Any reason why “Fediverse” means “Mastodon with some extras bolted on, but still largely only a Twitter clone” here?

Any reason why someone whom I remember as a Hubzilla veteran completely denies the existence of Hubzilla and its descendants and mostly even disregards Friendica?

At least on Hubzilla (which I know from personal experience because it’s my primary daily driver, believe it or not), these UX sins are partially an integral part of their concept and partly solved by their concept.

Sin #2: I, for one, do not want any algorithm of sorts to flush stuff onto my stream that I did not explicitly subscribe to. I only want to read what I want to read. I’m already busy curating, filtering and blocking stuff from those who decided to follow me, and whom I have to follow back. Also, getting rid of uninteresting cruft outside the scope of my channel coming from those whom I do give permission to send me their posts. I don’t also want to go and filter the stuff that others on my hub post or have subscribed to, especially because I can’t filter it by account/channel.

Besides, I only have one feed anyway. Public Hubzilla hubs do not have a pubstream at all, full stop.

That is, I don’t use my stream anyway. I vastly prefer the unread messages counter.

(Then again, Hubzilla doesn’t count non-technical folks who just came from the Twitter iPhone app as part of its target audience.)

Sin #4: On Hubzilla, private messages are private. Hubzilla has a thing called permissions.

Say, I send Alice a DM. I, as the starter of the conversation, only grant Alice and myself permission to view my start post as well as any comment.

Alice mentions Bob to pull him into the conversation. But Bob won’t see shit because Bob isn’t permitted to see shit.

I mention Bob to pull him into the conversation. But Bob won’t see shit because Bob still isn’t permitted to see shit. And even I, as the conversation starter and as the owner of the whole conversation, cannot change the permissions of anything in it after the fact.

Solved since 2012.

Sin #5: Hubzilla has full support for conversations as enclosed objects.

Like, I can use Hubzilla’s search to manually import some Mastodon toot from somewhere in the middle of a thread. Then Hubzilla will go and reel in the whole branch of the thread all the way back to the actual start post. And the replies to that toot. And eventually the other branches as well.

Someone replies anywhere in the conversation, and I will receive that reply.

The only things that could meddle with this are filters on my side, Superblock on my side or someone else having blocked me. Then I won’t get their messages, and I won’t get any follow-ups either.

This also means that, taking the same toot as an example, if someone up that branch in the conversation has fully blocked me, I can’t pull in their message. I can’t pull in any follow-ups either, nor can I pull in any follow-ups of these follow-ups, so I can’t pull in that particular toot either.

If something has a parent, and Hubzilla can’t get the parent, then Hubzilla refuses to get that something as well.

AFAIK, even Friendica has always been behaving like this. Only that Friendica is the only one in the family that hasn’t adopted FEP-171b “Conversation Containers” yet. It was invented on (streams), backported to Hubzilla and inherited by Forte.

Anyway, solved since at least 2012, if not 2010.

Sin #6: The whole family has very powerful search, including full-text search, since Mistpark’s inception 16 years ago. It’s part of their philosophy and culture.

Also part of the philosophy and culture on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte: You don’t want your stuff to be discoverable? Then don’t make it public in the first place. Likewise with quote-posts: You don’t want anyone to quote-post your stuff? Then don’t make it public. Public equals fair game. Deal with it, or restrict the permissions on it.

This, again, is where permissions come into play.

Solved since at least 2012.

Sin #7: This, again, implies that everyone in the Fediverse wants content to be sent to them on a silver platter while, at the same time, not having access to groups in some way or another.

I can understand that Mastodon users want that because the concept of curating their timeline is alien to them. After all, they barely have the means to do so. And in fact, many Mastodon users randomly follow thousands of Fediverse actors to get the same deluge of uninteresting stuff in their timeline that they’re used to from Twitter, hoping that something interesting pops up in-between. At the same time, the uninteresting stuff drowns the interesting stuff because nobody on Mastodon will ever scroll through all their unread content.

Also, sadly, this shows that the lack of groups is the default in the Fediverse because Mastodon neither has groups of its own nor really supports groups in any way.

I dare say that (streams) could be the champion of content discovery, all without shoving unwanted content down users’ throats. Not only does it have full support for groups, but it has a Facebook-style directory that lists actors from all across the Fediverse as far as it’s aware of them. And I myself am surprised about just how many of them a fairly young (streams) server with about a dozen channels can know.

You can even filter for groups, and then you get them all: Lemmy communities, /kbin and Mbin magazines, PieFed communities, Friendica groups, Hubzilla forums with and without ActivityPub, (streams) groups with and without ActivityPub, Forte groups if there were any, nodeBB subforums, Flipboard magazines, you name it, it’s all there. Join with 1 click, adjust the contact settings if you wish, there you go.

Essentially, what Friendica needs a centralised website for, (streams) has built into each server, reachable from each channel. On 'roids.

If that’s too difficult for you, then Facebook is too difficult for you.

