The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total. Seriously, what did they expect?

As many followers as they've built up in the Birdcage? With maybe 1% of users altogether? In a much shorter timespan?

And by running the accounts as pure shoutboxes with no interaction with replies that could just as well be unmarked crossposter bots?

Do you explain the Internet to your grandparents by explaining HTTP first?

Sorry to say, but the Fediverse would be a great deal smaller if it wasn't for millions of Twitter users who were railroaded straight to mastodon.social, not knowing anything about it except that it's allegedly "literally twitter without musk".

There are still people who have been on Mastodon since shortly after Musk bought Twitter out, and who shit brix upon discovering for the first time that the Fediverse is, in fact, surprisingly, who woulda thunk it, not only Mastodon.

These people wouldn't be here, had their introduction to the Fediverse started with an explanation of ActivityPub.

The irony is that all it would take is one high profile person or a nation state to commit to using Mastodon, and slowly you would see the numbers start to increase.

Um, nope.

George Takei is on Mastodon. I've yet to see masses of Trekkies piling into Mastodon.

Greta Thunberg is on Mastodon. There has never been a huge influx of FFF members. Or Zoomers, for that matter.

The Dutch government has its own instance. The Federal German government has its own instance. Doesn't lure anyone into the Fediverse.

Reminds me of when Aeris Irides tried to connect (streams) (2021's umpteenth fork-of-a-fork of 2010's Friendica, to dumb it down) and OpenSimulator (free, open-source server application for 3-D virtual worlds very similar to Second Life, est. 2007, interconnected 2008).

Okay, this wasn't to go as far as federating the OpenSim local chat or even only the OpenSim in-world instant messaging system via ActivityPub because both (streams) and OpenSim were to remain untouched. So you couldn't post from OpenSim to Mastodon or vice versa.

But the planned features included

• tying together the creation of channels on (streams) and the creation of avatars in OpenSim
• forwarding notifications from (streams) to OpenSim as a message
• syncing the avatar profile picture in OpenSim with that on (streams) bidirectionally
• automatically uploading snapshots taken in OpenSim to the (streams) file space and generating image-only posts

Nothing came out of this, though. The HoloNeon (streams) instance is gone the HoloNeon grid is gone, and Aeris has moved to another OpenSim grid.

So neither the idea of interweaving the Metaverse with the Fediverse is new, nor is the free, open, decentralised Metaverse.

Here's some stuff that I'd meme about:

• Mastodon users thinking the Fediverse is only Mastodon
• Lemmy users thinking the Threadiverse is only Lemmy
• Mastodon users thinking the Fediverse started with Mastodon
• Mastodon being ridiculously underpowered in comparison to just about everything else, particularly Hubzilla and (streams)
• Mastodon users wishing Mastodon (or, better yet, "the Fediverse") had certain features which are readily available just about everywhere outside of Mastodon
• Mobile apps built against only Mastodon
• Fediverse tools built against only Mastodon
• Pleroma being lightweight
• Mastodon's culture which Mastodon users are trying to force upon the rest of the Fediverse
• Forkey antics such as "Speak as cat"
• Forkeys in general
• Forkeys inspired by Blåhaj vs Mastodon's mastodon plushie
• Mastodon users still uploading videos to YouTube and not to PeerTube
• Hubzilla's UI
• Sharkey's infamously bad Mastodon API implementation
• Friendica federating with everything, especially juxtaposed with some Mastodon users not wanting to federate with anything that isn't vanilla Mastodon
• Hubzilla's ability to host Web pages
• Nomadic identity
• Bluesky's AT protocol seeming like a cheap knock-off of the Zot and Nomad protocols in parts
• Self-proclaimed Fediverse experts who actually barely know anything about Mastodon and don't know anything about the rest of the Fediverse
• Character limits
• Threads perhaps wanting to EEE the Fediverse vs Mastodon actively trying to EEE the Fediverse right now
• Mastodon's poster-side content warnings set in stone in what they want to be the Fediverse culture vs Friendica's, Hubzilla's, (streams)' and Forte's automated, reader-side content warnings which have been around for longer
• Generally, the Fediverse being older than Mastodon
• Lemmy only barely federating with everything else
• /kbin essentially being dead
• Permissions on Hubzilla and (streams)
• "Conversations" on Mastodon vs conversations on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams)
• Certain points in the Fediverse history

Granted, I guess almost all of this will fly even over most c/Fediverse users' heads due to how detached Lemmy is from the rest of the Fediverse. But I don't really expect that many more Mastodon users to understand it, and those who do may be offended. Oh well.

