Agreed. Friendica is the best Fediverse (long-) post service, and for reading threads. Second best is Akkoma, which allows you to have a tree-view of threads, but also which shows you what a "I agree completely!" post is in relation to, as well as highlighting if there are replies to that post, and you then can select to "fold out" the thread, in which case it dashes off to fetch posts dynamically. Akkoma is the best among the short-post services.

Then there is of course Lemmy too, which has a pretty clear thread-with-replies structure. Could do with some touching up of the CSS of the threads to make them even more clear, and the concept of Lemmy is obviously different compared to the short/long-post services in that it sticks to posting a link/topic and the discussion around that.

The absolutely worst is Mastodon. It doesn't show threads at all, so one has to really like that "back" link, because they have to spend a lot of time with it. For every little "I agree!" post you have to dig in all the way to see what it is all about...if it has even bothered to collect all the replies, as the federation in Mastodon only covers instances you know. If you are reading a thread there could be several replies you simply don't see, and you will not get any dynamic updates unless you back all the way out and then go back in again.

Misskey/Calckey look nice. Sadly they have the same issue as Mastodon with not picking up all replies in a thread and the "Content might be missing, you might want to check out this post on the original instance" message on top of every post gets tired pretty quick.

It is a shame Mastodon users seem to think everyone else is using Mastodon, and that it is the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) of The Fediverse, when it literally is a goat. A big goat, admittedly, but still, big doesn't always mean best.

@fediverse

@Ada @defcon42/Mirko @m@thias.hellqui.st To me, it sounds more like some #Mastodon users, especially those who came in through the #TwitterMigration, actually can't stand there being something else in the #Fediverse than their beloved Mastodon. When they caught their first glimpse of the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, they reacted much like the people of Krikkit when they caught their first glimpse of the universe beyond Krikkit: "It has to go!"

They make themselves and each other believe that Mastodon is superior to any other Fediverse project in just about any regard imaginable while apparently completely refusing to learn about those other projects. They're supported in their belief by mass media only ever writing about Mastodon and the number of Mastodon users.

However, mass media only write about Mastodon because they simply don't know a thing about the rest of the Fediverse, and they didn't know a thing about Mastodon until the #TwitterTakeover had actually happened, and the second wave of former #birbsite users had come flooding into Mastodon in such numbers that it was impossible to ignore even for those who act as if #FLOSS doesn't exist.

As for the numbers of Mastodon users, they're so high because I guess more than 90% of all Mastodon users still don't know that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, because they have never heard of anything else in the Fediverse. Mastodon was pretty much the only Fediverse project advertised on #BirbSocial when this was still possible.

There are various reasons why Mastodon users don't spread across the Fediverse in masses. None of it is because Mastodon is superior to everything else because, truth be told, it isn't. I'll come to this later. One reason is, again, that the vast majority of them still don't know anything else. Another one is because it was hard enough to get used to Mastodon after years of using #Twitter, and they don't want to get used to yet another platform. And another one is that it's hard to move from Mastodon to something else and take your account or at least your connections with you.

Another reason may be because people don't need anything beyond microblogging, and that's what Mastodon does. Now, sorry for all those of you who fight tooth and claw to defend Mastodon against the competition, but #Akkoma does microblogging, too. With extra features beyond Mastodon, some of which Mastodon users have been pestering Eugen Rochko to include in Mastodon for ages (e.g. "quote retweet"). All while being more lightweight and requiring fewer server resources than Mastodon. Oh, and it federates with Mastodon.

Other Fediverse projects aren't even competition for Mastodon because they specialise in something else. @Pixelfed specialises in posting pictures, much like #Instagram. @PeerTube specialises in video upload and streaming, not too dissimilarly from #YouTube. #Plume and #WriteFreely specialise in distraction-free traditional blogging, much like #Medium. #Lemmy specialises in groups and posting and discussing news, much like #Reddit or #HackerNews. You can't claim that Mastodon is better at each of these things than these platforms.

And then there are the jacks-of-all-trades which are usually filed under either "macroblogging" or "like #Facebook ". They weren't launched to have something that goes beyond Mastodon because their history reaches far back before Mastodon. Mastodon was launched in 2016 (and not 2022 like many believe). #Friendica was launched in early 2010, even before the crowdfunding campaign for the development of #Diaspora started. And in that early stage, Friendica, then still named #Mistpark, was vastly more powerful than Diaspora* ever got and also vastly more powerful than Mastodon 13 years later.

#Hubzilla, created by the same man as Friendica, is the most extreme one of them all. For starters, it eliminates the need for multiple accounts by having multiple independent channels with separate identities on the same account. Each channel can have multiple profiles like on Friendica so you can present your channel differently to individual contacts or groups of them and differently again to the general public.

