FediDB seems to be opinionated as well. It seems like if Daniel doesn’t like a server app, he won’t add it. AFAIK, he has been notified about the existence of Forte, but he still hasn’t added it.

There’s also the FediIndex which, however, isn’t as convenient to use.

You may also want to support groups on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

Fair warnings ahead: First of all, there is no central index for them whatsoever. You’ll probably have to find a way to crawl them.

Also, crawling anything on (streams) is difficult. It officially and intentionally does not have a name (not even kidding here). It’s the only Fediverse server application that doesn’t even come with a default server identifier. A Lemmy server always identifies as “lemmy”. A (streams) server rarely identifies as “streams”, only when the admin explicitly and intentionally makes it identify as “streams”. Otherwise, it has identifiers all over the place, usually automatically derived from the server name.

What makes crawling (streams) even harder is that almost all nodeinfo code has been removed from (streams) on purpose. It’s also being kept away from all Fediverse stats and listing pages like The Federation, Fediverse Observer, FediDB and FediIndex on purpose.

Forte does have an official name and branding. However, AFAIK Forte still offers the possibility to change the server identifier to something else than “forte”. Also, while it does have nodeinfo, Forte’s nodeinfo doesn’t send any stats AFAIK, only zeroes for everything.

The issue isn’t instances.

The issue is that Lemmy isn’t designed for interaction with single actors, e.g. Mastodon users or PeerTube channels. Lemmy can only interact with groups, and that’s by design because it’s a purist Reddit/Hacker News clone.

If you have one account someplace that isn’t Lemmy or Mbin (or something similarly specialised), you can connect to and interact with just about everything everywhere.

Just because they know the Fediverse, doesn’t mean they know Lemmy.

For more than 50% of all Mastodon users (that’s more than 25% of all Fediverse users), the Fediverse equals Mastodon. For large parts of the rest, if it doesn’t behave like Mastodon, it’s disturbing.

Besides, how are they supposed to learn about Lemmy anyway? Yes, in theory, Mastodon and Lemmy are federated. In theory.

In fact, however, they’re almost completely incompatible. Lemmy is all about groups. It doesn’t support any interaction between users directly. Mastodon, on the other hand, is about users interacting with each other directly. It has no support for groups whatsoever. At all. Nada. Zilch.

One of many reasons why there’s almost no interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy that’d demonstrate to Mastodon users that Lemmy exists by confronting them with Lemmy content.

By the way, the latter won’t work anyway. Mastodon doesn’t show you what software a message came from. Thus, most Mastodon users assume that everything they see comes from Mastodon.

Mastodon. Hands down.

Mastodon has more monthly active users than the entire rest of the Fediverse combined. There are lots of people for whom the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Most of the time, when someone hears about the Fediverse for the first time, it’s explained to them as only Mastodon, allegedly because that’s easier to understand. And there are vastly more people who have heard of Mastodon, but not the Fediverse, than who have heard of any other Fediverse software, but not the Fediverse.

There are tons of phone apps made for Mastodon and only Mastodon. There are websites that have “Fedi” in their name, but that are built hard against only Mastodon, and if they’re compatible with anything else, it’s by chance. diaspora* (remember 2010 when those four kids announced a free, open-source, decentralised “Facebook killer”, asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding and got over $200,000) refuses to join the Fediverse because, according to one dev, Fediverse developers don’t “implement ActivityPub”, they “implement Mastodon”.

Lots of people say that claiming that Mastodon is the Fediverse is justified.

Here are the numbers from the FediIndex:

• Most active instances: Mastodon (36.98%; Lemmy is 9th with 1.11%)
• Most accounts: Mastodon (51.16%; Lemmy is 7th with 1.77%)
• Most monthly active accounts (not counting Misskey and GoToSocial whose stats are off): Mastodon (51.17%; Lemmy is 5th with 2.37%)
• Most posts: Mastodon (60.48%; Lemmy is 10th with 0.54%)

Hey folks, I have several accounts across the fediverse (Lemmy, pixelfed, mastodon, bookwyrm), and I think it would be neat to have a single identity across all these platforms.

This would be possible if they all implemented nomadic identity.

