Ja, im #Fediverse sind jetzt in etwa zehn Millionen Accounts registriert, das ist schon toll, allerdings sollte man nicht davon ausgehen, dass diese zehn Millionen Accounts auch alle aktiv sind. Wesentlich sinnvoller als die Gesamtzahl sollte man lieber auf die im letzten Monat oder meinetwegen auch auf die im letzten halben Jahr aktiven Accounts schauen, und da sieht es doch etwas anders aus. Im letzten Monat aktiv waren nur etwa ein viertel der zehn Millionen Accounts und im letzten Halben Jahr aktiv etwas mehr als die Hälfte, also knapp sechs Millionen. Bei aller Begeisterung über die zehn Millionen sollte man also auch so ehrlich sein und dazu sagen, dass sehr viele dieser Accounts nicht genutzt werden.

Und davon mal abgesehen ist ein anstieg von etwa 450.000 monatlich aktiven Accounts im März '22 auf etwa 2,4 Millionen aktiver Accounts im März '23 doch auch ein ziemlicher Zuwachs an Nutzern der von den meist als Hobby Projekt betriebenen Instanzen ja auch erstmal bewältigt werden muss und bis jetzt auch bewältigt wurde. Und das ist doch auch toll.

Interessant ist übrigens auch, dass das nach gesamt Nutzerzahl zweitgrößte Projekt im Fediverse nach #Mastodon immer noch #Diaspora ist.

• https://the-federation.info/#projects

#Friendica #Pleroma #Pixelfed #Misskey #NeuHier

Allow me to digress from the usual topic on this channel once more.

I'm pretty sure that no human being on this planet has created nearly as many federated social platforms as @mike. But all these (actually not always so) different platforms can be a bit confusing. Even I may be wrong here and there, but I'll try to make some sense of them by putting them into a kind of chronology.


So first, there was #Friendica. Only that it started out under the name of #Mistpark. I'll get to the name later.

Remember #Diaspora? Remember summer 2010 when the crowdfunding run was launched so that those four guys could spend all their time creating a free, #OpenSource, decentralised, federated social network (a.k.a. #Facebook killer) which they wanted to name Diaspora*?

Well, they unknowingly wanted to re-invent the wheel. #StatusNet was already there, #GNUsocial was already there, and especially, Mistpark was already there with a 1.x release and more powerful than both, actually, more powerful than Diaspora would ever become. I think Mistpark even already had Diaspora*'s aspects, only that they were called groups.

As for its concept, Mistpark went beyond that of Diaspora*. Mistpark didn't only want a bunch of instances ("nodes" in this case) of its own kind to connect with one another, it also wanted to federate with everything else that moved, be it e-mail, be it StatusNet, be it Twitter, be it whatever.

The first name change was from Mistpark to #Friendika. The reason was that the original name sounded repelling to German speakers. "Mist" means "fog" in English, but "dung" or "manure" in German, not to mention that it's a German curse word.

When Diaspora* was finally there, Friendika didn't see it as competition, it saw it as another federation target. To this day, Friendica is fully federated with Diaspora*, and that has exclusively been the work of the Friendika developers who studied Diaspora*'s source code and reverse-engineer it because it didn't have an API.

Probably the biggest coup was the bidirectional federation with Facebook. This was what everyone was waiting for. This, however, was also where the trouble started. Facebook didn't want to be federated with a non-commercial social network and started taking defensive measures. Also, Friendica users (the second name change was through meanwhile) who used the Facebook connector had their entire and often very busy Facebook timelines mirrored onto Friendica nodes, one of the reasons why even nodes on powerful root servers often had to close new registrations even though they only had a little over a hundred users. So there were several reasons why Facebook federation was axed again.

Internally, Friendica uses its own protocol named #DFRN. But I guess Mike had meanwhile seen it as a dead end, also because he had a new idea: #NomadicIdentity, not only the ability to easily take your account from one instance to another, but the possibility to have it on multiple instances at the same time, keeping the copies in sync.

That's why he laid the foundation for a new protocol that could do that: #Zot.


And with it came the next social platform. It was first just simply named Red from Spanish "red" = "net". Red was based on Zot from the beginning, and as an experimental platform, it only understood Zot. On Friendica which was now running at full steam on dozens upon dozens of nodes, and which Mike had passed on to the community, the development was followed with interest. And just like later platforms, I think Red actually got a few small public instances because someone really wanted to try it out. Red eventually changed its name to #RedMatrix.

Also, Red didn't just want to be a social network like Friendica. The idea was rather to have a "social content management system" that could do just about everything you could do with a website and/or a cloud server. Third-party federation was slightly reduced, connections to commercial platforms didn't come back. But as Red evolved, the Diaspora* connector was included which was also used to federate Red with Friendica.


From the Red Matrix emerged #Hubzilla, the Swiss Army knife of the #Fediverse. Still today, its possibilities have rarely ever been fleshed out: not only microblogging, but macroblogging, article publication, websites, wikis (no, I'm not kidding), #WebDAV, #CalDAV and #CardDAV server and so forth.

Next to the nomadic identity that came with Zot, Hubzilla introduced another killer feature: one account, many separate channels. Each one of these channels is basically like one Friendica account. You can have multiple fully separate identities on one account, and nobody (except the instance admin) can tell that they're all you. So this goes way beyond Friendica's multiple profiles. By the way, Hubzilla still has multiple profiles per channel.

