There are so many great #mastodon clients. My favorite from those I tried so far is @moshidon. Right now I am on @mastify, it's amazing but right now it lacks lot of features. There are also lot of other great clients like #Tusky and #Kaiteki.
Premier message posté depuis mon nouveau smartphone (qui me permet d'installer un client fediverse) :duck_disco:
En revanche, j'ai essayé #milktea sans succès, je me suis rabattu sur l'app mastodon classic qui fait le taff (même si bcp d'options manque à l'appel) #firefish#android#mastodon
Cc: @tournesol
I'm tempted to add the following preamble to all my posts and comments. This would answer a lot of questions right away and maybe leave nothing unclear.
Preamble
IMPORTANT: I am not on Mastodon. I am on Hubzilla. Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance. Hubzilla is a wholly different project in the Fediverse. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. The Fediverse has never been only Mastodon. And Hubzilla is not a fork of Mastodon either.
Mastodon was not even here first. The first was StatusNet from 2008 which later became GNU social. Then came Friendica in 2010. And Hubzilla is from 2015 and based on a project from 2012. Mastodon was launched in 2016. It was immediately federated with all three because it spoke a language that these three spoke, too. Except for GNU social, all are still federated with one another to this day. And this is normal, legal and fully intentional.
We aren't the intruders. Technically speaking, Mastodon is the intruder.
Hubzilla has features that Mastodon doesn't have. Hubzilla has an unlimited character count where Mastodon has a limit of 500 characters. Hubzilla can create various ways of text formatting such as bold type, italics, code blocks, lists or headlines; Mastodon can display them now, but it can't create them. Hubzilla can embed hyperlinks; Mastodon toots only support URLs in plain sight. Hubzilla can do both quotes and "quote-tweets", and it doesn't have to resort to screenshots for either. And Hubzilla always mentions users by their full name, not by their short name like Mastodon.
When Mastodon was launched with its self-imposed restrictions, Hubzilla had had all these features for almost four years already. Friendica had had the same features for almost six years already. And many of these features, including longer posts and text formatting, have been available on all other Fediverse projects since they were created.
Thus, I will use features that are not available on Mastodon even though Mastodon users could read this. I will not refrain from writing over 500 characters in one post, and I will not refrain from using text formatting just because Mastodon users aren't used to that.
We were here first. And we won't limit ourselves just because you're limited by the software you're using. We will continue to make use of features that you don't have. Deal with it.
Unfortunately, the target audience of this, Mastodon users, won't read it because it's too long. Not to mention that it'd require a boatload of content warnings and filter-triggering hashtags; see below.
@jupiter_rowland Ah, this is tough... I can't really argue against most of your points, and still it feels ... very very uncomfortable. Some thoughts on that:
First, yes, Mastodon dominating "ActivityPub" Fediverse by numbers is a problem. But ... the last couple of months, I've read way less posts by Mastodon users complaining about long posts coming from other platforms than posts by users of longform platforms complaining about, in example, Mastodon users using threads to compose "longer" posts. So it doesn't seem all a problem of complainers on Mastodon.
Second: Mastodon apparently started out to replace Twitter with something that technically is as close as possible but tries to avoid some things the Mastodon devs considered reason for some toxic behaviours on Twitter. I don't agree with some of these points, but I can very well understand why people cling to these and aren't likely or willing to go for compromises here. But if there are strong gaps between platforms - like one explicitely focussing on long, formatted posts and the other one on short text/plain messages and everyone of them is convinced their idea and approach is the right one, how could interoperability even look like? How to find a common ground in such a situation? I have no idea. I've seen this quite often before, and everyone else who ever used e-mail has, too - when ending up in a fight between mutt advocates and Outlook users, the former claiming that HTML e-mail should be avoided at all costs, the latter complaining why on earth that crappy tool isn't even capable of displaying a part of text in bold red font. E-mail basically failed to bridge these gaps in a meaningful way, most of the "console-based" text/plain mailers still strip formatting (and subsequently throw the information contained in the formatting) away and even claim this is a good thing (which it isn't, in my opinion, but that's another story). The Fediverse, at the moment, feels just like this.
Third, which leaves me a bit angry at times: Reading posts by @mike or @denschub makes me really wonder here - especially this one overengineer.dev/blog/2019/01/… - where Dennis reported from the standardization group and the conscious decision to accept an inconsistent user experience. While I might not be entitled to this opinion as I haven't part of said crowd and only know second-hand information on it, this feels like inconsistency in interoperability isn't a nasty side-effect or an unwanted issue one needs to work around - it rather feels like a conscious decision to throw users under the bus. This is really really bad, and this shines through the ActivityPub Fediverse wherever you look. Basically, the current spec doesn't really feel like something built to foster an open, interoperable ecosystem for people - it rather feels like a foundation for a social network "market" where the strongest (by number) player and its implementation "wins", which now happens to be Mastodon. Every other platform, however, has its very own nasty specialties that work there and only there and are lost when looking at these posts and interactions from elsewhere (just looking at "Misskey Flavoured Markdown", pixelfed stories or the emoji reactions on Firefish that go far beyond "just" a like). While it's easy to understand why these are here, strictly speaking and from an end-user perspective, it's an utter and complete mess. It's a mess that I can send out responses, messages, interactions without having a clue what the "other" side will see or without even knowing they lose information down the line (with e-mail at least, most people knew about the fallacies of using HTML or winmail.dat in there).
