People who have only ever seen Mastodon tend to believe that Mastodon is the be-all, end-all in terms of Fediverse features. They think that Mastodon has a perfect, bee’s knees implementation of threaded conversations.
They should daily-drive Friendica or even Hubzilla instead of Mastodon for at least half a year and use it for everything they’re using Mastodon for right now. It’ll be eye-opening.
On the one hand, Mastodon will kill the Fediverse.
On the other hand, for the majority of Mastodon users, Mastodon is the Fediverse. (Like, they literally don’t know that Mastodon is connected to something, anything, that isn’t Mastodon. They think that Mastodon is its own enclosed network.)
The irony.
PeerTube is YouTube. It’s a general-purpose video streaming application.
Loops is TikTok. It’s for short vertical videos and for people with the attention span of a squirrel who don’t know that you can rotate phones sideways, and who are constantly looking for the next dopamine kick. Also, in terms of software maturity in general and Fediverse software maturity in particular, Loops is nowhere near PeerTube.
No, that’s because next to nobody in Germany is on 𝕏. Unless they’re celebrities, politicians, influencers or fame whores.
Germany’s 𝕏 is TikTok for Zoomers, Instagram for Millennials and Facebook for everyone who’s older.
I want Mastodon threads in Lemmy.
Won’t come.
Mastodon has no support for enclosed threaded conversations whatsoever. At all. Why not? Because Twitter has never had any either. That’s not how microblogging works. And Mastodon tries hard to be minimalist, purist, old-school, original-gangsta, Twitter-like microblogging, just with a few more characters.
Mastodon barely manages to tie its threads together with mentions. But it neither has nor supports nor even only understands the one-post-multiple-comments conversation model.
You even have to jump through hoops both on Mastodon’s Web UI and in every single last Mastodon app to see a whole thread. Like, actually the whole thread and not just the branch with the “toot” that you were just looking at.
The fediverse is not even a teenager
The Fediverse is literally 18 years old this year.
Invented by Eugen Rochko Evan Prodromou. By launching Mastodon StatusNet. In 2022 2016 2008.
Interconnectivity between different software is 16 years old as of last month. Established when Mistpark, now known as Friendica, came out in May, 2010, with support for StatusNet’s OStatus protocol already built-in.
Oh, and the term “Fediverse” is from 2022 2016 2012.
Of course, if you’re hosting your own hub, you aren’t bound to the vanilla features and the one standard theme or whatever some hub admin has installed. Hubzilla is not only modular, it’s also extensible by simply adding a third-party git repository with apps and/or themes to your hub installation.
I think the currently best third-party theme bundle is the Utsukta Themes.
If you want Instagram users to move, there’s no real alternative to Pixelfed. You can literally move an entire account full of images and posts over from Instagram to Pixelfed.
If, however, you’re seriously eyeing Bonfire, check Hubzilla. Bonfire promises lots of stuff. Hubzilla offers more than what Bonfire even only promises and then some. Also, while Bonfire is still in fairly early development, Hubzilla is tried-and-true, stable software that has been in development since 2012, for even longer than Mastodon. And Hubzilla only needs a LAMP stack. Basically, Bonfire is Hubzilla from Wish.com at best. And AFAIK, Hubzilla even needs fewer server resources per user than Friendica.
Downsides: There’s no phone app (but then, there’s none for Bonfire either). You’ve got no other choice but to use the Web interface; at least Hubzilla can be installed on phones as a Progressive Web App. On top of that, especially the default theme is not really user-friendly and kind of stuck in the early 2010s, and for alternative themes, you need to include third-party repositories into your installation. Posting images isn’t as straight-forward as on typical social media; it’s more like a blog in the sense of having to upload image files before you can use them. And if you want alt-texts, you have to learn to get your hands dirty on BBcode.
Any reason why “Fediverse” means “Mastodon with some extras bolted on, but still largely only a Twitter clone” here?
Any reason why someone whom I remember as a Hubzilla veteran completely denies the existence of Hubzilla and its descendants and mostly even disregards Friendica?
At least on Hubzilla (which I know from personal experience because it’s my primary daily driver, believe it or not), these UX sins are partially an integral part of their concept and partly solved by their concept.
Sin #2: I, for one, do not want any algorithm of sorts to flush stuff onto my stream that I did not explicitly subscribe to. I only want to read what I want to read. I’m already busy curating, filtering and blocking stuff from those who decided to follow me, and whom I have to follow back. Also, getting rid of uninteresting cruft outside the scope of my channel coming from those whom I do give permission to send me their posts. I don’t also want to go and filter the stuff that others on my hub post or have subscribed to, especially because I can’t filter it by account/channel.