But for starters, nomadic identity via ActivityPub (as opposed to via Zot/Nomad) is still quite young. No Fediverse server application has ever successfully been converted from non-nomadic and account = identity to Forte’s level of nomadic identity (which ActivityPub-based Forte has inherited from Nomad-based (streams)).

Besides, even if some Fediverse server app actually managed to go all the way in converting to full nomadicity, I can’t see Mastodon do that. Or Lemmy, for that matter.

And even nomadic identity would require you to have separate accounts on Lemmy and Pixelfed and Mastodon and BookWyrm. Even if your identity was spread across Lemmy and Pixelfed and Mastodon and BookWyrm servers. For your identity does not include your login credentials.

What you will definitely not get is a “pan-Fediverse” login (create a Lemmy or Mastodon account and be able to use it to log into any server of any Fediverse application and use it like with a local account). There’s a whole pile of reasons why this will never happen.

Hubzilla.

It’s the most powerful and feature-rich Fediverse server application ever, hands down. Also because it has features implemented that go vastly beyond what ActivityPub is capable of.

It was made by Friendica’s own creator by first forking Friendica twice over in 2011, then completely re-writing the second fork in 2012 and then expanding the re-written second fork in 2015.

While it was the first application to ever implement ActivityPub (July, 2017; two months before Mastodon), it has always been based on its own protocol, Zot, that was invented by Hubzilla’s own creator in 2011.

It’s Friendica, much more modular, with nomadic identity, with a staggering permissions system, expanded into a full-blown “social content management system” with all bells and whistles.

It’s basically Facebook meets WordPress meets Nextcloud meets a whole lot of other things.

Features:

• Can be used both like Mastodon (follow people/accounts) and like Lemmy (join groups), and that’s just the beginning
• Account and identity are not the same
• One account can contain multiple fully independent identities (kind of “accounts within an account”, only they’re called “channels”)
• Nomadic identity: A channel can exist on multiple fully independent servers simultaneously; the instances of the channel are mutual live and hot backups of each other; this also makes moving identities from one server to another vastly more complete than on most other Fediverse server applications
• OpenWebAuth magic sign-on: Hubzilla logins are recognised by (streams) and Forte and itself; Hubzilla itself recognises logins on Mitra, Friendica, (streams), Forte and itself
• ActivityPub connectivity is only optional; can be used as an “anti-Mastodon drawbridge”
• Optional connectivity to diaspora*
• Optional crossposters to WordPress, LiveJournal, Libertree and DreamWidth
• Can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds
• Each channel generates two Atom feeds itself, one for posts, one for comments
• Content from any contact can be automatically reposted (“channel sources”)
• Can be installed as a progressive Web app
• Multiple profiles per channel; one default public profile and any number of additional private profiles that can be assigned to certain contacts so that they can know things about you that the general public must not necessarily know
• Extensive profiles which can be made even more extensive (multiple dozen dedicated fields) optionally
• Channels can hide from directories
• Channels can be flagged NSFW
• The second-most advanced permissions system in the whole Fediverse; it works on three levels (for the whole channel, for each contact individually, for certain content)
• Discussion groups (called “community forums”) which are channels with a special channel type/with special channel settings
• Four channel types to choose from: public, private, community forum and a custom type in which 17 permission settings can be adjusted individually
• The custom channel type allows for various degrees of private and/or moderated groups
• The permissions system makes it possible to grant full administration permission for your channel to any contact with client-side OpenWebAuth support; this also makes it possible to appoint additional admins/moderators for community forums
• Channel-wide filter, consisting of one blocklist and one allowlist; optional individual filter with blocklist and allowlist per contact (as in, you can follow someone and then filter them and only them); the filter system has loads of options from regex to a special filter syntax with Boolean operators, making it one of the most advanced and powerful filter systems in the Fediverse
• Enclosed threaded conversations like on blogs/Facebook/Tumblr/Reddit/Hacker News/Slashdot/etc. with one post and otherwise comments; supports FEP-171b “Conversation Containers”
• Fully capable of long-form blogging
• Hashtag cloud
• Optional list or cloud of internal, non-federating keywords
• Can both render and generate the full gamut of HTML text formatting
• Supports both titles and summaries in separate fields (the summary field is the same field that Mastodon has been misusing as a CW field since 2017)
• No character limits worth mentioning (technically, the character limit for message texts is 16,777,215)
• Images can be embedded within the message text of any post or comment like in a blog post; no limit for how many images can be embedded
• No limit for poll options either
• Full support for forum-style quotes
• Full support for quote-tweet-style quote-posts; these are dumb copies of the original message
• Stream sorting options:
  • Complete conversations, most recent comment first (default)
  • Complete conversations, most recent post first
  • Single-message piecemeal à la Mastodon
• Stream filtering options:
  • DMs
  • Messages/conversations from a certain privacy group
  • Messages/conversations from a certain community forum
  • Messages marked with a star (a kind of primitive bookmark)
  • Your own messages
  • Messages filed into a “folder” (a more advanced bookmarking system)
  • Messages/conversations from a certain contact
• Built-in cloud file space with support for subfolders at any depth, WebDAV access and its own file manager; the file space is also used to store images and other media embedded in messages; permissions apply here as well, and guest read-access tokens can be granted
• Event calendar with support for Event-type ActivityStreams objects
• CalDAV calendar server which uses the event calendar frontend
• Optional CardDAV addressbook server
• Optional articles (non-federating written pieces of virtually unlimited length; can be used for blogging without throwing excessively long posts at Mastodon users)
• Optional planning cards (similar to articles, but with a few extra features)
• Optional wikis (any number of independent wikis per channel with any number of pages each)
• Optional static webpages that can include dynamic content from elsewhere on the channel; the feature can also be used to pimp up the channel itself
• Optional notes
• Optional OpenStreetMap support
• Optional QR code generator
• Extensive customisation options for what the channel looks like even with the default Redbasic theme, and that doesn’t even take third-party themes into account which basically give Hubzilla an entirely new Web UI

