@atomicpoet you had a browser addon doing this previously. I am telling you I cannot find evidence ANYBODY could have the code that does this. I provided github links.
It seems server dependent. I just sent out a test message to my two Mastodon accounts. Universeodon shows alle three codes correctly, Sunny Garden doesn't.
Is it part of a regular Mastodon software update that all servers eventually should run?
@atomicpoet you could always run your own instance and set up a cron job to pull latest code and restart... Your instance might explode more often though, if you do that 🤣
@atomicpoet
yeah, I remember when I used to get my freebsd from -current and my linux from -unstable/Sid . Fun times. But after a few years I came to prefer stability over rapid access to new features.
@jupiter_rowland@atomicpoet While I prefer Friendica over Mastodon, and have always been impressed by Hubzilla's amazing feature list, it does make you wonder how Mastodon has been able to beat them despite their head start. Also, people keep saying Hubzilla isn't ready yet, or too complicated. Is development for these two going too slowly, or are they crippled by their broader features?
Is Mastodon development going faster because it's simpler, or is the simplicity itself more attractive to many users?
When it was launched, Diaspora* was assumed to be half-dead because it was still a public alpha. Friendica was basically unknown. Hubzilla was even more obscure. Nobody was there to advertise Mike's creations, even less to potential end-users. I think in Friendica's case, it was also because people didn't want Friendica to grow too fast for the community to create more capacity. Friendica was so awfully inefficient back in the day that many instances closed their registrations between 100 and 130 users.
So when people talked about decentralised, federated social networks, it was either all about Diaspora* or "someone should develop something like this" as if it hadn't been done yet.
It's tempting to blame complexity, to claim that Mastodon grew so big because it was so simple, and everything else wasn't. Not only has Diaspora* always been simple to the point of being lack-lustre, but Pleroma was launched the same year as Mastodon, even three and a half weeks earlier.
So somehow Mastodon must have become the talk of the town while Pleroma didn't.
As for Hubzilla, yes, it is complicated. In comparison with early Friendica, its UI was "streamlined" and taken more into a Diaspora*-like direction. But having this as a unified UI for all of Hubzilla's use-cases is bound to fail. This UI can barely handle Hubzilla's feature set. Also, Mike isn't as much of a UI designer as he's a protocol developer.
All-new UIs are being developed right now, however.
As for its development, I can't say it's slow. Sometimes Hubzilla gets more frequent updates than Mastodon. Hubzilla's 1.0 release was in December of 2015, only months before Mastodon, and Hubzilla's stable version is 8.2, released a few months ago, with 8.3 being test-driven on Zotum.
It's just that the main focus has always been on Hubzilla's core functionality and Zot-related stuff. ActivityPub just had to work. I mean, it's an add-on that's not only optional per channel, but it's off by default. It actually has to be activated, for it still somewhat disrupts nomadic identity. If (streams) has solved parts of this problem, this means that Hubzilla does have a problem here. So external connectors didn't receive much care.
This only changed recently when Mastodon and thereby the ActivityPub part of the Fediverse exploded. This explosion was registered even on Hubzilla where users interacted with ActivityPub-based instances, Mastodon in particular, more and more frequently. Previously, this could be ignored, but now it no longer could.
The more Hubzilla users and ActivityPub users interacted with one another, the more obvious the existing shortcomings became, and they did so for both sides. All of a sudden, more and more issues in the communication with ActivityPub were revealed, also because the number of ActivityPub implementations which Hubzilla had to interact with increased.
Also, more people tried out Hubzilla themselves. However, they kind of expected "nomadic Mastodon + x" or "nomadic CalcKey + x" at best. Needless to say this led to complaints. And more users with more ways of using Hubzilla means more things that don't work being discovered and reported.
So the Hubzilla devs have a whole lot more to work on than the Mastodon devs, even though Hubzilla is very unlikely to upgrade to (streams)' Nomad protocol because that'd require Hubzilla to throw out just about all external federation except ActivityPub.
@atomicpoet@mcv@jupiter_rowland, I'd take that a step further and say that their publicity is compounded by the fact that Mastodon doesn't tell its users from what platform anyone is posting, thereby enforcing their belief that everything they see in coming from other people using Mastodon.
For my part, I gave #friendica a brief try and it didn't really grab me in part because of the number of features. Not that that's a bad thing for me, I'm just a "simple interface with discoverable customisable features/complexity when you want them" kind of person, and so friendica felt like an awkward middle ground for me.
Re mastodon, guessing, I think publicity/marketing is always the annoying differentiator.
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