestingly, it consists entirely of native German speakers. Most of them are primarily on Friendica which likely suffers the most from obnoxious Mastodon users who insist in the Fediverse being Mastodon and only Mastodon and nothing else.

If you spot some post or comment that explains that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon, you can almost count on the user being on Friendica. And usually a native German speaker. Unless it's one of the few "usual suspects" on Pleroma, Akkoma, Calckey or Hubzilla.

Interestingly, however, you hardly ever see someone whose mother tongue is not German telling Mastodon users that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Mastodon users doing so are even rarer occurrences.

On the other hand, it's crazy how Mastodon users resist being told about the Fediverse not being Mastodon. It isn't only journalists who have outright stated in news articles that the Fediverse is "the Mastodon network" or not even mentioned the Fediverse and presented Mastodon as a decentralised walled garden, and who fight tooth and nail to defend themselves being right and everyone else being wrong when being confronted by non-Mastodon users.

It's even more completely normal users. They use "Mastodon" and "Fediverse" mutually synonymously and fully exchangeably, or they openly claim that Mastodon is the Fediverse, and most replies are from more Mastodon users who like and thereby confirm what they've posted. And the more Mastodon users post like the Fediverse was only Mastodon or directly claim just this, the more Mastodon users believe it.

Mass media and tech media never even mentioning the existence of the Fediverse and only ever talking about Mastodon contribute their part, also because journalists don't like to admit that they're wrong even when they're clearly wrong. It doesn't help that those very few journos who write about Mastodon while being Mastodon have only ever dipped one toe into Mastodon and still largely use it like Twitter otherwise.

Also, maybe it's because we're growing more sensitive, but for one, it seems like those who have joined during the second Twitter migration wave, the one in late 2022, and who still think the Fediverse is only Mastodon are coming out of the woodwork now. And besides, just about all newbies joining the Fediverse nowadays "know" that the Fediverse is only Mastodon.

At best, it's hard for them to wrap their minds around this not being the case. At worst, they resist this notion. Yes, they resist the fact that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon.

First, they seem to go into full denial. They try to convince themselves that what that other user has just written is not true because it'd be very uncomfortable to them to have to share the Fediverse with something that is not their beloved, nice, friendly, cosy, fluffy woolly mammoth. That's when they don't say anything.

Then, when they come to the realisation that there is no denying it, especially when more and more users chime in, they try to fight back. They claim it doesn't matter. They claim nobody needs to know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon, and one of their key points is that this information makes matters even more difficult for newbies than they already are.

If all this fails, they press their hands onto their ears like little children and chant out loud, "Lalala, I don't want to hear it!" They generously deal out mutes and blocks. They believe that by silencing everyone who tries to educate them about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, it goes away again.

For they believe that the Fediverse actually was only Mastodon until recently. They believe that the non-Mastodon Fediverse stuff has emerged just recently because they hadn't heard of any of it before, just like they believe that Mastodon was launched shortly before they've joined because they hadn't heard of it before. That's why they want to hear or read even less about Friendica and Hubzilla having been there before Mastodon.

At least parts of Mastodon are turning more and more into a religious cult, a sect. Facts don't matter anymore. Belief and faith not only replace facts, but they turn into "alternative facts" in a sense. Amongst this is that the Fediverse started with Mastodon, Gargron is the God of the Fediverse who created it, and everything that isn't Mastodon is an add-on to Mastodon. According to them, the Mastodon users are the rulers, and the non-Mastodon users are the peasants.

The fundamentalists in this sect are those who haven't even heard of Pixelfed, who haven't heard of Flipboard, WordPress, Medium etc. having implemented ActivityPub and joined the Fediverse either. For them, there is nothing in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon. Any claim otherwise is heresy. Anything that doesn't behave exactly like vanilla Mastodon is regarded a rogue Mastodon instance that needs to be corrected.

Now you may say, "Let them be, they're harmless." But they aren't. It isn't like they ignore the non-Mastodon parts of the Fediverse. They fight them to make the Fediverse only Mastodon or as close to being only Mastodon as possible. They've defined their own "Fediquette" which is geared towards only vanilla Mastodon, and they try hard to force it upon everyone outside and make them give up their own culture and all features they have that Mastodon doesn't have. Or they actually try to chase non-Mastodon users out of the Fediverse.

You may say I'm kidding. I wish I was. But I'm not.

Ask @crossgolf_rebel - kostenlose Kwalitätsposts, he is on Calckey. A Mastodon user told him to either keep all his posts at 500 characters or fewer or get the fsck out of the Fediverse. That's only the tip of the iceberg for him.

Ask @jakob 🇦🇹 ✅, he is on Friendica. After telling a Mastodon user that he is not on Mastodon, but on something that is connected to Mastodon, said Mastodon user blocked him for being an evil hacker who used an evil hacker tool to illegally hack himself into the Mastodon Fediverse.

Ask @Hamiller Friendica and @Matthias, both on Friendica, about obnoxious and ignorant Mastodon users.

All this only happens because aspiring Mastodon users apparently have to be mollycoddled to no end. And this mollycoddling absolutely must include not telling them about the existence of a Fediverse beyond Mastodon. They're already inundated to no end by the concept of decentrality and instances, not to mention the prospect of having to pick a Mastodon instance in spite of actually being railroaded to mastodon.social. So apparently, telling them that there's even more stuff connected to all those many Mastodon instances, stuff which isn't even Mastodon, would overload them completely.

What's even worse is that many Mastodon users are in a competition-against-Bluesky mode now. They want Mastodon to beat Bluesky in user numbers at all costs. And this must include making Mastodon even more newbie-friendly, i.e. mollycoddling them even more than already now. This would inevitably involve telling them even less about the true nature of the Fediverse than already now.

The Fediverse is already growing more and more hostile towards non-Mastodon server applications and non-Mastodon users day by day. Cranking up the mollycoddling and the shielding of new users from the mere existence of a Fediverse outside of Mastodon will accelerate this disturbing process more and more.