Some say that the Red Matrix was renamed Hubzilla. This isn't true. Hubzilla is a fork of the Red Matrix, one could say it was a stable snapshot of the Red Matrix.

For the development of the Red Matrix continued. Planned advancements on Zot couldn't be tested on stable Hubzilla, they needed their own testbed. Eventually, the last Red Matrix instance was Mike's personal one with himself as the only user. It still federated with Friendica and, of course, Hubzilla.

In the meantime, #ActivityPub came along. It wasn't just another obscure networking protocol, though, because #Mastodon made it huge. So at least Friendica and Hubzilla had to adopt it. Friendica firmly integrated it. Hubzilla made it into an app just like all other protocols that aren't Zot because they stand in the way of fully nomadic identity. By the way, both profited from its introduction because the federation between each other no longer had to use the Diaspora* protocol.


For the next advancements of Zot, two new platforms were forked from the Red Matrix or Hubzilla. At this point, Mike wasn't involved with Hubzilla anymore either. First, there was #Osada, an early testbed for what would become #Zot6, but still with ActivityPub. For pure Zot6, #Zap followed suit. Most connectors that are neither Zot nor ActivityPub, including the one to Diaspora*, weren't taken over, as were many of Hubzilla's extra abilities (websites, articles, wiki, CardDAV, two parallel calendar systems etc.) to keep it slim. It did get to keep the various types of channels as well as one CalDAV server and the WebDAV connection, though.

Eventually, when Mike handed them over to the community, they used the exact same code base. The only differences between Osada and Zap was whether or not the admin had ActivityPub on (Osada) or off (Zap) and the name.

As having two different names for the same thing, depending on the instance configuration, Osada was discontinued in favour of Zap which now included ActivityPub itself. In the meantime, Zot6 became stable and was backported into Hubzilla which thereby became fully compatible to Zap, only that what Hubzilla can that Zap can't cannot be mirrored to Zap.

Then Osada re-emerged as Zap's unstable branch. Along with it came a new Red Matrix which, as far as I could see, was now an even more purist, even more unstable branch that only served for testing Zot8 and lacked all other protocols.

To top this off, in 2020, Zap itself got a stable branch even more intended for productive use. For this purpose, the name Mistpark was dusted off. The new stable branch was named #Mistpark2020 or simply #Misty. Misty was the first of its kind to not even get an announcement anymore, though. Its home page on Zotlabs disappeared along with Zotlabs before it could be filled with any useful information.

Two things were interesting: Red Matrix, Osada, Zap and Misty were based on various states of the same code base. It was possible to switch from one to another by rebasing the local code repository on your server. This became obvious through instances that carry the name of one project but run another one.


It must have been in 2021 when #Roadhouse showed up, again, unannounced. It seemed to be nothing more than a concept for the next generation of distributed social platforms. Roadhouse was the first of its kind to use the #Nomad protocol which, I guess, is forked from #Zot because it serves the same purpose. It got its own home page on Zotlabs which remained as uninformational as Misty's.


And then the most recent name popped up: #Streams. At first, it was even less clear what Streams was supposed to be and what set it apart from Roadhouse, not to mention Red Matrix, Osada, Zap and Misty, also because Zotlabs didn't say what Streams was either.

But I guess Streams' purpose has emerged in the meantime through word-of-mouth: It's the experimental successor of all five and the solution to this maze of names. Streams isn't even a product with a name, it's a concept that uses Nomad for nomadic identity and that is in constant flux, hence Streams. The idea was to do away with fixed names to get rid of the previous chaos. Everyone can name whatever they do with Streams however they want.

There is currently only one more or less public Streams instance, but it still carries "Stream" in its name. At least two more instances which may be private are named something with "Streams", too. So whether Mike wants or not, Streams has become a name of its own, and people use it.

How many Streams instances exactly exist right now is hard to tell, even from Communities pages on Streams instances or Sites pages on older platforms, because they don't necessarily identify themselves as Streams instances. So if you go through one of these pages, and there are names in the Projects column which you don't know as Fediverse platforms, check out what's behind them. It's often only one instance. Open the instance, click its burger menu, and if there's a Communities link, it's a Streams instance. I've discovered a lot of Streams instances not named anything with Streams this way. Private instances included, I guess Streams must have more than a dozen instances already.

There has even already been a request to launch a Streams support forum much like the one for Hubzilla; after all, Streams still supports forums. It's safe to say that Streams is doing quite well for something so obscure.

Feature-wise, Streams is the same as Zap and Misty.


But what became of the six platforms between Hubzilla and Streams?

• Red Matrix kept having only this one single-user instance because nobody else dared to touch it and set up another instance. It's a Zap instance now as far as I can see.
  
• Osada never really took off, Zap probably did only after Osada was merged into it, and some Osada instances became Zap instances. This explains why Zap has got comparably many instances. Most of them, however, are tiny, probably private and utterly undermaintained as they run rather old Zap versions. Zap only lives by numbers, and it's the only one of the five listed on Fediverse Observer. Also, while the FediDB lists all five, it only knows that one Dominican public Zap instance and none of the others (looking through its connected sites reveals many unlisted instances of Zot-based networks, by the way). Still, it seems to be on the deathbed, being superseded by Streams, experimental as the latter may be.
  There still seem to be a very few running Osada instances, but Osada can be considered dead as the focus is on Streams now.
  