Friendica has only got four advantages over Hubzilla. One, it supports the Mastodon client API (although that’s half-useless because Mastodon apps don’t even cover 20% of Friendica’s features). Two, it has mobile apps of its own, although stable releases only exist for Android; on Hubzilla, there’s only the Web UI for everyone anywhere. Three, it has even more connection options like being able to integrate a Bluesky account and “remote-control” it. Four, it’s easier to use; this is also because Hubzilla is highly modular with tons of optional, off-by-default stuff whereas just about everything is hard-coded to permanently on on Friendica.

Otherwise, Friendica is no real match for Hubzilla, and Bonfire is even less of a match.

Additional hilarity: The German Federal government, i.e. the jurisdiction under which Ursula von der Leyen resides, would be directly affected. They literally have their own Mastodon server: https://social.bund.de/. It _will_have to support the KIDS Act, regardless of whether or not kids (or anyone who isn’t part of or tied to the German Federal government) can make an account there.

They should address to Uschi and tell her that if they can’t implement what she wants with taxpayers’ money, then thousands of spare-time, hobbyist admins can’t possibly implement it with their own money either.

The German Green Party has its own Mastodon server, too: https://gruene.social/.

The German public broadcast service has one: https://ard.social/.

But corporate Germany is stuck in the early 1990s technologically. Most politicians are stuck in the 1980s at best. And many want to go back at least to the mid-1960s.

Not only that.

Some go as far as demanding 100% AI-free Fediverse server instances. OS kernel, userland, Web server, database server, Fediverse server application etc. etc., the whole stack 100% devoid of any code that went through an AI at some point. And they accept no compromises. Well, other than sticking on their Mastodon servers on which probably the whole stack is partially written by AI.

I’m actually waiting for someone to hard-fork Mastodon 3, not only in order to get rid of “AI slop” code, but also to make “the Fediverse” feel as purist as during the big hype of October/November, 2022 again.

My guess is that Friendica’s issues lie in its various federation connectors. They seem like leftovers from Friendica’s early days or derived from such.