Fourth, however, finally: I'm mostly using Friendica these days, for reasons. On Android, I use Friendica through a Mastodon client app and am able to do so only because Friendica implements the Mastodon client API. I've been on identi.ca in 2010 and Diaspora around 2011, 2012 (not sure). Mastodon popped up in 2016 and really took off, as far as I can remember, only in 2018. Safe to say: Other open federated platforms were around 4 .. 8 years, depending on how you count. How on earth can it be that still Mastodon is the most widespread platform? Either Mastodon did something right in here, or every other platform (pessimistically speaking) just totally failed to manage that. I remember rather well discussing the need for a mobile app for Diaspora in 2012 or 2013 - it hasn't fully happened until now. Hate to say but maybe Mastodon has done more than any other of these platforms to make people aware that non-commercial social networks not backed by surveillance and venture capitalists are a thing that is even possible. And I still wonder what it would take for, say, Hubzilla, Friendica, ... to become a "better" alternative to Mastodon not just for tech-savvy people but also for end users only trained and willing to use a smartphone and a mobile app? Are we ready to get there? Who is, if so? (In example, through the Android user glass I see #Firefish + #Kaiteki quite a strong option and more than just a worthy alternative to Mastodon. If we manage to build more of these, if we manage to provide more "working" toolchains like these, more and more stable instances, ... , I am pretty sure the Mastodon "problem" will gradually become smaller over time...)
@crossgolf_rebel Yeah, it was #fedilab that I tried initially, and found out it wasn't supported.
The #kaiteki app looks interesting, and works well with my #mastodon account, too, but trying to interact from #firefish seems to be a hit-or-miss thing.
@gowin #Kaiteki - the app is still in alpha status #Milktea - runs quite well, but a few things are missing #ZonePane - also runs quite well, but the handling is not my cup of tea. #Misskey - still works, but the more Firefish develops, the less compatible they are #Moshidon - is also still in development #Fedilab - also still in development
❓ Welche App "kann" Firefish und Mastodon (und am liebsten auch Friendica)?
Ich bin immer noch auf der Suche nach dem für mich idealen "Blogging"-Dienst im Fediverse. Deshalb probiere ich neben #Mastodon z.Z. #Firefish (ehemals #Calckey) und #Friendica aus. Langsam werden meine Accounts etwas unübersichtlich. Auf dem Desktop nutze ich die Web-Apps, unter Android #Tusky und #Kaiteki. Gibt es eine App, die alle meine Dienste unter einen Hut bringt?
Yay ! Je viens de réussir ma migration de compte depuis mamot.fr (#Mastodon) vers social.marud.fr (#Calckey) !
🎉
Ça m'a pris un peu de temps à comprendre que c'était le mot de passe de l'ancienne instance qu'il fallait fournir et pas celui de la nouvelle... la formulation du formulaire n'était pas claire, je trouve. Enfin bref...
Pouet ! Je retire les anglophones de la conversation, histoire de ne pas les polluer inutilement de notifications en langue de Molière :D
Concernant la mise en place de Calckey, je trouve que c'est plutôt simple étant donné que c'est dockerisé (3 conteneurs en tout) et un reverse proxy devant. De mémoire c'est juste 3 fichiers à changer, 2 fichiers d'environnement et le docker-compose.yaml.
J'ai eu un peu plus de mal car je venais de Misskey et j'ai migré l'instance sur Calckey, j'ai rencontré quelques problèmes mais qui sont plus liés à des soucis de cache de navigateur qu'à de réelles configurations sur la stack docker.
Concernant les tests, n'hésite pas à t'inscrire sur mon instance (enfin, notre, puisque c'est tout autant votre instance que la mienne. hymne communiste au loin) si tu veux tester.
Pour moi, le principal défaut reste l'absence de réel client lourd comme on peut le trouver sur les différents logiciels permettant d'accéder au fediverse. #kaiteki et #milktea sont deux fonctionnels / semi fonctionnels pour Android.
A noter que l'interface web mobile est tout de même assez bien pensée.
Pour la prochaine version majeure, une compatibilité (partielle pour l'instant) avec les API Mastodon arrivera, ce qui rendra #calckey compatible avec la plupart des clients mobiles.
CalcKey is awesome but currently almost no mobile apps support it. It runs fine in a mobile browser but sometimes you miss having a dedicated client for it.
Give https://kaiteki.app/ a try. It's still in Alpha but honestly day-to-day its stable and does the job with little fuss.
It's built for MissKey, CalcKey's poppa, but handles CalcKey very well too, as far as I can tell. It seems to be a simple web app, without...any...settings once you get logged in, but that invisibility just lets CalcKey do all the shining. ☺️
Oh, and Kaiteki means "comfortable/comfy" in Japanese and so far that seems very apt. (Apped, geddit?) #CalcKey#MissKey#Kaiteki