• Misty didn't take off either, even though it was considered more stable and more production-grade than Zap. This time, the reason may simply be because Misty got zero advertising, so nobody heard about it, probably not even some of the Zap crowd. Misty never had many instances, they weren't properly advertised either (the same applies to most Zap instances, by the way), and Misty's death knell may have been the unannounced shutdown of its largest instance. Basically, there was little room for Misty next to less obscure Zap.
  
• Roadhouse didn't even manage to get much limelight before Streams appeared shortly afterwards. In both cases, the only way to find out what they were and what they did was by either studying the source code or installing a private instance. Streams, however, had the advantage of being even newer. The-Federation.info knows exactly one German Roadhouse instance which was originally set up as Misty and has meanwhile been upgraded beyond Roadhouse to Streams, and there only seems to be one remaining unlisted Roadhouse instance.
  
• I've seen another result of an upgrade from Zap to Misty. So it's safe to assume that you can upgrade all five to Streams. If this is the case, then now that Streams is here, it probably isn't worth spreading the developer community across six almost identical platforms. Basically, Streams has become the latest version of Red Matrix, Osada, Zap, Misty and Roadhouse.
  
• At least Red Matrix, Osada, Zap and Misty are still being maintained in a sense, though. All four got the same small Git commit from Mike a good month ago. Roadhouse got one four months ago.

As of now, Friendica is still going strong, so is Hubzilla, and Streams seems to be cleaning up the mess that came after Hubzilla.

If you really want to try out something with Zot, my current recommendation is Hubzilla, even if it may seem bloated and cumbersome to you, even if you'll never harness its full power. Many of its extra functions are additional apps and switched off by default; this includes ActivityPub, by the way, this is important to know.

It's hard to find a public Streams instance with open registrations currently, much less multiple ones that'd be required for a nomadic identity. Neither Fediverse.party nor the FediDB nor The-Federation.info nor Fediverse.info even knows Streams, and existing Streams instances usually don't identify to other Fediverse servers as Streams instances. It's still a rather underground and grass-roots project with no publicity at all. As Streams is rather experimental, however, you may want a nomadic home on at least two instances to have an instant backup, should one of them shut down.

Zap has got exactly one instance open to the public, and seeing as Zap may be shrinking rather than growing, I don't expect this to change. Again, due to Zap's still small size and unclear future, I wouldn't recommend using it without nomadic identity as a safety net.

As for Osada or Misty, good luck finding an instance to join, much less one that's here to stay and ideally be upgraded to Streams one day.

Hubzilla may not be as bleeding-edge as Streams, and it may be overkill for your purposes if Zap or Streams would be sufficient, but it's stable, it's big enough, it's established, and it's different enough from Streams to not be endangered by it. I mean, Hubzilla hasn't managed to kill off Friendica either, right?

Hallo #neuhier, aber auch #althier. Weil ich erst neulich gefragt wurde, warum ich #Friendica #Mastodon bevorzuge, wollte ich hier einmal kurz schreiben, wieso ich Friendica nutze. Erst einmal vorweg: Ich finde Mastodon nicht schlecht, ist echt eine sehr gute Möglichkeit die #Fediverse zu nutzen.

Aber mir persönlich gefällt die Usability bzw. die Oberfläche von Mastodon nicht. Ich stehe mehr auf die Threadansicht von Beiträgen. Bei Mastodon fehlt mir diese. Da werden mir in der Timeline Antworten von Beiträgen reingespült, bei denen mir der komplette Zusammenhang fehlt. Das ist der Hauptgrund.

Ein weiterer Grund sind tatsächlich die Features von Friendica. Genial finde ich die Möglichkeit, Beiträge ohne einer Zeichenbegrenzung zu erstellen. Ein Hammerfeature sind die Foren bei Friendica. Man kann diese sehr einfach erstellen und das restliche Fediverse kann solche Foren mitnutzen. Mit Ausnahme von #Diaspora, da klappt das mit den Foren meines Wissens nicht.

Dann kann man seine Kontakte in Gruppen sortieren und sich einen Stream nur mit den Kontakten aus den jeweiligen Gruppen anzeigen lassen.

Auch das Abonnieren von #Hastags funktioniert recht einfach. Solch abonnierte Hashtags werden mir dann auch in meinem Netzwerkstream angezeigt, auch wenn diese von User stammen, die nicht in meiner Kontaktliste sind. Bei meinem Testkonto habe ich zum Beispiel nicht einen Kontakt, aber dank der Hashtags wird der Netzwerkstream trotzdem mit interessanten Beiträgen gefüllt.

Ach ich könnte noch das eine oder andere Feature von Friendica aufführen. Aber seht doch selber die komplette Featureliste an:
Features – friendica

Ein weiterer für mich wichtiger Grund ist die wirklich gute #Community rund um Friendica. Auch der Kontakt mit den Entwicklern ist wirklich sehr vorbildlich. Es gibt auch ein aktiv genutztes Supportforum, bei dem einem bei Fragen oder Problemen immer mit Rat und Tat zur Seite gestanden wird.

