Go ahead. Try to force that upon Friendica that has called its instances “nodes” for almost 15 years now.

Or Hubzilla that not only calls them “hubs” but also resists any and all cultural or technological influences from anything that wasn’t created by Mike Macgirvin.

Also <insert Morpheus here> what if I told you that (streams) and Forte call them “communities”? You know, like Lemmy’s and PieFed’s “subreddits”?

Mostly Hubzilla. Also (streams), WriteFreely and Lemmy for special purposes.

Lemmy users = Redditors = geeks.

OP is talking about people for whom the Internet is Facebook, Google, YouTube and Amazon, and who have always only ever used phones and never in their lives laid their hands upon an actual computer.

People who had their Gmail account registered and configured by whoever sold them their phone (or one of their past phones).

Anything that goes beyond “load an app with the same name as the thing you want to use from the App Store, user name, password, go” is too complex for them.

Imagine being able to post only to Alice, Bob and Carol and nobody else ever laying their eyes on the post. Not in the Fediverse, not outside the Fediverse.

Imagine only Alice, Bob and Carol being able to reply to your posts, but all three being able to see and reply to each other’s replies.

Imagine being able to define groups of connections with which you can do the above.

Sounds like utopian science-fiction. Is reality.

Hubzilla (official website), a Friendica fork by Friendica’s own creator, offers literally what I’ve described above. It has since 2012, almost four years longer than Mastodon has been around.

If you want something more lightweight with not quite such a steep learning curve, there’s also (streams) (code repository from 2021 from the same creator, the result of a whole series of forks. Similar advanced and fine-grained permissions system, but somewhat easier to use.

Why does the fediverse not have a privacy control to limit who can see and interact with your posts?

It does. The Fediverse is more than Mastodon and Lemmy.

Especially Hubzilla and (streams) with their advanced permissions systems provide what you’re looking for and more. Only downsides are the learning curves ((streams)’ learning curve is not exactly shall, Hubzilla’s is steeper), UIs that don’t look like they were made in 2024 from venture capital and a total lack of native mobile apps (you can install both as PWAs, though).

Common misconception by Fediverse newbies: “Fediverse” is an umbrella term for a bunch of decentralised walled gardens. Like, Lemmy only connects to Lemmy, Mastodon only connects to Mastodon, Pixelfed only connects to Pixelfed etc. And if you’re on Mastodon, and your Facebook friends join Friendica, you need a Friendica account to get back in touch with them.

In reality, just about everything is interconnected with everything. No matter what it is.

You can use your Mastodon account to follow people on Pixelfed, on Friendica, on Misskey, whatever.

That said, having a separate Lemmy account makes sense because Lemmy/the Threadiverse is somewhat special in operation. Also, it’s all about conversations and groups, and Mastodon doesn’t understand neither. And starting a thread on Lemmy from Mastodon is not as straight-forward as starting a thread on Mastodon from Mastodon.

The closest you’d get would be with Hubzilla or (streams). Or Forte if it wasn’t experimental with no public instances yet. They even have file spaces with WebDAV on which you can upload files and then define who is permitted to see/access these files or the folders they’re in.

However:

What you want isn’t their default M.O. You’ll have to get used to and think yourself into something with a learning curve that’s even steeper than Friendica’s. You’ll have to learn and understand the permissions system, including giving nobody permission to see your connections. Ideally, all your connections would have to be smart enough to know how to to hide being connected to you from the public and to actually do so.

Encryption is optional and “uninstalled” by default for everyone, and it isn’t even available on all server instances (it’s up to the admin to activate that add-on, and then the user has to activate it, too). Also, it uses passphrases and not automatically generated key pairs.

Finally, if you insist in using it with a mobile app, you’re completely out of luck. It’s browser or PWA for all of them.

What really needs contributors are the streams repository and probably also Forte. They’re very powerful, they’re highly advanced, they’re secure and resilient, they’re basically what the whole Fediverse should be like, and they can blow not only Mastodon out of the water, but also Pleroma, Misskey and all their forks. But they only have half a maintainer at best because their creator has officially retired.

Allow me to elaborate:

These are the youngest offspring of a family of roughly Facebook-like Fediverse server applications created by Mike Macgirvin. They started in 2010 with Mistpark, later Friendika, now known as Friendica. The focus has never been on aping the UI/UX of something commercial and centralised, like Lemmy apes Reddit, but to create a replacement that’s actually better. Toss out stuff that sucks, add features that could be useful like full-blown blogging capability, including blogging-level text formatting, and a built-in file space with its own file manager.

