FACTS ABOUT MASTODON
If you are curious about leaving the cooked turkey site and going to the elephant site, here are some important tips:
1. It sucks. But then, so does every site.
2. You can still shitpost. Take great glee.
3. Picking your server instance is super important.
Ideally you should start at a large instance, and leave because it's full of white suburban NIMBY shitheads who joined in November because they were promised 0 uncomfortable experiences in their lives and lash out when this turns out not to be the case.
Then you move to a smaller server where suddenly you can't talk to your friends because the admin of your instance is feuding with the admin of their instance. Then you wait a month before you can move again.
In this regard, the feudal structure of Mastodon instances is very like early 2000s message boards, whenever the admin got drunk and deleted the site.
4. You can work around the feudalism by running Mastodon yourself. It's the size of a mastodon and costs a fortune.
You can run Pleroma, which is smaller, and is also favoured by Nazis for unfortunate historical reasons. Pleroma is perfectly good software that fulfils a need for something smaller than Mastodon, but also the devs are definitely not Nazis but are the other ten guys at the table.
There was a hilarious moment where the guy behind Spinster was so obnoxious he got kicked out of Pleroma and did his own fork called Soapbox/Rebased. He is now known as Soapbox Terf.
The nice people went to Pleroma fork Akkoma, which Soapbox Terf calls the "tr***y server", a review I understand they were delighted by. Try that.
There's also Misskey, which is a bit weird and Japanese, and supports cat ears right there in the protocol.
5. Any bozo who makes assertions about the Fediverse that assume it all runs on the rules of mastodon.social is one of the suburban NIMBYs and invariably joined in November. Block and don't look back.
6. If anyone annoys you about your posting, you can improve their feed for them by blocking them from ever seeing your posts. The blocking tools are marvellous.
7. There are NO QUOTE TWEETS on Mastodon and anyone who wants QUOTE TWEETS is an invader, pollutant and corrupting influence despoiling the suburban vistas of Mastodon who only wants quote tweets so they can wreak EVIL.
So quote-tweeting is well supported in Akkoma and the Calckey fork of Misskey, is in live trials in the Treehouse fork of Mastodon, and will be coming to more Fediverse software soon.
8. In Mastodon, Eugen Rochko has achieved the creation of something greater than himself. And he will *never forgive it*.
9. The Fediverse interprets Website Boy as damage and routes around him.
10. Mastodon is yet another demonstration that worse is better. So come onto Mastodon, and *be* that worse.
@davidgerard
Sorry, how does it suck...? Best social network I've ever used by a longshot and the fedilabs app (or tootsy I hear) add lots of functionality
@id1om
Use #Friendica for a month.
Then go back to #Mastodon. And then tell us what you think.
I've read about people claiming that everything that isn't Mastodon isn't "feature-complete." LOL. I could pit Mastodon's features against Hubzilla's. #Hubzilla would mop the floor with Mastodon big time, feature-wise, without even breaking a sweat.
The same goes for just about everything out there that isn't Mastodon. Not to the same degree, but it does.
Unless "looks like Mastodon," "feels like Mastodon" and "has an iPhone app named like itself" counts as absolute must-have features.
Oh, by the way, #Pleroma, Akkoma, #MissKey and #CalcKey are all easier on server resources than Mastodon while at the same time offering more features than Mastodon.
@David Gerard @Ian Davis
@jupiter_rowland
All I want is a federated feed with no blocks to the live feed coming through from users.
Mastodon delivers that.
No weird ass blockage or abstractions to that pure feed, come what may.
Like the account we gave Elon for free with millions of tweets streaming to his feed, that he'll try to sell the Google Brain when it becomes most profitable.
It leaves Mastodon toots untouched, yes.
But everything that comes from outside vanilla Mastodon is changed, if not to say mangled.
Posts from Pleroma, from Akkoma, from MissKey, from CalcKey, from FoundKey, from Socialhome, from GoToSocial, from Friendica, from Hubzilla, from (streams), even from Mastodon forks have any and all of their text formatting stripped away. You won't even be able to tell quotes because they aren't shown as such, because Mastodon removes the necessary formatting.
Also, pictures. Other projects can embed pictures within a post, and they can show more than four pictures. Mastodon rips the pictures out of the posts, converts the last four into file attachments, shows them after the post instead of within the post where they belong, and all but the last four pictures are discarded, thrown away, never to be seen by any Mastodon user.
If this isn't abstraction, I don't know what is.
That's why I've told you to try Akkoma and/or Friendica. It will open your eyes and show you what the Fediverse really looks like, and what can be done in the Fediverse, all once you're free from the restrictions and limitations of Mastodon. It'll be at least as much a revelation as when you learned that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon.
@jupiter_rowland But formatting is a bad idea in the first place. Email used to be text only until Microsoft, so it's ruined now.
@jupiter_rowland Oh, interesting, TIL!
Nevertheless, plain text is all you need. Back in the Fidonet days, we used things like asterisks to highlight text; more formatting on the sender side does not improve usability, IMHO.
2010: #Friendica (then known as Mistpark) was launched with text formatting. Six years before Mastodon.
2012: #Hubzilla (then known as Red) was launched with text formatting. Four years before Mastodon.
2016: Mastodon was launched without text formatting.
If anything, it's Mastodon that's ruining the Fediverse. It utterly cripples posts coming in from a whole lot of other projects outside Mastodon by reducing what was composed in the style of a blog post (standard at least on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams)) to 1990s' e-mail/Usenet standards because that's all it can handle.
And then there are those round about seven million Twitter refugees who piled onto mastodon.social in November 2022 and who "knew" that the Fediverse is only Mastodon until March 2023. Not few of them passive-aggressively demand everyone on non-Mastodon instances to compose their posts in such ways that they don't look and feel any different from vanilla Mastodon toots.
In fact, they don't want the Fediverse to be anything else than Mastodon because that's they're used to, and it was hard enough to get used to that already.