Sollte jetzt jemand neugierig auf Friendica geworden sein, der kann sich gerne auf https://anonsys.net ein Konto klicken oder sich eine Instanz aus der Liste der öffentlichen Server aussuchen: https://dir.friendica.social/servers

Estás cordialmente invitado a unirte a mi y a otros amigos en Friendica, creemos juntos una red social mejor.

Para aceptar la invitación visita y regístrate en https://friendicarg.nsupdate.info o en cualquier otro servidor público de Friendica.

Los servidores de Friendica están interconectados para crear una enorme red social centrada en la privacidad y controlada por sus miembros. También se puede conectar con muchas redes sociales tradicionales. Mira en https://dir.friendica.social/servers para poder ver un listado de servidores alternativos de Friendica donde puedes darte de alta.

Una vez registrado, por favor contacta conmigo a través de mi página de perfil en:

https://friendicarg.nsupdate.info/profile/fabianbonetti

Para más información sobre el proyecto Friendica y por qué sentimos que es importante, visite http://friendi.ca, por favor

#mastodon #diaspora #twitter #social #facebook #friendica #spanish #es #español #fediverso #fediverse #hola #nuevo #hi #new #presentación

Estás cordialmente invitado a unirte a mi y a otros amigos en Friendica, creemos juntos una red social mejor.

Para aceptar la invitación visita y regístrate en https://friendicarg.nsupdate.info o en cualquier otro servidor público de Friendica.

Los servidores de Friendica están interconectados para crear una enorme red social centrada en la privacidad y controlada por sus miembros. También se puede conectar con muchas redes sociales tradicionales. Mira en https://dir.friendica.social/servers para poder ver un listado de servidores alternativos de Friendica donde puedes darte de alta.

Una vez registrado, por favor contacta conmigo a través de mi página de perfil en:

https://friendicarg.nsupdate.info/profile/fabianbonetti

Para más información sobre el proyecto Friendica y por qué sentimos que es importante, visite http://friendi.ca, por favor

#mastodon #diaspora #twitter #social #facebook #friendica #spanish #ñ #es #español #fediverso #fediverse #hola #nuevo #hi #new #presentación

📌 ~~ Denunciar vs Denunciar ~~

Haran ya 3 años desde que hice una denuncia contra una cuenta que hacia apologia del #fascismo y el #nazismo (mas en especifico de un fan del dictador #Pinochet) que en reiteradas veces se habia mofado (y hasta la ultima vez que me lo encontre lo seguia haciendo) de las miles de victimas que dejo el paso de la #CarabanaDeLaMuerte y de los centros de reclusion, tortura y desaparicion que desde 1973 y hasta muy cerca de 1990 mantuvo la #Dictadura #CivicoMilitar

La cuenta en cuestion se ha mudado ya varias veces y actualmente cuenta con espejos en instancias de #diaspora, #mastodon y #pleroma. Aunque parezca sorprendente, en ninguna instancia ha sido siquiera amonestado... y esa experiencia me basto para entender que la forma de proceder de la comunidad toda es la de relativizar muchas veces el problema.

Yo no veo razon para denunciar a una cuenta si veo un texto de dudosas caracteristicas, ya que entiendo que pudo haber sido escrito con otras intenciones o simplemente quien emitio esa opinion no se dio cuenta de lo que escribio... y ademas no me gusta sacar de contexto o entrar a interpretar frases, dichos o palabras para despues usarlas en contra de nadie... el tiempo de la caza de brujas ha pasado y creo que debemos ser mucho mas responsables y serios en este tipo de cuestiones.

Ademas -desde mi punto de vista- lo que hay que combatir hoy en dia esta un poco mas alla, al otro lado de la linea.

No es lo mismo cuando vemos una actitud reiterada, que sigue una linea y se autoreafirma en esas cuestiones, sean de tipo racistas, discriminadoras, matonezcas, etc.

Lamentablemente veo que las herramientas que ha ido generando la comunidad en vez de solucionar este tipo de problemas, a veces simplemente las agrava o son mas bien insuficientes. El que cada instancia publique listas negras de cualquier tipo ha venido creando una especie de sensacion de una vuelta a la caza de brujas. Es cuestion que una gran instancia acuse a otra mas pequeña, para que la "comunidad de admins" reaccione como bloque, dejando afuera la imposible participacion de la comunidad toda (en este ultimo punto estan claras las razones del porque no se puede hacer participe a todos y todas).

Y ademas, no han tenido (a excepcion de muy contadas excepciones) efectos claros y disuasorios suficientes. Implican enorme cantidad de tiempo y energia de parte de los admin, quienes en muchos casos simplemente han terminado por arrojar la toalla y solo se concentran en cuestiones mas globales.

La experiencia que tuve me dejo claro, que aunque nos moleste, el #fediverso tiene una estructura mas bien piramidal (y no horizontal) y que a fin de cuentas es lo que hay... castas o como se llamen. Hay quienes, que usando su micro-poder andan con actitudes matonezcas, imponiendo su posicion, intentando someter a quienes no piensan similar y haciendo bullying contra quienes les son molestos, incomodos.