Besides, I only have one feed anyway. Public Hubzilla hubs do not have a pubstream at all, full stop.
That is, I don’t use my stream anyway. I vastly prefer the unread messages counter.
(Then again, Hubzilla doesn’t count non-technical folks who just came from the Twitter iPhone app as part of its target audience.)
Sin #4: On Hubzilla, private messages are private. Hubzilla has a thing called permissions.
Say, I send Alice a DM. I, as the starter of the conversation, only grant Alice and myself permission to view my start post as well as any comment.
Alice mentions Bob to pull him into the conversation. But Bob won’t see shit because Bob isn’t permitted to see shit.
I mention Bob to pull him into the conversation. But Bob won’t see shit because Bob still isn’t permitted to see shit. And even I, as the conversation starter and as the owner of the whole conversation, cannot change the permissions of anything in it after the fact.
Solved since 2012.
Sin #5: Hubzilla has full support for conversations as enclosed objects.
Like, I can use Hubzilla’s search to manually import some Mastodon toot from somewhere in the middle of a thread. Then Hubzilla will go and reel in the whole branch of the thread all the way back to the actual start post. And the replies to that toot. And eventually the other branches as well.
Someone replies anywhere in the conversation, and I will receive that reply.
The only things that could meddle with this are filters on my side, Superblock on my side or someone else having blocked me. Then I won’t get their messages, and I won’t get any follow-ups either.
This also means that, taking the same toot as an example, if someone up that branch in the conversation has fully blocked me, I can’t pull in their message. I can’t pull in any follow-ups either, nor can I pull in any follow-ups of these follow-ups, so I can’t pull in that particular toot either.
If something has a parent, and Hubzilla can’t get the parent, then Hubzilla refuses to get that something as well.
AFAIK, even Friendica has always been behaving like this. Only that Friendica is the only one in the family that hasn’t adopted FEP-171b “Conversation Containers” yet. It was invented on (streams), backported to Hubzilla and inherited by Forte.
Anyway, solved since at least 2012, if not 2010.
Sin #6: The whole family has very powerful search, including full-text search, since Mistpark’s inception 16 years ago. It’s part of their philosophy and culture.
Also part of the philosophy and culture on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte: You don’t want your stuff to be discoverable? Then don’t make it public in the first place. Likewise with quote-posts: You don’t want anyone to quote-post your stuff? Then don’t make it public. Public equals fair game. Deal with it, or restrict the permissions on it.
This, again, is where permissions come into play.
Solved since at least 2012.
Sin #7: This, again, implies that everyone in the Fediverse wants content to be sent to them on a silver platter while, at the same time, not having access to groups in some way or another.
I can understand that Mastodon users want that because the concept of curating their timeline is alien to them. After all, they barely have the means to do so. And in fact, many Mastodon users randomly follow thousands of Fediverse actors to get the same deluge of uninteresting stuff in their timeline that they’re used to from Twitter, hoping that something interesting pops up in-between. At the same time, the uninteresting stuff drowns the interesting stuff because nobody on Mastodon will ever scroll through all their unread content.
Also, sadly, this shows that the lack of groups is the default in the Fediverse because Mastodon neither has groups of its own nor really supports groups in any way.
I dare say that (streams) could be the champion of content discovery, all without shoving unwanted content down users’ throats. Not only does it have full support for groups, but it has a Facebook-style directory that lists actors from all across the Fediverse as far as it’s aware of them. And I myself am surprised about just how many of them a fairly young (streams) server with about a dozen channels can know.
You can even filter for groups, and then you get them all: Lemmy communities, /kbin and Mbin magazines, PieFed communities, Friendica groups, Hubzilla forums with and without ActivityPub, (streams) groups with and without ActivityPub, Forte groups if there were any, nodeBB subforums, Flipboard magazines, you name it, it’s all there. Join with 1 click, adjust the contact settings if you wish, there you go.
Essentially, what Friendica needs a centralised website for, (streams) has built into each server, reachable from each channel. On 'roids.
If that’s too difficult for you, then Facebook is too difficult for you.
Solved, too, unless the declared goal is for literally everything in the Fediverse to become a better Twitter. Including the stuff that’s already better than Twitter because its concept and philosophy is to not be like Twitter at all.
If it doesn’t look and smell and feel like a tweet, it’s considered “most certainly AI slop” nowadays.
Welcome to 2026.
I also wonder why we don’t hear more about this?
I guess that’s because most information about the non-Threadiverse Fediverse comes into Lemmy via Mastodon. And next to nobody on Mastodon knows that Hubzilla exists, much less what it can do.
The source code is actually on Framagit.
Ignore the creation dates; Hubzilla is much older than that.
