@downey

Mastodon IS NOT the #Fediverse!

The #BDFL of that project saying it's is "vital" illustrates the branding philosophy and corporate, ego driven mindset behind so many PRs and requests that have repeatedly been rejected by an overwhelming amount of Fediverse users and developers - just look at how many 👎 "thumbs down" 👎 reactions his post received (that is rarely seen on GitHub).

His language and marketing have been largely successful, confusing newcomers during this Twitter egress (including media coverage) and conflating just what the Fediverse and mastodon are...

People are saying, "I just joined mastodon!" - NO, you did not. You just joined the "Fediverse", by creating an account on a mastodon server. Even newcomers creating accounts on #Friendica and #Pleroma servers are often seen saying this, and it needs to "STOP".

The Fediverse is the network they are joining, and mastodon is just one of a dozen or so viable platforms that people can use to do so.

Truth be told, mastodon is one of the least feature complete Fediverse server platforms, lacking in many of the most basic social networking tools and features that most other popular server platforms introduced ages ago.

It doesn't even render Markdown, have have quotable boosting, only introduced editing of posts a couple of weeks back, and has a hard coded limit of a paltry 500 characters for each post, forcing users to create those confusingly chronologically backward hellthreads that are interspersed and broken up in everyone's feeds, and there's many more deficiencies to list here.

This is why there are so many different forks.

When you create a #PeerTube account, you haven't joined the PeerTube network - you've joined the Fediverse!

When you create a #Pixelfed account, you haven't joined the Pixelfed network - you've joined the Fediverse!

If you create a mastodon account, you haven't joined "mastodon" - you've joined three Fediverse!

There is no such thing as a mastodon network!

It's just one type of Fediverse server platform, among many, like:

#Akkama, Pleroma, Friendica, #Lemmy, #Soapbox, #Misskey, PeerTube, #Mitra, Pixelfed, #MicroPub, #Epicyon, #Quanta, #GoToSicial, #Socialhome, #FunkWhale, and many many other platforms that open up the entire Fediverse to people, allowing them to share and seamlessly communicate with one another.

There are analogs for #Faceplant, #Twitter, #InstaSPAM, #Reddit, and pretty much any type of social networking experience you can find in the deprecated, centralized, legacy silo systems that cannot, and do not wish to interact with each other - which the Fediverse breaks the paradigm of, and empowers everyone engage with each other globally.

Mastodon's marketing has very deliberately been designed to subvert that narrative and replace this reality with its own, self serving commercial interests to the detriment of Fediverse itself.

A wake up call us coming very soon when the #non_FOSS based platforms like #Tumblr and #Imgur join their (millions) substantial user bases to the Fediverse at which time, mastodon itself may find itself drowned out and largely irrelevant due to its very lacking feature set, and ask if the other existing Fediverse platforms providing so much more if what is possible for us all.

This is typically what happens when your development is driven by egocentric, ulterior motives (whether he actually realizes this about himself or not) to benefit yourself personally - just look at how his donations have jumped, even though newcomers are creating accounts on other Fediverse and mastodon servers begging for donations that for the most part are going directly to him.

#tallship #FOSS #ActivityPub #introductions #newcomers

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