Yo he tenido (buenos) cruces de palabras e ideas con muchas y muchos, lo que me parece que enriquece los temas y las conversaciones, pero en otros pocos casos, mas bien parecieran enfrentamientos... y eso empobrece la discusion 😪

Hay que mejorar mucho todavia.

Nach den vielen Ergüssen, die wir von Expert*innen hören und lesen durften, die mal kurz ihre Nase in die Microblogging-Software Mastodon reingehalten hatten, heute mal gute Nachrichten aus der #taz 🐾 :

Das Problem sind nicht nur Musk bzw. T witter, auch nicht nur Zuckerberg, Facebook Instagram / Meta und die anderen Akteure des Plattformkapitalismus ... doch immerhin:
"Die gute Nachricht: Die Alternativen sind schon da" Nicht nur für Twitter, auch für Facebook, Instagram, YouTube u.a. "Sie werden als #Fediverse bezeichnet – das Universum der föderierten Netzwerke."
Es gibt #NichtNurMastodon , sondern viele verschiedene "potenziell ­weltumspannende, nichtkommerzielle und dezentrale Plattformen. Es gibt kleine und große, und es gibt für jede kommerzielle Plattform eine oder mehrere Entsprechungen."

Aktuell gab es einige Anlässe T witter zu verlassen und/oder sich einer Microblogging-Alternative wie Mastodon zuzuwenden. Aber warum bleiben so viele bei Facebook, Instagram, Youtube ? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Nicht nur „Linke“, sondern De­mo­kra­t:in­nen und ihre Institutionen ganz generell sollten ihre Inhalte nicht [nur] auf datenkapitalistischen Plattformen teilen (...) Inhalte müssen reichweiten­unabhängig auch dort geteilt werden, wo es sich emanzipatorisch vernetzen kann. Das ist zurzeit das Fediverse. Ein guter und zeitsparender Start wäre es, sich einen #Friendica -Account zuzulegen, mit dem mehrere Netzwerke des Fediverse und sogar T witter gleichzeitig bespielt werden können."

#Mastodon #Diaspora #Pixelfed #Peertube #FOSS #OpenSource

Artikel von @Ulf Schleth in der @taz@taz@taz (inoffiziell)
https://taz.de/!5895653/


@caos

ja, gerne 😁👍 @taz
👋 Hallo an alle von #TazImFediverse 🐾
📞 Ferngespräch von #Diaspora für Euch: "Mastodon im taz-Profil"
👉fyi: @taz
@Dominik Baur@J.Drosdowski@Anna@Gereon Asmuth@Cornelius W. M. Oettle@Kersten Augustin@Michael Trammer@shoko_bethke@Paul Wrusch@Elquee@powl@Simone Dede Ayivi@Tobias Schulze@Lalon Sander@Erik Peter@Bert Schulz@Gareth Joswig@Andreas Rüttenauer@Stefan Hunglinger@Lea Fauth@Jonas Wahmkow@Simone Schmollack@Jean-Philipp Baeck
🧐 wen vergessen?

@caos

---

♲ taz - 2022-11-24 13:11:39 GMT

Mastodon im taz-Profil

hi, hier eine nachricht vom taz - diaspora* - maintainer an die mastodon-user: wenn ihr einen taz-account habt, könnt ihr nun auch eure mastodon-ID angeben. in eurem taz-profil wird dann automatisch auf eure mastodon-profilseite verlinkt.

vielleicht mag das ja eine friendicanerin weiterleiten 😀

viel spaß!

#taz #diaspora #friendica #fediverse

⚪🔴🟤🟡🟠⚫🟢🔵🟣 This is your daily reminder that contrary to the hype and marketing hullabaloo but #Mastodon is not the #fediverse and the #federation is actually a huge tapestry thousands of servers and volunteers and dozens if not hundreds of developers and even more volunteers who have made this space what you see today.

When you accidentally or intentionally spread the misinformation you erode the very foundation of what has drawn you to this place to begin with.

You are marginalizing great projects like:Diaspora — The OG. None of this would be possible were it not for two college kids who had a dream and set up a Kickstarter to fund its development back in 2010. Over 29,000 of your fellow fediverse peers are on #Diaspora at this very moment. (10/22/2022)

Friendica — The one app that lets anyone or any organization literally create their own private #facebook on the fediverse and make it accessible and federated with the rest of the World. It also has very modest hosting requirements making it accessible to more people to host without requiring a VPS or complex server setups. About 6,700 federation citizens use #Friendica each and every day and it’s still in active development. (10/22/2022)

Hubzilla — The successor to Friendica, #Hubzilla took what was great about Friendica and made it all the better. About 2,200 of your fediverse neighbors use Hubzilla every day. (10/22/2022)

Peertube — Calling #PeerTube a “YouTube competitor” doesn’t do it justice. PeerTube is so much more than a competitor to YouTube. In a very real sense it’s a YouTube killer, if only more people knew about it and more people used it. PeerTube lets anybody stand up a service and then instantenously their published videos become accessible to the entire Federation (and vice versa). There are approximately 113,000 active PeerTube users in the federation right now. (10/22/2022)

Mastodon — #Mastodon came on the scene in 2016 and promised a more user-friendly experience. Coupled with some fortunate timing and early publicity it quickly became the darling of the fediverse. It’s certainly the software with the most amount of users. 1.28 million active users back in October, but recent events mean this number is woefully inaccurate today.