No time to run and moderate it. I'm not primarily a Lemmy user, I'm mostly on Hubzilla and (streams). It can happen that I'm absent from Lemmy for weeks.

What I meant weren't screenshots from social media that are treated like memes.

I rather meant original memes made in the Fediverse for the Fediverse, lampooning the Fediverse, parts of it or certain aspects of it. Even if they're based on existing templates, no matter how old.

Also, it'd be nice if there was a place where such memes can be posted in the first place.

Any bets this will only work with Mastodon because it was built and designed only against Mastodon?

I wouldn't even be surprised if other Fediverse server apps could simply circumvent sub.club if sub.club assumes that everything else out there works like Mastodon, too.

It isn't just types of content that makes a fully featured, unified Fediverse client nigh-impossible. It's features in general.

It all starts with having one unified timeline for any arbitrary number of Fediverse identities on any arbitrary number of different Fediverse servers. Nicely convenient. You only open one app, and you've got them all. Not even separated timelines within the same app, TweetDeck-style. No, you have posts on your three Mastodon accounts under posts on your Pixelfed account under posts on your Lemmy account under posts on your Friendica account, maybe even under posts on your Hubzilla channel if the app isn't limited to the Mastodon API, and if it supports multiple identities under one login.

But it doesn't stop there.

Maybe you want to reply to a post. Or you want to post something yourself.

And, of course, you don't want to stick with the basics that Mastodon offers. Maybe you want to use text formatting.

So text formatting has to be implemented. But it has to be deactivated if you want to post to one of your Mastodon accounts, but it has to be reactivated if one of them is actually on Glitch.

Next trouble: Not everything that supports text formatting supports standard Markdown. Misskey and its various forks use "Misskey-flavoured Markdown". On Friendica, Markdown is optional and off by default, and BBcode is the standard. On Hubzilla, Markdown is not available at all, only BBcode is, and it comes with a whole slew of extras specific to Mike Macgirvin's nomadic projects from Red (2012) to Forte (2024). So yes, you may want support for things like [zmg][/zmg], [zrl=][/zrl] or [observer.baseurl].

Of course, if you are on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams), you're used to having a post preview. Code-heavy posting like on these three makes it a requirement; pure plain-text posting like on Mastodon doesn't. But the preview button must be able to faithfully render any post just like its native server application would render it. No matter what it'll be. Oh, and if you've got NSFW activated on your Friendica account or your Hubzilla or (streams) channel, the preview must be hidden behind an automatically generated content warning.

Speaking of which, Mastodon-style CWs aren't unified either. Depending on the server, they would have to go into the CW field, the summary field, [abstract=apub][/abstract] (Friendica), [summary][/summary] (streams) or nowhere at all (e.g. Lemmy, replies on Hubzilla).

The Fediverse has various different ways of quote-posting, and Mastodon doesn't have quote-posts at all. The Threadiverse has dislikes/downvotes/thumbs-down, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) optionally have them, too, but others don't. Misskey and the Forkeys have emoji reactions. Hubzilla has only twelve emojis, and clicking one creates a whole new comment with only that emoji in it. Friendica lets you hashtag other people's posts, so does (streams) optionally, but only they themselves even understand this feature.

Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) also have categories, much like a blog, next to hashtags. At least on Hubzilla and (streams), they're optional. But they require their own text field which the app must have, too, depending on the availability of this feature.

This goes further and further. After all, you may not just want basic functionality for when you aren't on your computer. Maybe you don't have a computer. Maybe your phone is the only digital end-user device you possess. So the app would have to cover not only the bare necessities (read, reply, post etc.), but everything.

For example, someone wants to follow you. On Mastodon, you just confirm it if you've set your account up to do so manually, and you're done.

On Hubzilla with enough optional features activated, you assign a contact role to the new contact to give it the permissions you want to grant it, you add it to one or multiple privacy groups, you choose which profile that contact can see, you adjust the affinity slider, you may even want to pre-fill the per-contact filter lists (one allowlist, one blocklist), and then you confirm the new connection. Upon which Hubzilla automatically follows that connection back. Oh, and then you can still block or ignore or archive a connection or set it to invisible. On (streams), it's somewhat similar, but since you can grant individual permissions to specific contacts in addition to a pre-defined permission role, you've got even more options.

A unified, daily-driver Fediverse app that's supposed to fully replace Web interfaces would have to offer UI elements for all these settings. And only when they're actually needed.

Don't get me started about settings and options. Again, the app would have to mirror all of them. Many people have never touched the Web UI of their Fediverse servers, and they don't intend to. They do everything on their phones with dedicated apps.