Part of Friendica’s concept is to be able to connect to just about everything and then some. Friendica itself is based on a combination of its own DFRN protocol and ActivityPub. It connects via ActivityPub. It connects via the diaspora* protocol. It can crosspost to WordPress, any other XML-RPC-based blog, LiveJournal, Libertree and Dreamwidth. It can integrate accounts from Twitter, Tumblr and Bluesky. It can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds. It can “federate” via e-mail.

Sound fine and dandy. The actual issue is two-fold: Friendica’s federation code is terribly inefficient. As I’ve said, it seems to be Mike Macgirvin’s first shot at building such stuff, either untouched since ca. 2010/2011 or derived from similarly old code. Besides, if I remember Friendica right, none of this is really optional. If the server admin activates it, it’s permanently on for all accounts, regardless of whether they actually use it or not.

Sure, it worked well under lab conditions when there were only few connectors. And it worked well while Friendica was just a few very early adopters playing and tinkering around with it. But when these became a few thousand people actually daily-driving it, and the number of connectors gradually grew, shit got real.

I remember Friendica nodes closing their registration at not even 150 users back in the day because they were full. Granted, these were mostly nodes that had the Facebook connector on (which worked like the Bluesky connector nowadays), and people would mirror their entire Facebook timelines with hundreds of “friends” into Friendica. Still, nodes without the Facebook connector didn’t fare that much better.

And yes, there were public Friendica nodes disappearing spontaneously all the time. That’s why Mike invented nomadic identity and created Hubzilla in the long run.

One of the first steps on the way was in 2012 when he took Red, the fork of a fork of Friendica that would eventually become Hubzilla, and re-wrote the entire backend against his new Zot protocol. In the course of doing that, he must have redone all the federation stuff. In addition, he made all protocols that aren’t Zot, RSS and Atom optional and turned them off by default on each newly created channel.

I have no other explanation as to why hub.netzgemeinde.eu is working that well with 3.5K channels (only a bit over 220 of which have recently been active, but the inactive ones cause their share of load, too), including cloned channels as well as clones, with a whole lot of add-ons activated, on an ARM-based server, operated by a guy who pays for the server himself and refuses to accept donations.

Technically speaking, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte ought to be parts of the Threadiverse, too. They’ve always had enclosed threaded conversations and even discussion groups built in. Except for Friendica, they support FEP-171b “Conversation Containers”.

But look at how few people on Lemmy have even only heard of Mastodon. Friendica is much more unknown there. Those who know Hubzilla are a subset of those who know Friendica. And (streams) and Forte are next to completely unknown beyond Hubzilla’s actual users.

The Threadiverse is not named after Threads by Meta Platforms, Inc. The term “Threadiverse” is older than Threads by Meta Platforms, Inc.

It is named after Lemmy’s and /kbin’s and Mbin’s and PieFed’s “killer feature” of enclosed threaded conversations, with exactly one post followed any number of comments, where everyone always receives all of the comments. Something that was (and often still is) considered exclusive to these four applications.

In stark contrast to the de-facto Fediverse default, Mastodon. Where everything in a thread is a post. Where the concept of comments doesn’t exist. Where conversations are a filthy hack because it’s social media, and replies to replies aren’t part of the concept.

Where timelines always only consist of single posts with seemingly no context, and only a small variation in a small icon tells you that there is a context in the first place. Where seeing even only the branch of a conversation that any given post is in takes some effort, and seeing the whole conversation with all branches takes even more effort, not to mention the knowledge that this can be done in the first place, much less how it can be done.

Where you have to be mentioned to know that someone has replied to you. Like, where I would have to mention everyone in this branch of this conversation (@fonix232@fedia.io @speedythefirst@lemmy.zip @OpenStars@discuss.online @ceiphas@feddit.org) so that even only they receive my reply (everyone else in the conversation doesn’t). Where whoever will reply to me will automatically mention these four participants plus me.

The “Thread” in “Threadiverse” doesn’t stand for Meta Threads. It stands for “we can do proper threads, as in enclosed threaded conversations, something that Mastodon can’t, something that most Mastodon users believe the whole Fediverse can’t!”

Tell that to the gajillion of Mastodon servers whose TLD is .social. Including mastodon.social which is home to over 20% of all monthly active Fediverse users.

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.