Pleroma — Less than a year after launch, disagreements with certain design decisions and direction with the Mastodon project gave birth to #Pleroma, a lightweight alternative to Mastodon that at the time ironically offered a more user-friend experience than Mastodon itself and pioneered features years ago that are just now being implemented by Mastodon and other projects. Pleroma’s bug claim to fame was that you could stand up a robust instance on a single RasperryPi with little trouble. Approximately 26,000 of your fediverse neighbors access the federation from their Pleroma accounts. (10/22/2022).

Pixelfed — #Pixelfed is the federation’s answer to Instagram. By standing up a public or private Pixelfed server you enable yourself (or the public) to post rich multimedia content (photos and videos), “stories”, and more that instantly are accessible to the rest of the federation. Over 36,000 of your fediverse peers are here right now through Pixelfed. (10/22/2022)

And there’s others!

Lemmy — #Lemmy is a federated version of Reddit (or Digg or HackerNews). It’s a federated link-aggregator. Individuals can stand up their own servers or communities of topics.

Funkwhale — #Funkwhale is a federated version of Soundcloud or Bandcamp for sharing your music library with other Funkwhale users and the Federation.

BookWyrm — #BookWyrm is a federated version of GoodReads. A federated instance by book lovers and for book lovers. 🟣🔵🟢⚫🟠🟡🟤🔴⚪

I've just written about how Second Life is largely ignored in the Metaverse context, but it's much much worse with worlds based on #OpenSimulator. Next to nobody even knows that it exists beyond its users, its former users and a few people in #SecondLife.

Why does it matter then? First of all, because #OpenSim is the technical foundation for something that comes as close to the literal #Metaverse as we've gotten thus far: the #Hypergrid.

Unlike just about all the other #VirtualWorlds, OpenSim isn't one monolithic entity completely owned and operated by one company or foundation or so. It isn't a virtual world per se. The name rather stands for thousands of big and small virtual worlds, so-called "grids". The world of Second Life is being referred to as a "grid", too. All these worlds are organised in squares of 256x256m, that's why.

In the case of OpenSim, these grids aren't just places within the same world. They are actually separate worlds. Each one of them is operated by someone else, and each one of them is even hosted individually, some on rented webspace, some on machines the grid owners run at home. Some are owned by companies, some by foundations, most by private persons. And they didn't "rent these worlds from OpenSim", they created them from scratch. There are no higher powers within the OpenSim ecosystem than the grid owners. It's the same as with e-mail or #XMPP or #Matrix or #Mastodon or any other project on the #Fediverse.

And here is where the #Hypergrid comes into play: At least 95% of these OpenSim grids are connected with each other, much like e-mail servers or XMPP servers or Mastodon instances or #Diaspora pods or #Friendica nodes or #Hubzilla hubs. Applied to virtual worlds, however, this borders on a sensation: You can have an avatar on one grid, and you can travel to all other grids on the Hypergrid. You usually even take your entire inventory with you, you can even pick up things on other grids and take them home with you, and you can become friends with avatars from other grids.

Essentially, what some big corporations and start-ups try to create from scratch right now has been around and in use since 2008 already. Not experimental use, but everyday production use. For something with so few developers behind it who, due to OpenSim's decentral nature, have to take care of various products, namely OpenSim itself and the viewers, this is remarkable.

In other points, OpenSim is very similar to Second Life. Community-building and creative possibilities are largely the same, only that creativity is stifled by the massive influx of high-quality payware that was stolen from Second Life and is now offered as freebies all over the Hypergrid. I'll come back to that. Okay, and because OpenSim is dirt-cheap in general, and because you can get far without paying a penny, most OpenSim users are unwilling to spend any money on it.

They also laugh about outrageouly expensive land on other worlds. Many of them sell land for hundreds of thousands or even millions of US dollars. Second Life offers land rentals; for example, a 256x256m region on the Mainland costs over $300 a month. Many OpenSim grids offer similar land rentals, but you can get a region of the same size for usually under $20, mostly under $15, often under $10 a month. Or you can host your land yourself and attach it to a grid. Or you can even run your own grid and attach it to the Hypergrid. Not only do most grids have such vast coordinate ranges that they're unlikely to run out of land anytime soon, but you can literally create your own new land.

Of course, all this is a nightmare for those who want to cash in on land sales or land rentals. And the abundance of land leads to the Hypergrid feeling even more like a wasteland than Second Life. By far most people own at least one region, many own more than one, and my estimation is that one out of a dozen OpenSim users is a grid admin.

But why does nobody know OpenSim? Well, I'd say that a key reason is that it's too decentralised. It doesn't have an umbrella organisation that a) represents OpenSim to the outside world and b) at least tries to steer what's happening in the ecosystem. OpenSim itself, i.e. the server application, is "represented" by, I think, one single remaining permanent developer, and even Ubit Umarov only works on OpenSim in his spare time. He doesn't even have a grid of his own, only a private region on OSgrid.

This means that there is no "official" grid. OSgrid comes closest. It was the first public grid, it's the oldest grid, it's the biggest grid (it has more land than Second Life), and it's still the grid with the most users. But it is not official. And its only connection to the OpenSim dev team (if there happens to be one) is that it contributes a lot of code. After all, OSgrid is still the same experimental, bleeding-edge grid that it was in 2007 when it was launched to test new features in public.