Solved, too, unless the declared goal is for literally everything in the Fediverse to become a better Twitter. Including the stuff that’s already better than Twitter because its concept and philosophy is to not be like Twitter at all.

If it doesn’t look and smell and feel like a tweet, it’s considered “most certainly AI slop” nowadays.

Welcome to 2026.

I also wonder why we don’t hear more about this?

I guess that’s because most information about the non-Threadiverse Fediverse comes into Lemmy via Mastodon. And next to nobody on Mastodon knows that Hubzilla exists, much less what it can do.

The source code is actually on Framagit.

https://framagit.org/hubzilla

Ignore the creation dates; Hubzilla is much older than that.

Some Fediverse server applications are being described as “the Swiss Army knife of the Fediverse” because they have so many features, and they cover so many use-cases. They’re advertised as the most fully-featured Fediverse server applications to ever exist. By people who have never heard of Hubzilla, or who count on everyone else never having heard of Hubzilla.

Still, Hubzilla blows them clean out of the water, feature-wise and use-case-wise, without even breaking a sweat.

It does do blogs. And it does Facebook. And it does shit-tons of stuff on top of that. And if you choose so, it can do even more shit-tons of stuff on top of these shit-tons.

Hubzilla offers you, all under one roof:

• federated microblogging/macroblogging/long-form blogging with literally all the text formatting and then some with a character limit of over 16.7 million, with as many embedded images as you want, plus post/thread titles, plus summaries, plus local blog categories
• a social networking experience like on Facebook
• moderated forums (groups) with a variable and flexible level of privacy and secrecy
• a built-in file space that supports subfolders, and that can be accessed via WebDAV
• (optionally) fully formatted and titled, non-federated long-form articles (you can link to them in federated posts)
• (optionally) webpages, formatted either in Hubzilla’s extended BBcode or in Markdown or in HTML
• (optionally) multiple wikis per channel with multple pages per wiki, formatted either in Hubzilla’s extended BBcode or in Markdown
• a federated event calendar
• a CalDAV calendar server that uses the same UI as the event calendar; events in CalDAV calendars are shown among the event announcements, too
• (optionally) a headless CardDAV addressbook server
• (optionally) OpenStreetMap integration
• (optionally) QR codes dynamically generated in messages
• the second-most-advanced permissions system in the Fediverse, well over a dozen different permissions, on three levels, with seven or eight permission settings at per-channel level
• one of the most advanced filter systems in the Fediverse with a channel-wide keyword blacklist, a channel-wide keyword whitelist, optional blacklist and whitelist per connection, an optional filter list that just hides messages behind content warnings, RegEx support and, for advanced use-cases, even its own filter syntax
• multiple independent channels/identities (like accounts on other apps) on one account/login
• nomadic identity: just about the best and most advanced identity portability in the Fediverse, even with the possibility to have one or multiple live, hot backups of your channel on other servers with near-real-time bidirectional sync that you can use just like the original if you can’t use the original

Hubzilla can be your microblogging platform.

Hubzilla can be your social networking platform.

Hubzilla can be your Fediverse blog.

Hubzilla can be your non-federating blog.

Hubzilla can be your NeoCities webpage host.

Hubzilla can be your forum.

Hubzilla can be your personal wiki.

Hubzilla can be your little cloud file storage.

Hubzilla can be the DAV server that you use to sync the addressbooks and calendars on your phone and your PC.

Etc.

And Hubzilla can be any combination of the above. Like, a website with its own forum, with its own news blog, with its own wiki, with its own event calendar. All within one Hubzilla channel.

Hubzilla isn’t even new. It isn’t someone’s recent brain-child. It has been developed for 14 years now, longer than Mastodon. And it is still under active development. That doesn’t even mean small patches every few months. Rather, it means that the devs actually keep whipping up new features and/or greatly improving existing features. And that says nothing about the third-party add-ons and themes which slowly get more and more, too.

Hubzilla is my number one daily driver (although I’m here as well). In fact, I’ve found this post on Hubzilla, forwarded by someone on Mitra, but I remembered just in time before commenting that I have a Lemmy account.

I guess the reason why hardly anyone seems to be talking about Hubzilla is that hardly anyone knows that it exists in the first place, and even fewer people know what it is and what it can do.

Let’s just say that whenever some other Fediverse server software is declared “the Swiss Army knife of the Fediverse”, then Hubzilla is the Leatherman Surge of the Fediverse by comparison. There’s just so much that you can do with it.

It has just about all the capabilities of a good blogging platform, up to and including its own WebDAV-enabled cloud file space that you can also use to upload images for your blog. Or for your webpages because, yes, Hubzilla can do that as well. In fact, the official Hubzilla website itself is a webpage on a Hubzilla channel.

In addition, it introduced nomadic identity to the wider Fediverse; or rather, an earlier incarnation of Hubzilla named Red did back in 2012. This also means that we aren’t talking about something that was cobbled together during or after the 2022 Mastodon hype, but something that’s actually older than Mastodon.

