Exactly why most Germans only had a @t-online.de address back in the day. The only exceptions were those who needed an e-mail account before they had their own home and their own landline connection.
JupiterRowland
joined 2 years ago
IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.
Plus, it keeps the obnoxious "But muh follower count" fame whores and the majority of the "Why can't this be exactly like Twitter, I want a total Twitter clone" dumb-dumbs out. They'd ruin Fediverse culture even more than the second migration wave two years ago which was so massive that those who fled back then only encountered each other on Mastodon and hardly anyone who had been in the Fediverse before then.
Still, this chart looks like it's actually counting phone apps rather than providers. Google doesn't have two separate e-mail services AFAIK.
Nobody really actively chooses Apple Mail.
It's just that they buy iPhones, and they want a total no-brainer, like, a phone that's fully set up and ready to use without them having to do anything because it, like, totally confuzzles them 'n stuff. So whichever friendly salesperson sells them their phone also sets everything up for them. Including an e-mail account because they need one for their Apple account, but they don't know if they've got one.
If they buy an Android phone, it's the same, only that they get a Gmail account if they don't happen to already have one.
It actually doesn't.
Install the official Mastodon app on your phone, launch it, scroll past the instance selection box that railroads you to mastodon.social anyway, and it's no more complicated than Twitter. It's just that nobody knows that.
Fun fact: The official Bluesky app has a selection box for a PDS, too. It's no more and no less complicated than the official Mastodon app. Nobody knows that either.
Granted, of course, if you let yourself be railroaded, the place where you land in the Fediverse won't be the bee's knees, and you won't know that there are not only better Mastodon instances (or more Mastodon instances in the first place), but also better server applications than Mastodon (or anything else than Mastodon in the Fediverse in the first place). But hey, it's easy-peasy.
Awful user experience can be anything from side-effects of decentralisation (no, you can't search the entire Fediverse for something; no, you can't even search all of Mastodon for something) to Mastodon's official app being crap and people being unwilling/unable to use an app that isn't named "Mastodon" to Mastodon refusing to catch up with the rest of the Fediverse in features to Mastodon refusing to finally become the 1:1 Twitter clone expect it to be. Mind you, the latter two contradict each other.
Another feature-rich Forkey from before Firefish's first "death" which, as I've read somewhere, must have managed to iron out more of Misskey's original issues than the other Forkeys.
where pleroma
where akkoma
where misskey
where firefish
where iceshrimp
where sharkey
where cherrypick
where catodon
where mitra
No. The various Fediverse server applications are too different in how they work.
First of all, it isn't all just about object types. The architecture of various Fediverse server applications is vastly different, including how they handle objects, and how they distribute them.
For example, on Mastodon, a thread is just a loose string of posts and more posts which, technically, are identical in properties. Mastodon doesn't know conversations, and Mastodon doesn't know groups. You receive the posts from those whom you follow plus, by default, the posts that mention you.
Friendica does know conversations, and it knows groups because it has them implemented. On Friendica, a thread is one (1) post plus comments, just like on Facebook or on blogs. You receive the posts from those whom you're connected with, but not their comments on other people's posts. Plus, you receive all comments on posts from those whom you're connected with. Receiving posts from those whom you've mentioned is optional but off by default AFAIK.
Forte is like Friendica, but with nomadic identity. That obviously isn't a client thing.
Hubzilla and (streams) are like Forte, but with wholly different protocols that were made for nomadic identity in the first place and with ActivityPub as an optional extra.
Lemmy, Mbin and PieFed are all about conversations and groups. You literally can't follow Lemmy users (something that Mastodon users will never understand), you can only follow Lemmy communities (something that's totally alien to many Mastodon users).
There are many more differences.
Mastodon's HTML sanitiser that rips out most text formatting is on the server side AFAIK. If you make Mastodon the gold standard, say buh-bye to numbered lists, horizontal lines, tables etc. (And I'm not kidding, there are places in the Fediverse that support these. In posts.)
Character limits are server-side. Since the huge majority of Fediverse users and many Fediverse devs think the Fediverse was made as a Twitter replacement, they also think that there has to be an arbitrary character limit, otherwise it wouldn't be microblogging, right? Welll, then Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Nomad can wave good-bye to their unlimited character counts and 100,000+-character posts.
Filters are server-side. And they work vastly differently on different Fediverse server apps. Some import filtered content and then delete it. Others reject it.
Permissions are server-side. Permissions are absolutely essential and integral parts of Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, but the entire rest of the Fediverse doesn't even know they exist. Of course, it'd be great if everything down to mastodon.social implemented the (streams)/Forte permissions system, but it'd completely overwhelm those who came to mastodon.social in search of Twitter without Musk.
Another feature that Friendica and Hubzilla could kiss good-bye if there was only one unified server backend are multiple profiles per account. Speaking of which, it's farewell to multiple channels (identities, like accounts everywhere else) on one account/login for Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. Unless everything else is willing to implement both.
Lastly, Hubzilla has absolute literal shit-tons of features on top of even Friendica. Both have built-in file spaces, but Hubzilla has one with WebDAV connectivity (as do (streams) and Forte). Both have federated event calendars, but Hubzilla also uses it as a frontend for its built-in CalDAV calendar server (which is headless on (streams) and Forte). Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte have an optional CardDAV addressbook server. Hubzilla also has optional stuff like non-federating long-form articles, "cards" that work similarly, a simple built-in wiki engine for multiple wikis per channel with multiple pages each, support for simple webpages (the official Hubzilla website is on a Hubzilla channel) and so forth. I'm not even remotely kidding with any of this.
If you want to unify Fediverse servers, they'd all have to become Hubzilla, but with nomadic ActivityPub.
I've recently read about that myself. But hosting anything Bluesky-related yourself is horrendously expensive because you need absolute monster servers with terabytes of disc space. Not to mention Bluesky's convoluted architecture.
First, Bluesky's nomadic identity isn't worth shit if nobody knows that there's more than one instance.
Next, it has yet to be proven to work because nobody has daily-driven it yet.
Finally, if you want nomadic identity that's actually proven to work, don't join Bluesky. Join Hubzilla. Nomadic identity, established in 2012, some four years before Mastodon, daily-driven by probably hundreds or thousands of people since then.
I'm not even kidding. The Fediverse had nomadic identity four years before it had Mastodon.
But hardly anyone in the Fediverse, next to no-one on Mastodon and literally no-one outside the Fediverse knows that Misskey exists. Not outside of Japan anyway. Or any of the Forkeys, for that matter (if you're a Westerner and neither an otaku nor a weeb, Iceshrimp or Sharkey may suit you better).
For more Mastodon users than not, the Fediverse = Mastodon. And outside the Fediverse, hardly anyone has even heard of the Fediverse.