It won’t replace anything. It’s just another alternative.

Friendica has its advantages. Hubzilla has its advantages. (streams) has its advantages. (streams) can’t replace either because both have features that (streams) will never implement.

Always the same.

“The Fediverse in its entirety is objectively unuseable and repulsive unless it invests $100M into corporate-level UIs and corporate-level branding/brand design. What do you mean, the Fediverse doesn’t have $100M?”

No idea. I’ve stopped using diaspora* eons ago.

Ironically, Google+ was an all-out diaspora* ripoff. And Google got away with it because they brazenly stole from something that nobody even knew existed.

Remember Google’s new UI style? The black bar at the top? Stolen from diaspora* for Google+.

Also, everyone claims that Google+ invented the concept of “circles”. Actually, Google just ripped off diaspora*'s aspects. (And Friendica had them several months before diaspora* even. So Friendica had them first. Not diaspora*. And Google even less.)

Won’t happen.

Around December 29th, multiple big diaspora* pods shut down. According to one source, diaspora* lost over half of its users within three days. On January 25th, diasp.org, one of the biggest pods, will meet its end.

Also, if anything, Friendica (plus Hubzilla plus Socialhome) will suck the rest of life out of diaspora*. diaspora* users will move there from their own dying pods to stay in contact both with their friends who still hold out on diaspora* and with their friends who have moved on to something that uses ActivityPub. And the former will become fewer and fewer as more and more pods shut down.

This is even fairly easy for (streams) which is a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork?) of a fork of Friendica by Friendica’s own creator, eleven years after Friendica. And I wouldn’t even feel bad about it.

That’s because (streams) has only got two public, open-registration instances. If you’re in North America, it’s Rumbly. If you’re in Europe, it’s Nomád (with a German veteran admin who also runs two Hubzilla hubs, who is savvy enough to single-handedly re-write Hubzilla’s entire help system from scratch in both German and English, and who plans to do the same for (streams)).

And it’s because (streams) intentionally keeps itself away from instance-listing websites like Fediverse Observer and FediDB, so being railroaded to any one specific instance is just about the only chance you have to get into (streams).

Granted, it has a learning curve that’s even steeper than Friendica’s. It doesn’t have a UI/UX that looks like $10M of VC. And there’s no way whatsoever to use (streams) with any kind of dedicated, native mobile Fediverse app, especially not its own official iPhone app named “Streams” that looks like $20M of VC.

Knud Puppetsen, is that you on the picture?

why the fuck are they so consistently BAD at naming things???

Because the guy who developed Mistpark within four months in 2010 in his spare time on a budget of exactly zero didn’t have millions for hired marketing experts to design a name for something that literally had never been done before.

Good luck going around, putting the proverbial gun against the devs of way over 100 Fediverse projects that are fully independent from another (no, there is no central Fediverse branding department) and forcing them to rename their stuff NOW OR ELSE!!!

A few exceptions that are trochees right now:

• Forte (which may pretty well be the Fediverse of 2030 by this logic)
• Iceshrimp
• Sharkey
• Mitra
• Lemmy
• Mbin
• PieFed
• PeerTube
• Funkwhale
• Owncast
• BookWyrm

When Friendica was launched in 2010 (yes, it’s way older than both Mastodon and Lemmy, go figure), it was named Mistpark.

Which, to a German like me, sounds like “dung park” or “manure park”. Which, by the way, is the reason why Mike Macgirvin renamed it.

Friendica user: “You say you want the Fediverse to have this feature? The Fediverse has this feature. Mastodon doesn’t, but the Fediverse has. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. Friendica has it. Friendica has had it since its inception in 2010, over five years before Mastodon was launched. And Friendica has always been part of the Fediverse. And since Mastodon was launched, it has been federated with Friendica. So there.”

Programmers either don’t understand that “nice to look at and use” is actually a really important aspect of an app/program, or it’s a lot harder to do that well than it seems from the outside. I really don’t know. When it’s just one person making the whole thing, it makes sense that they split their work where they can.

It could be both. I guess the former is widespread amongst Linux-based hobby coders who use a minimalist window manager or even a terminal multiplexer instead of a full-blown desktop environment. They don’t see the appeal in good UIs.

But they may also fall victim to the latter because they see good UIs so rarely that they simply don’t know what good UIs look like. That, and most hobby FLOSS coders are backend devs above all. Even if you assemble 20 hobby coders for a project, you may have to appoint one who’ll begrudgingly have to make a UI without actually knowing how.

At least, some Fediverse server applications can not only be themed, but you can replace the entire Web UI. And there are capable UI designers in the Fediverse, just not so many as capable full-stack devs. Granted, they may not be on the same level as frontend devs with Apple paychecks, but still.

For example, Pleroma and Akkoma have gotten to a point where, I guess, Pleroma-FE and Akkoma-FE only see so much use because not everybody has heard of stuff like Mangane yet. But people who have gotten a taste of Mangane usually don’t want to go back.

Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are so extensively themeable that a user-selectable theme is very close to an all-new frontend. In practice, Hubzilla’s themeability fell victim to the effort of keeping Hubzilla’s monstrous backend maintained, and so it’s down to one theme whose name is not the only hint at it being stuck in 2012. Well, enter people who make new third-party themes to stop Hubzilla being as unuseable as it’s being made out to be.

I’ve recently read about that myself. But hosting anything Bluesky-related yourself is horrendously expensive because you need absolute monster servers with terabytes of disc space. Not to mention Bluesky’s convoluted architecture.

Both Hubzilla and (streams), in practice the only Fediverse server apps that have a “public stream” and users other than the dev, can do a lot to keep content private.

But tell that to the Mastodon users who only know Mastodon and the Lemmy users who only know Lemmy, both of whom “know” that nothing in the Fediverse is private because nothing on Lemmy and effectively nothing on Mastodon is private.

My point is that not everything in the Fediverse is public. Unlike what Mastodon and Lemmy users keep claiming because that’s all they know.

As an administrator, the only time you would want to turn on the public stream is if you are a public hub and accept new signups. It makes it easier for administrators and moderators to moderate the public content on their own server since they can see all public posts in one place. If someone is posting illegal content or spam, a moderator can see it, and remove it (and perhaps the user too).

Even then, it wouldn’t be a federated public stream that’s in plain sight for any visitor. At most, it’d be a local pubstream in plain sight for anyone. Or a federated public stream only visible to local users.

At least by German law, hubmins can be held liable for what’s happening on the pubstream because it’s happening on their “website”, and so they’re responsible for it. And remember that most public Hubzilla hubs and the two biggest ones are German.

And they can only connect to Threads because Meta doesn’t want to go after thousands of private single-user instances, clutter their blocklist with them and check every once in a while if they still exist to keep it from being clutterted too much.

Also, at least on Hubzilla and (streams), it’s the single-user instances that are likely to have an actually public pubstream. But not necessarily the federated one that Threads wants.

If you decide to make it public. Or if you’re on something that doesn’t leave you any choice like Lemmy.

If you’re on Hubzilla or (streams), and you’ve grokked it enough to use it accordingly, then you can actually post content in private to only selected users.

There are two common fallacies. One, the Fediverse is inherently private because it isn’t corporate. Two, the Fediverse is inherently public because everything on Mastodon or Lemmy or whatever is the only Fediverse project you’re familiar with is public.

Don’t have a publicly-viewable federated timeline. Bam, blocked.

BTW: Public instances of Hubzilla and (streams) never have such a thing. They could, they do have the technology, but the admins always decide against activating it in order not to be held liable for content that comes in from the rest of the Fediverse.