However, its learning curve is steep. For starters, that’s because it’s so powerful. It doesn’t dump features upon you; in fact, it’s very modular, and many features are actually add-ons that have to be activated. But that actually kind of adds to Hubzilla’s complexity. Besides, it isn’t and doesn’t try to be a clone of anything. It doesn’t mimic anything. It isn’t quite like anything else out there except maybe its other own family members.

At least Hubzilla probably has the best built-in help system in the Fediverse, and if that should fail, it has its own Hubzilla-based support forum.

Also, Hubzilla is very modular at hub (server) level. Not all features are available on all hubs. But there’s a way to check what optional features are available on which hub: Go to a hub that you’re interested in and add /siteinfo/json to the domain. I’m not sure if that page lists installed third-party themes, though, because there certainly are third-party themes that make Hubzilla even better for blogging.

There have already been too many spare-time devs who came to Mastodon, got totally excited about everything, decided to develop something for “the Fediverse”, built it hard against only Mastodon and then learned that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon.

See FediDevs which, for quite a while, was built against only Mastodon and against Mastodon-specific elements of Mastodon, which did not work with anything that isn’t Mastodon, but which still kept “Fedi” in its name.

Old and busted: Mastodon DDoSes the non-Mastodon Fediverse due to design decisions.

New hotness: Mastodon DDoSes itself due to design decisions.

Some 22% of the entire Fediverse (except Threads).

When someone’s on Mastodon, and they say, “Fediverse,” chances are very good that it’s only Mastodon that they’re talking about.

Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are all built in PHP. All they need to run is a LAMP stack. That’s why even a feature monster like Hubzilla needs fewer server resources per user than Mastodon.

They only have a little bit of JavaScript for some UI elements such as spoiler tags.

Friendica and NodeBB

And Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte. All from the same family. Although there has yet to be someone to start a group on Forte.

The main issue with Mastodon is that literally every single last Mastodon newbie is being told (or at least implied to) during on-boarding that the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Nobody learns upon joining Mastodon that Mastodon is not an enclosed network. That the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. That there’s non-Mastodon stuff connected to Mastodon and constantly pumping non-Mastodon content into Mastodon.

Why? Because that’s easier to understand. A network of tens of thousands of virtually identical Twitters is already much harder to grasp than one Twitter website. It’s basically the maximum of what most people out there, even many die-hard übernerds, can grasp.

Tell them that it’s ackchually a network in which lots of Twitters and lots of different Twitters and lots of yet again different Twitters and lots of Reddits and lots of Facebooks and lots of YouTubes and lots of Instagrams and whatnot are all joined, and that you can follow what amounts to Facebook users or YouTube channels or subreddits from what amounts to Twitter. And they’ll nope out. Whoosh. Too complicated.

At least every other Mastodon user at this point in time “knows” that Mastodon is alone in the Fediverse, that the Fediverse consists of only Mastodon. Many Mastodon users spend literal years believing that. Reply to them from Friendica or Hubzilla in a typical Friendica or Hubzilla way, and they’ll shit brix and block you.

Mastodon’s entire culture is geared towards a Mastodon-only Fediverse. It was basically defined in mid-2022 (which is why it doesn’t include any Mastodon 4.x features either) by those who had fled Twitter in early 2022 after Elon Musk’s announcement to buy Twitter out. None of them knew about a Fediverse outside of Mastodon at that point.

And so you have a Mastodon culture that’s all about Mastodon’s features (or lack thereof), and that at least implies that any features that Mastodon doesn’t have (and that isn’t craved for by the majority of Mastodon users) are bad. You know, like more than 500 characters per post. And yet, Mastodon users are trying hard to force Mastodon’s culture upon places in the Fediverse that are very very much not like Mastodon at all, e.g. Lemmy or PieFed or Friendica or Hubzilla.

This is also why mainstream media, including most tech media, keep hammering on the Fediverse being Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. For starters, the truth would be incomprehensible to their audience. Besides, the journalists themselves haven’t understood that either.

As for BlackMastodon, it was another Fediverse = Mastodon thing. At least, nobody there was really Fediverse-savvy worth mentioning. Blackzilla or Blackstreams might have been a success. If only anyone there had known about Hubzilla or (streams).

Thread title goes into the top line. It’s mandatory. Top line/paragraph must be only the thread title. No post text.

Line below: Mention the Lemmy community that you want to post to. The Lemmy community must be mentioned between the title and the post text, as in, under the title and above the post text. Nothing else must be in this line/paragraph.

Below that: post text in as many paragraphs as you need.

No further mentions anywhere else in the post.

Also, no hashtags. They won’t break anything, Lemmy simply doesn’t support hashtags. But some 99% of all Lemmy users come from Reddit (as opposed to almost everyone on Mastodon coming from Twitter), Reddit doesn’t have hashtags, and so they aren’t used to hashtags. Lemmy’s culture is basically Reddit’s culture, and Mastodon’s culture is irrelevant and invalid on Lemmy.