Some Fediverse server applications are being described as “the Swiss Army knife of the Fediverse” because they have so many features, and they cover so many use-cases. They’re advertised as the most fully-featured Fediverse server applications to ever exist. By people who have never heard of Hubzilla, or who count on everyone else never having heard of Hubzilla.
Still, Hubzilla blows them clean out of the water, feature-wise and use-case-wise, without even breaking a sweat.
It does do blogs. And it does Facebook. And it does shit-tons of stuff on top of that. And if you choose so, it can do even more shit-tons of stuff on top of these shit-tons.
Hubzilla offers you, all under one roof:
Hubzilla can be your microblogging platform.
Hubzilla can be your social networking platform.
Hubzilla can be your Fediverse blog.
Hubzilla can be your non-federating blog.
Hubzilla can be your NeoCities webpage host.
Hubzilla can be your forum.
Hubzilla can be your personal wiki.
Hubzilla can be your little cloud file storage.
Hubzilla can be the DAV server that you use to sync the addressbooks and calendars on your phone and your PC.
Etc.
And Hubzilla can be any combination of the above. Like, a website with its own forum, with its own news blog, with its own wiki, with its own event calendar. All within one Hubzilla channel.
Hubzilla isn’t even new. It isn’t someone’s recent brain-child. It has been developed for 14 years now, longer than Mastodon. And it is still under active development. That doesn’t even mean small patches every few months. Rather, it means that the devs actually keep whipping up new features and/or greatly improving existing features. And that says nothing about the third-party add-ons and themes which slowly get more and more, too.
Hubzilla is my number one daily driver (although I’m here as well). In fact, I’ve found this post on Hubzilla, forwarded by someone on Mitra, but I remembered just in time before commenting that I have a Lemmy account.
I guess the reason why hardly anyone seems to be talking about Hubzilla is that hardly anyone knows that it exists in the first place, and even fewer people know what it is and what it can do.
Let’s just say that whenever some other Fediverse server software is declared “the Swiss Army knife of the Fediverse”, then Hubzilla is the Leatherman Surge of the Fediverse by comparison. There’s just so much that you can do with it.
It has just about all the capabilities of a good blogging platform, up to and including its own WebDAV-enabled cloud file space that you can also use to upload images for your blog. Or for your webpages because, yes, Hubzilla can do that as well. In fact, the official Hubzilla website itself is a webpage on a Hubzilla channel.
In addition, it introduced nomadic identity to the wider Fediverse; or rather, an earlier incarnation of Hubzilla named Red did back in 2012. This also means that we aren’t talking about something that was cobbled together during or after the 2022 Mastodon hype, but something that’s actually older than Mastodon.
However, its learning curve is steep. For starters, that’s because it’s so powerful. It doesn’t dump features upon you; in fact, it’s very modular, and many features are actually add-ons that have to be activated. But that actually kind of adds to Hubzilla’s complexity. Besides, it isn’t and doesn’t try to be a clone of anything. It doesn’t mimic anything. It isn’t quite like anything else out there except maybe its other own family members.
At least Hubzilla probably has the best built-in help system in the Fediverse, and if that should fail, it has its own Hubzilla-based support forum.
Also, Hubzilla is very modular at hub (server) level. Not all features are available on all hubs. But there’s a way to check what optional features are available on which hub: Go to a hub that you’re interested in and add /siteinfo/json to the domain. I’m not sure if that page lists installed third-party themes, though, because there certainly are third-party themes that make Hubzilla even better for blogging.
There have already been too many spare-time devs who came to Mastodon, got totally excited about everything, decided to develop something for “the Fediverse”, built it hard against only Mastodon and then learned that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon.
See FediDevs which, for quite a while, was built against only Mastodon and against Mastodon-specific elements of Mastodon, which did not work with anything that isn’t Mastodon, but which still kept “Fedi” in its name.
Old and busted: Mastodon DDoSes the non-Mastodon Fediverse due to design decisions.
New hotness: Mastodon DDoSes itself due to design decisions.
Some 22% of the entire Fediverse (except Threads).
When someone’s on Mastodon, and they say, “Fediverse,” chances are very good that it’s only Mastodon that they’re talking about.
Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are all built in PHP. All they need to run is a LAMP stack. That’s why even a feature monster like Hubzilla needs fewer server resources per user than Mastodon.
They only have a little bit of JavaScript for some UI elements such as spoiler tags.
It’s just that hardly anyone knows that PWAs exist, much less how to “install” them.
That, and most phone users prefer native mobile app UIs to Web UIs that don’t look like native apps.
Then again, I guess it’s theoretically possible to build a Hubzilla theme that does look like an iOS app.