Realistically, they’ll build FediHood against Mastodon and its inner workings and call it a day.

Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte all have (partly optional) dedicated profile fields for your location (street, town, postal code, region/state, nation, Facebook-style “hometown” as in place of origin). FediHood could use these. But, like so often, I’ve got my doubts that the makers of FediHood even only know that Friendica exists.

I mean, if they really knew even only Friendica and Hubzilla, they would have made FediHood a third-party add-on for Hubzilla.

Mastodon doesn’t even really understand threaded conversations on the backend side. It can’t render and display what it doesn’t understand.

That’s also why there’s so much friction between Mastodon on one side and Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte on the other side. All four are based on enclosed, threaded, one-post-many-comments conversations in which all participants in the conversation and everyone who has received the start post always receive all comments (ignores and blocks notwithstanding). Friendica is the only one out of the bunch with no support for FEP-171b “Conversation Containers”.

Mastodon has no sense or support for groups whatsoever.

Mastodon aims to be purist, old-school microblogging. Anything that isn’t purist, old-school microblogging has no place on Mastodon. Not even enclosed threaded conversations. Especially not groups. For Twitter has no groups either.

The result of this is that the huge majority of Mastodon users don’t even know that there are any groups anywhere in the Fediverse. What they can’t see on Mastodon doesn’t exist at all.

FediGroups is kluged Mastodon, but it sells itself to Mastodon users as the only group solution in the Fediverse. And Mastodon users buy it because it’s literally all they know. Come up to FediGroups with something like Friendica or Hubzilla or the Threadiverse, and they’ll still insist that FediGroups is vastly superior to all of them in every way imaginable. As far as I can see, FediGroups was invented by Mastodon users who at that point had never even heard of Friendica or Lemmy, who might even have believed like so many others that the Fediverse equals Mastodon.

On the other hand, Mastodon is rumoured to be working on groups itself. But knowing Mastodon’s track record (as well as Mastodon’s philosophy of trying hard to make the non-Mastodon Fediverse look broken and therefore very undesirable to Mastodon users), we have to expect Mastodon re-inventing the wheel in a way that’s as incompatible with existing wheels and roads as it ever comes.

Akkoma only has two instances and they are both down

Try Fediverse Observer and FediDB, have some more.

Sharkey is a Misskey fork and there don’t seem to be any instances.

Again, try Fediverse Observer and FediDB.

This has its own hurdles.

Mastodon has exactly zero support for groups. Most of its users don’t even know that the Fediverse has groups. Mastodon is all about user accounts following user accounts.

Lemmy, on the other hand, is all about groups. User accounts literally can’t follow other user accounts. Completely different technological philosophies.

Then there’s the inevitable culture clash.

Make Lemmy more well-known on Mastodon, and you’ll have gaggles of Mastodon extremists barging into Lemmy, behaving like they’re still on Mastodon (well, technically, they are) and trying to force Mastodon’s culture upon Lemmy.

Like, CW’ing posts that someone on Mastodon might find sensitive (Lemmy doesn’t even have this feature), cutting “long posts” with over 500 characters into threads of itty-bitty pieces of no more than 500 characters, using the right hashtags for content discovery (Lemmy doesn’t even support hashtags) and visibly mentioning everyone your comment will go to because Mastodon users are apparently easily freaked out by posts that don’t come from someone whom they follow, and that don’t mention them either.

They will clash with Lemmy users and, more importantly, Lemmy moderators who live by Lemmy’s culture which is almost identical to Reddit’s, and which has exactly nothing to do with Mastodon’s culture.

Also, Lemmy’s enclosed threaded conversations will clash with Mastodon which doesn’t have any support for enclosed threaded conversations whatsoever. Something that especially Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and Mitra have to struggle with because they’ve implemented FEP-171b “Conversation Containers” which is completely and utterly incompatible with how Mastodon works. From Mastodon’s point of view, both Hubzilla and its descendants and the whole Threadiverse are “broken”.

The result: Mastodon users will block tons of Lemmy users. Mastodon users will demand entire Lemmy servers be Fediblocked. Entire Lemmy servers will end up on subscribable Mastodon blocklists for behaving too “un-Mastodon-like”. Lemmy servers, in turn, will defederate from tons of Mastodon servers. Once enough big Lemmy servers have blocked mastodon.social (which is 22% of the whole Fediverse, and which is chock-full of the most clueless Mastodon users), it’s game over.

You want to advertise Lemmy? On Twitter? Like, get Twitter users to leave Twitter for “the Fediverse” as in Lemmy?

Hardly anyone even seems to manage to get Twitter users to leave Twitter for one of the *omas or one of the *keys or any other microblogging server app in the Fediverse that isn’t Mastodon (except for East Asia where the *keys rule supreme). Now you want to get Twitter users to move to a Reddit clone?

Oh, and if your effort should indeed show signs of success, you’ll draw the ire of the fanatic, extremist Mastodon fans upon you who are trying hard to paint the Fediverse as only Mastodon in order to get rid of everything else. And yes, they really exist.