Like most other big grids, OSgrid presents itself as a stand-alone virtual world. It doesn't even mention that other worlds like it exist. It does mention the Hypergrid, but instead of explaining what the Hypergrid is, it only gives Hypergrid addresses to its most important official places. It also has its own forums that seem to try their best to blank out the existence of worlds outside OSgrid. It actually isn't too uncommon for grids to have their own forums. There is, however, not a single general and grid-independent OpenSim forum in English.

Mutual acknowledgement or even collaboration only exists between smaller grids that are less or not at all interested in competition between grids. This includes grids that rely on visitors from the Hypergrid because they've decided not to have a big community of their own, sometimes limiting the number of residents to the grid owners.

OpenSim also doesn't have an official viewer. There are several viewer projects, usually third-party Second Life viewers that also work with OpenSim, but each of them is its own little bubble with hardly any connection to elsewhere. In fact, the most popular viewer, the Phoenix Firestorm Viewer, can barely keep its OpenSim-specific development running and has to focus on Second Life.

The official OpenSimulator website, and it is actually official, is a wiki with operating a grid as the main focus and grid software development as the secondary focus. Its end user documentation is scarce, even less maintained than the rest of the wiki and thus not as up-to-date as it should be. Especially the list of public grids, basically the only connection between this website and the rest of the ecosystem, tends to be outdated. The Second Life Knowledgebase is more useful in anything that isn't OpenSim-specific, and for OpenSim-specific things, you often have to ask for help in-world.

OpenSim's central hub is OpenSimWorld which is "third-party" again and neither affiliated with the OpenSim devs nor with any one grid. It hosts the closest thing to a central community, but unfortunately with little to no moderation because the one-man staff sees himself as nothing more than the tech admin of a sim catalogue. OpenSimWorld also rendered in-world teleporters to other grids (and even within a grid) largely "obsolete", so these connections between grids and mutual acknowledgements are getting rarer and rarer.

All this contributes to OpenSim being basically completely unknown. Nobody feels responsible enough for OpenSim to advertise the ecosystem as a whole to the outside world. Everyone only cares for their project. The dev team is only that and only responsible for the server application. They would never advertise anything beyond that. Grids only ever advertise themselves, if at all, and even then mostly within the OpenSim ecosystem. If a grid significantly advertises itself beyond that, not only does it do so as a stand-alone world like Second Life or #HorizonWorlds, but grids that do so are usually grids that aren't really trustworthy. There seems to be more competition than cooperation between grids, not to mention bickering and long-standing petty feuds.

I think it'd be worth representing the OpenSim ecosystem at #FLOSS or hacker events so that the #FreeSoftware and #OpenSource scene becomes aware of it. But the sad fact is that there's nobody who could do that. The ecosystem as a whole doesn't have any representatives, nor does it have anyone who could appoint official representatives, and if you sent someone from a big grid, they'd probably advertise their grid first and foremost and give the impression that their grid is OpenSim.

Lastly, word of mouth doesn't work either because hardly anyone ever talks about OpenSim outside OpenSim.

Within all the ruckus about the #Metaverse, this is more than a pity. Companies and others try to create something they believe they'll be pioneers at, not knowing it already exists. It's quite similar to whenever someone decides to develop a free, decentral, distributed social network, not knowing that these have been around since #GNUsocial and Friendica, formerly known as #Mistpark, because they, too, get next to zero publicity.

It's also a pity because the developers and designers of the coming Metaverse could learn a lot from OpenSim. They could look at how worlds are connected with each other over the Hypergrid. How friendships and groups work on the Hypergrid, if they do, and if they don't, why. They could learn about enforcing rules, guidelines and content ratings in an ecosystem that isn't ruled over by one entity at the top or rather why certain Second Life approaches were bound to fail in OpenSim.

And they could gather some experiences in content protection, especially when, how and why it fails in Second Life and even much more so in OpenSim. Even better if they come to their senses and see that #NFTs on a #blockchain aren't a sensible solution because they've got their own ways of abuse which are being exploited right now.

There's the so-called Metaverse Standards Forum which tries to develop what OpenSim has been running for 14 years now. OpenSim, however, isn't represented in the #MetaverseStandardsForum at all, not by anyone. Because OpenSim doesn't have anyone to represent the entire ecosystem. Because nobody who deals with OpenSim feels even remotely responsible for the whole thing. Not the core devs, not a single one of the grids, not OpenSimWorld, not the Infinite Metaverse Alliance, nobody.

Everyone just cares for their niche. You could have half a dozen grids join the MSF, but then you'd end up with six grids representing themselves as individual grids rather than as parts of something bigger and overarching, and you still wouldn't have the OpenSim core dev team on-board. The core dev team, in turn, can barely keep up with developing OpenSim, so how should they have time to represent OpenSim in the MSF?

And so, the MSF will continue creating something which they wrongly believe has never been done before because there's nobody there to tell them about OpenSim. They'll have to design from scratch, from zero what they don't know already exists with open source codes to look at and with 14 years of experience to learn from.

By the way: #LindenLab isn't a member of the MSF either.