The next in the family was a 2012 Friendica fork originally named Red that introduced the concept of nomadic identity. As of now, and outside developer instances, nomadic identity is a feature exclusive to Mike’s creations. Red became the Red Matrix, and in 2015, it was renamed and redesigned into Hubzilla, a “decentralised social CMS” and the Fediverse’s biggest feature monster.

What followed was a whole bunch of forks, mostly development forks, only one of which was officially declared stable. This led to the creation of the streams repository in October, 2021. It’s a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of Hubzilla, but the first fork already lost many of Hubzilla’s extra features and a lot of Hubzilla’s connectivity.

The streams repository contains a Fediverse server application that is officially and intentionally nameless and brandless (“streams” is the name of the repository, not the name of the application), that is not a product, that is not a project, and that is just as intentionally released into the public domain, save for 3rd-party contributions inherited from Hubzilla that are under various free licenses.

While (streams), as it is colloquially called, may not have Hubzilla’s wealth of features, it has to be one of the two most advanced pieces of Fediverse software out there. With its permissions system that is even improved over Hubzilla’s, hardly anything can match it in safety, security and privacy. On top comes resilience through nomadic identity. Also, (streams) is more adapted to a Fediverse that’s driven by ActivityPub and dominated by Mastodon whereas Hubzilla seems stuck in the mid-2010s in some regards.

At this point, it should be mentioned that while Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can communicate through ActivityPub, none of them is based on it. AFAIK, Friendica is still based on its own protocol, DFRN, which is used by nothing else. Hubzilla is based on an older version of the Nomad protocol known as Zot6. (streams) is based on the current version of Nomad and also understands Zot6 for the best possible connectivity with Hubzilla.

So one of the latest development goals for the streams repository was the introduction of nomadic identity via ActivityPub, a concept that first appeared in 2023. I’m not sure how far this has been developed. But Mike created a new (streams) fork named Forte in August this year which had all support for non-ActivityPub protocols removed, probably also to cut down the maze of ID for everything which blew up on (streams) when support for FEP-ef61 was pushed to the release branch in July. Also, Forte has a name, it has a brand, it has a license, it has fully functional nodeinfo, and it is a project. Otherwise, Forte is identical to (streams).

Currently, there is only one Forte instance with one user, and that’s Mike’s private channel which mostly only his friends know about. Forte can be considered very experimental at this point, at least until Mike declares it ready for prime-time. After all, Forte has to handle nomadic identity via ActivityPub which, so far, is only proven to work under developer lab conditions at best.

However, there isn’t much going on in terms of development. After the hassle that was getting malfunctioning (streams) back on track this summer, Mike officially retired from Fediverse development at the turn from August to September. He hasn’t quit entirely, but he only works on (streams) and Forte sparsely. At the same time, the (streams) community was and still is too small to have a willing and able developer amongst themselves, and Forte has no community.

According to Mike, Forte could (and should) be “the Fediverse of 2030”. It only needs more people working on it.

You mean as an end user or as a hub admin?

Hubzilla is my main daily driver in the Fediverse and has been since before the big Twitter migration of 2022. In fact, I’ve never used Twitter.

A few attributes that could describe Hubzilla are “powerful”, “complex”, but also “unusual”.

Hubzilla is basically Facebook on coke and 'roids (without what sucks on Facebook) meets a full-blown blogging engine meets Google Cloud or iCloud services meets Dropbox with a small Web hoster on top, a simple wiki engine etc. etc. plus federation into all kinds of directions (Twitter if your hub admin has the money, diaspora*, WordPress cross-poster etc.), and that still isn’t all that Hubzilla can do.

If Friendica is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, then Hubzilla is a full-blown Leatherman.

There’s little that you couldn’t possibly do with Hubzilla. You can use it for Facebook-style social networking, actually even better than Mastodon. You can run moderated forum/discussion groups on it. You can use it as a blog with all the shebang (except it sends Note-type objects rather than Article-type objects over ActivityPub, and text formatting is done in BBcode), and you don’t even have to worry about where to upload your images because Hubzilla has a built-in file space, complete with subdirectory support and file managers. You can use it as your personal WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV server. You can run simple websites on it (hubzilla.org, the official Hubzilla website, is built on a Hubzilla channel itself).

Friendica, which Hubzilla was forked from back in 2012 (although it didn’t become Hubzilla before 2015), already has multiple profiles per account. You can assign profiles to contacts so that different people can see different sides of you. You can have a public profile with only basic informations. One profile for work and colleagues. One LinkedIn-style career profile. One profile for your family. One profile for your booze buddies or nerd friends or whatever. All with different information about you.

Hubzilla goes even further: Your identity is not tied to your account anymore. Your identity is containerised in what Hubzilla calls a “channel”. And you can have multiple channels on one account. Each channel is like a separate account mostly everywhere else, a fully separate Fediverse identity, but all on the same login. And each channel can have multiple profiles.