We’ve already got this in the Fediverse.

Most Mastodon users are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best, and nothing in existence can beat it in any way possible. They defend their “Mastodon Fediverse” against “inferior, barbaric, culture-less intruders” like Akkoma or Sharkey or Friendica tooth and nail. They absolutely refuse to accept that something, anything in the Fediverse can be better than Mastodon at anything. Of course, when they get people into the Fediverse, they railroad them straight into Mastodon, and they intentionally say nothing about the rest of the Fediverse.

Only those who actually start daily-driving something else than Mastodon realise that there are things in the Fediverse that outclass Msatodon.

I mean why would a leftist like ANYTHING about current day Russia?

Because they unironically believe that Russia = the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. That Putin literally is the Premier of the USSR and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Maybe even that what Putin is trying to do in the Ukraine is reconquer his own territory from CIA-driven Western insurgents.

Basically, just because Putin is a Russian, he automatically is a ☭★✊ СФММꙠИЇꙄТ СФМЯДDЭ ✊★☭, therefore he must be anti-Capitalist, therefore he has to be a good guy.

These people completely distrust any and all Western media because it’s capitalist, imperialist propaganda, but they take everything from Russia Today and Sputnik News at face value because the good guys wouldn’t ever lie, right?

They say they’re against wars. But if Putin started a full-on invasion in Germany (while the country is in a state in which it’ll be defenceless within three days), I can guarantee you that they’ll cheer for the Red Army finally coming and purging capitalism and imperialism.

Seriously, we have a political party in Germany whose very principles appear to be based on this belief, and that tried to get a new Chancellor of their own into office.

What’s important to know here is the distinction between Article-type objects (meant to be formatted, long-form content; e.g. blog posts) and Note-type objects (meant to be short messages, e.g. tweets, Mastodon toots).

What’s also important to know is: Mastodon’s very concept is to specialise in being a classic, purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging application. And Mastodon tends to stretch the ActivityPub spec until it breaks to live this concept.

Mastodon absolutely refuses to ever render more complex content in all its glory. For example, Mastodon refuses to show images embedded in content. Mastodon also refuses to support any lists except for bullet-point lists, and it sanitises e.g. numbered lists into bullet-point lists. Mastodon refuses to support horizontal rules. Etc.

Up until Mastodon 4.0, released in October, 2022 (right after Mastodon’s current culture had been coined), Mastodon flat-out refused to support any text formatting. Its HTML “sanitiser” would “sanitise” all content down to plain text.

Why? Because text formatting isn’t classic, purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging.

What Mastodon is doing right now: It shows Note-type objects, but after “sanitising” them. As for Article-type objects, it renders them with their title (if there is any), their summary (if there is any; this is literally the first time ever that Mastodon acknowledges the summary field as a summary field) and a link to the original. Comments on this preview end up comments on the original. But nobody on Mastodon understands.

This came to pass around 2017/2018, after first Hubzilla and then Mastodon became the first two Fediverse applications to adopt ActivityPub.

Hubzilla, capable of both showing and generating the full set of HTML text formatting, mostly implemented the official W3C spec by the book. It sent its posts as Article-type objects and its comments as Note-type objects.

Mastodon, intentionally incapable of any text formatting, sent Note-type objects, but it “sanitised” the text formatting out of both Note-type objects and Article-type objects. It completely defaced especially the latter. Mastodon users wouldn’t know what the latter were supposed to look like because nobody ever looked them up at the source.

The Hubzilla side asked Gargron to stick to the official W3C ActivityPub spec, respect what Article-type objects are and implement full HTML rendering for them instead of defacing them. He refused.

The result was that Gargron showed Article-type objects as links to the original with the title above. The Hubzilla devs considered this censoring and silencing of a Mastodon competitor and resorted to switching from Article-type objects to Note-type objects until Mastodon supports full HTML rendering.

Fast-forward about seven or eight years or so. Actual long-form blogging with all shebang was growing in the Fediverse, partially powered by commercial actors (WordPress, Ghost, Flipboard). In a strange twist of faith, they didn’t “implement Mastodon” because they knew nothing about Mastodon’s peculiarities. Instead, they went by the book and sent Article-type objects.

They were quite surprised to find out that Mastodon linked to their posts instead of rendering them. I guess they were also surprised that Mastodon wouldn’t go render their post with all their formatting, even if it did render them. And they weren’t pleased. So another round of discussions started.

Result: Mastodon added the summary to the preview. Wow. Just wow.

GoToSocial, on the other hand, happily renders everything it receives as it is to my best knowledge. At least with an appropriate frontend that hasn’t forced all of Mastodon’s limitations upon itself, and that actually supports full HTML rendering even if Mastodon itself doesn’t.

Why? Because GoToSocial isn’t driven by that “everything on here must be classic, purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging” mindset.