If someone actually started an umbrella organisation for OpenSim, and be it only to represent it, that might help, but it's also likely that it wouldn't because it would only join a tiny fraction of all possible participants under its roof. Important potential members wouldn't have enough time and/or energy, and I'm sure this will include the core dev team. Others simply won't be interested in contributing to anything beyond their niche. Others again will boycott it if they see the "wrong" grids or people having joined it. They don't want to collaborate with "this" grid or "that" person, and be it due to some six-year-old personal beef. Yet others will refuse to join because they dislike (one of) the founder(s), or because (one of) the founder(s) is a resident on the wrong grid. Of what few members the organisation may have, some will try their best to misuse their membership only for their own profit while others will quit again due to too much drama.

And it'd be everyone for themselves again like it is now.

Guten Abend #Fediverse

Guten Abend ihr Lieben,

Vorweg, ich bin nicht wirklich #neuhier im #Fediverse, ich habe schon seit Jahren einen Account drüben auf #Diaspora*. Auch einen #GnuSocial-Account, und ein Konto auf einem anderen Friendica Server habe ich, aber hier bin ich wie gesagt neu 🙂
Bin soweit eigentlich ganz zufrieden mit meinem Account bei D*, aber die Möglichkeiten der Vernetzung die #Friendica bietet, sind doch um einiges größer.
Ich habe wie oben schon erwähnt, noch einen anderen Friendica-Account, aber die Performance dort (Ladezeiten usw.) lässt wirklich zu wünschen übrig ... ich werde das andere Konto also schließen, wenn das hier so läuft wie erwartet.

Tja, was gibt es über mich zu sagen ... ich mag schöne Dinge, Bilder, Poesie, Kunst generell. (Aber tun wir das nicht alle 😇)
Ich lese gern, bin eher etwas zurückhaltend, aber habe nichts gegen ein gutes Gespräch, oder auch Diskussion, wenn man nicht der selben Meinung ist.
Ich versuche freundlich und unvoreingenommen jedermann gegenüber zu sein, allerdings gibt es Grenzen bei politischen Ansichten, Meinungen, Geisteshaltungen usw., wo ich dann den Kontakt abbreche, und auch nicht mehr weiter diskutieren möchte.

Ach ja, ich spreche und kann mich, auch schriftlich, mehr oder weniger gut in vier Sprachen ausdrücken: Deutsch, Französisch, Spanisch und Englisch.

Ich werde nach und nach meinen Bekannten von Diaspora* und dem übrigen Fediverse Kontaktanfragen zukommen lassen.

Ich wünsche euch noch einen schönen Abend, und eine tolle neue Woche!

Lorenzo

Source Photo: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/fantasy-night-ladder-universe-4063619/

🤓 Hallo zusammen, hier doch noch eine etwas verspätete #Vorstellung von mir:
Ich bin relativ #NeuHier auf #Friendica

Schon etwas länger, das heißt seit ca. einem Jahr, bin ich auf #Mastodon unterwegs als @caos
Anlass war damals v.a. der Kuketz-Blog. Erst nach und nach habe ich dann kennengelernt, was es noch alles gibt im großen, weiten #Fediversum 🚀

Meine Interessen sind u.a. #Linux #FOSS #Musik und #Sport.

🏐 🏓 ⚽ Ich habe immer sehr viel Sport gemacht, v.a. #Volleyball #Tischtennis #Fußball , bin aber nun leider seit 1,5 Jahren durch eine Knieverletzung im Reha-Training.

🎶 🎸 Musikalisch interessiere ich mich für ein breites Spektrum , nicht nur #Metal , sondern auch #Alternative #Grunge #Punk #Darkwave #Ska 🎺 u.v.m., war auch ab und zu auf Privatpartys als "DJ" 💿 🕺 engagiert und bin gerne auf Konzerten. Einen kleinen Einblick gibt es u.a. in diesem Thread: https://metalhead.club/@caos/106352109814044465 #DamalsInUnsererRockDiskothek

🐧 Ich bin im Linux-Guides-Forum aktiv und schreibe ab und zu auf gnulinux.ch . U.a. mit Distributionen für ältere Geräte und mit #CustomROM s habe ich mich privat etwas intensiver beschäftigt, um alte Laptops und Mobilgeräte wiederzubeleben, und darüber kleine Artikel geschrieben.
u.a.: #LineageOS #eOS #UbuntuTouch #PostmarketOS #DivestOS #ungoogled #Q4OS #Bodhi #RaspberryPi #LMDE #Sparky #Bunsenlabs

🐾 Vor einigen Wochen habe ich mit Unterstützung v.a. von @Aakerbeere 💙💛 und @Ückück / Stephanie Henkel den Aufruf #KommInsFediverseTaz gestartet. https://anonsys.net/display/bf69967c-2062-0a1c-358d-7f8597228647

Das war auch einer der Anlässe für diesen neuen Friendica-Account, da der sowohl mit Mastodon als auch mit #Diaspora , wo es schon lange einen semi-offiziellen taz-Account gibt, kommunizieren kann. @tazhttps://pod.geraspora.de/u/taz

Darüber hinaus gefällt mir aber Friendica auch sonst sehr gut, u.a. dass es auch auf längere Texte ausgerichtet ist und so auch tiefergehende Diskussionen ermöglichen kann. Ich freue mich über neue Anregungen und weiteren Austausch!