For example, you can run one channel as your personal daily-driver channel. Three channels as forums/discussion groups (think Lemmy communities/subreddits) for different topics. One channel with a webpage on it. Whatever. And nobody can tell that these channels are on the same account, save maybe for the hub admin if they’re eager to do some SQL-fu in the database. (Or everyone if all these channels are on a private, single-user hub.)

Or what if you need another Fediverse identity for special purposes? On Lemmy or Mastodon, you need another account. On Hubzilla, you create a new channel on your existing account. You don’t even have to log off and on again to switch between channels.

The channels system was basically introduced to make one of Hubzilla’s killer features possible: nomadic identity. What most Fediverse users consider utter science-fiction was actually already introduced in 2012. Granted, this is only possible because Hubzilla is based on its own protocol rather than ActivityPub, but still.

Nomadic identity makes it possible to have a channel, one and the same channel, on multiple hubs at the same time. Not with dumb copies, but with real-time, live, hot, bidirectional backups of just about everything. You can have as many clones as you want to/as you can find appropriate hubs to clone to.

Your channel always has one main instance which also defines its ID (at least from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla) and one or several clones (which, from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla, all have the same ID as the main instance). Whatever happens on your main instance is copied to the clones within seconds. You can also log onto your clones and use them. E.g. when the hub with your main instance is offline, you lose nothing. Whatever happens on one of the clones is copied to the other clones and to your main instance.

Oh, and if the hub with your main instance goes down for good, or if you want to move, you can define one of your clones your main instance, and your old main instance is demoted to clone. This means that if your channel is nomadic, one server going down won’t take your channel with it. You’ll still have the self-same channel elsewhere. Your home server gives up the ghost, you lose nothing.

But don’t expect Hubzilla to be easy to get into. It’s nothing like Reddit, it’s nothing like Twitter has ever been, and it’s nothing like most of the rest of the Fediverse. The closest would be (streams), a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork)? of Hubzilla itself, and everything in this chain is/was by the same creator. Followed by Friendica and Forte, still by the same creator, and Forte’s only instance is currently the private instance of said creator. But everything else in the Fediverse is nothing like Hubzilla.

First newbie obstacle: You can’t follow anyone on Mastodon. Or almost anywhere else in the Fediverse. That’s because ActivityPub is optional, and it’s off by default so that your new channel only supports that one nomadic protocol at first. Non-nomadic protocols kind of disturb nomadic identity, mostly because you have to re-connect non-nomadic contacts manually, one by one. And back when Hubzilla was made, it was actually a tempting idea to run a purely nomadic channel.

To add to the difficulty, there is no ActivityPub switch in the settings. ActivityPub is an “app” that needs to be “installed”. Hubzilla is very modular, and so are its channels where not all its features are enabled by default.

And then there’s the permissions system. Something like this exists nowhere in the Fediverse that isn’t made by the Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte creator Mike Macgirvin. Not even Friendica has it to such an extent. It’s extensive, it’s fine-grained, and it’s powerful.

But unlike everything in the Fediverse not created by Mike, it does not default to “everything is allowed to everyone unless muted or blocked”. Its default settings are still geared towards 2012 when it was still named Red (from spanish la red = the network), when the Federation, the precursor of the Fediverse, was still small, and four years before Mastodon was launched. In those days, the idea of a purely Red/Red Matrix/Hubzilla network that offers a maximum of privacy, safety and security was not too far-fetched.

And so, by default, certain things are disallowed unless explicitly allowed to certain contacts by means of contact role. By default, your posts all only go to a privacy group (think Mastodon lists on more coke and even more 'roids) instead of to everyone. Before you can really get going, you’ll have to install multiple apps of which you don’t know what they do and adjust things of which you don’t know that they exist, much less what they’re for. It takes months to become a halfway routined user, and it takes years to be come a power user who realises that setting everything to public is actually stupid, and who knows how to tone down the settings again while not keeping your existing contacts out.

Yeah, the UI/UX is far from top notch. But keep in mind that Hubzilla is a fork of Friendica. Which is from 2010. In 2010, social networks and social media were still mostly geared towards the desktop, and phone apps were gimmicks rather than bare necessities. Both Friendica and Hubzilla were created by only one person. And he’s a protocol designer and not a full-stack Web developer. Mike can make UIs work, but he can’t make them as pretty as what Apple whips up.

Hubzilla is very themeable, but it currently has only got one official theme. Its name “Redbasic” indicates its origin: Red. As in Hubzilla, three years before it was Hubzilla. 2012. It hasn’t changed much since then, except it became more configurable with Hubzilla 9 this year.