On Hubzilla, this would include access to Hubzilla's built-in "apps". "Install", "uninstall" and configure them. Many important optional features are "apps". But amongst these "apps", there are also things like articles, wikis and Web pages. And what would being able to turn these features on and off be worth if you couldn't use them in the app? And so the app will also have to provide access to Hubzilla's articles and wikis and Web pages with all bells and whistles.

Of course, whenever a Fediverse server app changes in a way that makes changes in the UI necessary, this unified mobile app would have to follow suit immediately.

The Fediverse is not one enclosed, unified entity under one centralised rule.

It's a common misconception that "the Fediverse" is a network platform created by whomever, usually Eugen Rochko. And Mastodon, Lemmy, Misskey, Friendica, Pixelfed, PeerTube etc. are Web UIs for the Fediverse, and Mona, IceCubes, Tusky, Fedilab etc. are mobile UIs for the Fediverse which mimic the functionality of certain Web UIs.

This is complete non-sense. None of this is true.

Instead, the Fediverse is a patchwork of many different things that work together by speaking common languages. And with "work together", I mean "work together ever so barely" in many cases. Mastodon and Lemmy are not different clients for the same server thing. They connect, but they can hardly interact.

These "apps" aren't client apps. They're server applications. They provide a whole slew of very very different server backends.

There is no "Fediverse suite of apps" either. Just about everything in the Fediverse is developed and offered separately from one another.

Mastodon, in particular, ignores the whole rest of the Fediverse and tries to present itself to its users and Fediverse novices as "the Fediverse". And when Mastodon users discover that Mastodon is, in fact, not "the Fediverse", Mastodon makes them believe that everything that doesn't work exactly like Mastodon is broken.

Oh, and no, Eugen Rochko didn't invent the Fediverse. Evan Prodromou did. In 2008. That was when he took his recently launched Twitter alternative Identi.ca, open-sourced its technology under the name Laconi.ca (later StatusNet, now part of GNU social) and laid its protocol open under the name OpenMicroBlogging (now OStatus).

The Fediverse consisting of multiple different kinds of interacting servers came to exist in 2010 when Mike Macgirvin launched his Facebook alternative named Mistpark (now Friendica). He built it on top of a whole new protocol, but he gave it the ability to speak OpenMicroBlogging as well, thus connecting it to StatusNet. One key feature of Friendica is still to be able to connect to everything that moves and then some.

Mastodon was built on top of OStatus, too. But the intention was not to connect it to already-existing StatusNet, Friendica, Hubzilla (a much more powerful Friendica fork by Mike Macgirvin himself) and Pleroma (which had started out as an alternative UI for StatusNet). The idea was rather that using an already existing protocol was easier for a young and barely experienced coder than designing an all-new protocol from scratch. Mastodon never intended to be interoperable with anything else.

Even when Mastodon introduced ActivityPub as early as September, 2017, it was not to be able to interact with Hubzilla which had it first, two months earlier. By the way, ActivityPub is another one of Evan Prodromou's creations, but this time, he wasn't alone.

The idea behind Lemmy seemed to be similar: Build a Reddit clone, but without the hassle of designing a brand-new communication protocol. The difference was that Mastodon was already quite well-known when Lemmy was launched. When Mastodon was launched, StatusNet was considered dead after its only really known instance, Identi.ca had switched from OStatus to pump.io. As for Friendica, Hubzilla and Pleroma, nobody knew they existed, much less that they spoke OStatus. OStatus was there, ready to use, but to most people who came across it, it felt unused. So I guess that when Eugen Rochko created Mastodon, he unironically and sincerely believed that he was now the only one using this protocol, nobody else ever would again, and Mastodon would only ever connect to itself. Mastodon's whole very concept is to be a "federated walled garden", decentralised on the inside, but not letting anything else connect.

At least hardly anyone on Lemmy believes the Fediverse was invented by Eugen Rochko in 2022 as a reaction upon Elon Musk's announcement to buy Twitter.

I wasn't talking about the dev side/Fediverse frontend development.

I was talking about the end user side, about the requirements to make Fediverse posts accessible, especially image descriptions.

Thing is, on Mastodon, it's pretty much mandatory to give a useful description for every last image you post, If your posts reach Mastodon, your images better be described sufficiently. But everyone's just got "the Mastodon way" stuck in their heads which is built around only having 500 characters in posts, and nobody can imagine there being images that are much different from Mastodon/Twitter screenshots nor cat photographs.

And everywhere that isn't Mastodon, nobody has even heard of alt-text or image descriptions, or if they have, they think it's another stupid Mastodon fad.

That's what I have mostly got on my mind.