There used to be more themes, but even after the community took over from Mike in 2018, Hubzilla never had more than two core developers. And, again, it’s an utter monster. The devs invested most of their time into the vast backend, consisting of the core and the more essential apps. Over time, not only several apps fell to the wayside (including a chess game which was dropped in 2020 because of a big protocol upgrade), but so did all themes except Redbasic. The devs only had time to upgrade one theme to new or changed features, and so the other themes became incompatible and were eventually dropped.

Brand-new third-party themes are in the making, and a few will soon be rolled out. But I wouldn’t count on them being included into every new Hubzilla installation, much less all existing hubs.

Speaking of apps: There’s no official Hubzilla app, neither for iOS nor for Android. There’s one app for Android named Nomad. It’s only available on F-Droid. And it hasn’t been updated in a whopping five years. On more recent devices, it doesn’t even work anymore. And, in fact, it’s a Web app. It integrates Hubzilla’s Web interface instead of having everything on a dedicated, native mobile UI. In other words, there aren’t that many advantages of using Nomad over using a browser.

There’s also a very, very, very bare-bone Android app, I think it was made by Hubzilla’s main dev, that can only post to Hubzilla and nothing else. You can’t even use it to read anything. It isn’t available in any app store.

The best you can do if you want to use Hubzilla on a phone is install it as a Progressive Web App.

Reason #1: It overloads them mentally. It was hard enough to wrap their minds around Mastodon not being the one website they thought it is.

Reason #2: They got so used to their nice and cosy and fluffy and friendly woolly mammoth being the entire Fediverse, and everything they ever interact with being Mastodon, that everything they (might) have to interact with that is not Mastodon is too much of a disturbance. There being something else in the Fediverse other than Mastodon simply feels too wrong.

No idea, I’m not that deeply into it.

The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren’t Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.

If you see someone tell Mastodon users that the Fediverse isn’t Mastodon, they’re hardly ever on Mastodon themselves. They’re most likely on Friendica which suffers the most from obnoxious Mastodon users, and if not, they’re likely to be on Firefish or Akkoma or sometimes on Hubzilla.

The most extreme case I’ve encountered was a Mastodon developer who tried to convince me, a Hubzilla veteran, that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete project in the Fediverse. Fortunately for him, I didn’t ask him about full text formatting support, permissions, nomadic identity, multiple independent identities on one login, WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV or a built-in wiki engine.

But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it’s a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO.

Worse yet, “coming into it” is also applied to everything in the Fediverse that isn’t Mastodon. After learning that there’s, in fact, more than Mastodon in the Fediverse, many Mastodon users still think Eugen Rochko has invented the Fediverse, and everything must have come after Mastodon.

Thus, even Friendica users who have been around since before Mastodon even saw its very first release are being forced to ditch Friendica’s own culture, adopt Mastodon’s culture instead and stop using all of Friendica’s features that Mastodon doesn’t have. And Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon. It has its own well-defined culture which is very different from Mastodon’s because Friendica is so much different from Mastodon.

It’s almost like European colonists vs natives, only that the European colonists didn’t assume the natives had entered the previously completely uninhabited land after them.

Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could buy Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances.

Or going someplace in the Fediverse that’s neither Mastodon nor Lemmy nor Pixelfed.

I think in many cases it was never about Bluesky or Jack Dorsey who never really had a saying on Bluesky proper anyway. It was more about keeping the Fediverse ActivityPub-only or even Mastodon-only.

In that light, I think the only reason why there haven’t been any calls for totally Fediblocking all of Hubzilla is because 75% of the Fediverse have never even heard the name, and maybe a few hundred people outside Hubzilla know how it works and what it does. No critical mass to be appalled. And Hubzilla not being based on ActivityPub and technically being bridged to Mastodon via its own per-channel bridges would be only one out of many possible reasons to want it “gone from the Fediverse”.

Because nobody knows they exist. Especially not on Mastodon. And even less outside the Fediverse, tech media included.

And truth be told, way too many Mastodon users don’t want to know. They want the Fediverse to remain what they thought it was when they joined: only vanilla Mastodon.

Really goes to show that Lemmy is full of tech-curious geeks: Tell a Lemmy user about a Fediverse project that’s neither Lemmy nor Mastodon, and it’s much more likely for the reply to be something along the lines of, “where public instances.”

When /kbin was zerg-rushed after the Reddit enshittification, it wasn’t ready yet. It was a public alpha. It had five instances, all official, all experimental, only one of them public. I guess the dev had intended to calmly and orderly develop it until it’d be ready for prime-time. But all of a sudden, it was either developing missing features or removing bugs for those who daily-drove it in this state in expectation of it being a stable point release.

Curated tits then?

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