It can do micro- and macroblogging with 50,000 or more characters and just about everything that can be done with #BBcode (italics, bold type, underline, lists with bullet points or numbers, quotes, code blocks), and you can embed as many pictures as you want in your posts where you want them instead of them automatically being attached to the end of the post.

Group handling in Hubzilla is much easier than list handling in Mastodon. You never have to type the name of a contact to find them. You can edit contacts and add them to groups or remove them, and you can edit groups and add or remove contacts, all with a few mouse clicks. And while Mastodon shows a maximum of four lists on the main page, Hubzilla will give you easy access to all your groups.

On top of that, you can have

• very fine-grained access rights control with pre-definable contact roles
  
• forums (just like Friendica, Hubzilla has #Guppe built in)
  
• more elegant macroblogging with articles which, in addition to BBcode, support #Markdown
  
• simple webpages (or not so simple if you're the admin of a hub, and you can expand it further)
  
• wikis (I'm not even kidding)
  
• a public calendar
  
• a virtually unlimited number of private calendars with #CalDAV connection
  
• a virtually unlimited number of address books with #CardDAV connection
  
• a file server with #WebDAV connection with its own access rights management which also ties in with the Photos and optional Gallery app (Mastodon drops your pictures somewhere, Hubzilla lets you upload them to your personal cloud space where you can access them whenever you want)

All with one run-of-the-mill Hubzilla account. And once per channel, separately.

And as if that wasn't enough, Hubzilla introduced the #Zot protocol and with it a concept named #NomadicIdentity.

Mastodon and Friendica let you have multiple accounts, even on separate instances. They also support migration from one account to another, and unlike Mastodon, Friendica lets you take all your content with you. Hubzilla (and #Streams, the successor of its slimmed-down successor, still created by the same guy) goes even further: Not only can you easily move from one hub to another, you can have channels on multiple hubs and automatically keep them fully in sync! If one hub goes down, it doesn't matter because you've got everything on all your other accounts.

Last but not least, both Friendica and Hubzilla federate with almost everything that moves, even far beyond the #ActivityPub Fediverse. This could be Diaspora*, this could be #GNUsocial, this could be #Wordpress blogs with or without the ActivityPub add-on, this could be RSS feeds (and they both generate feeds themselves, so this is bidirectional, too), this could even be Twitter until the API is shuttered. Friendica even used to federate with Facebook until Facebook put rocks in the way; this is the only connector that Hubzilla didn't take over.

The obvious downside is that for someone who just came in from the #birdcage, all this is utter overkill. In fact, people who are used to Mastodon may find Friendica borderline unusuable due to its many features. And Hubzilla is so infamous for its own clumsy UI capitulating before its sheer power that even Friendica users find it hard to use, fresh converts from Twitter to Mastodon even more so.

Some design decisions may be hard to understand for outsiders. Converts from other Fediverse projects to Hubzilla regularly fail at something as seemingly similar as connecting to users on other ActivityPub-based projects until you tell them that ActivityPub is an optional app on Hubzilla that has to be activated first because Hubzilla concentrates on Zot with its Nomadic Identity.

Also, just because these projects offer so much power, that doesn't mean that everyone needs it. If you do, it can be convenient to have it all under one login. But if all you're looking for is a bit of microblogging and online socialising, you don't need to drag a CMS and a full-blown cloud server with all bells and whistles along with you that just clutter up the UI. In that case, projects like Mastodon and Akkoma win because they're more approachable.

And while Friendica, Hubzilla & Co. can do threaded discussions and even have something like forums, Lemmy can do this more elegantly because it specialises in it. While you can use Hubzilla's private calendar feature for event planning, it's easier to do the same with #Mobilizon which, again, specialises in it. Or you can host podcasts on Friendica, Hubzilla & Co, but you can host them better on #Funkwhale and even better on #Castopod.

Wanting the Fediverse to be only Mastodon hinders development, namely the development of new projects within the Fediverse that may be able to do all-new things that we haven't seen in the Fediverse yet. Things that, sorry to say again, you'll never be able to do with Mastodon.

P.S.: For extra kicks, don't just read this on Mastodon. Open my original post; there you can see what Hubzilla is capable of, and what Mastodon strips away.

@jupiter_rowland @peertube @m
Thanks guys.Having joined essentially as part of the #TwitterMigration in early Nov, I do want to say cut us some slack 🙂 and that some of us *do* grasp the potential of the #Fediverse and take to it like a "duck to water" 🦆 ... but still it takes time to expand one's social network worldview from a very locked-down Twitter micro-blogging/chat view, to a whole new #Fediverse dynamic? It's a journey, and #Tumblr moving onto the #Activitypub may be a huge sign of things to come

Keep promoting the opportunitites e.g.
@ada has got me interested in moving onto CalcKey in future, and I'm looking for an additional platform for an occasional longer piece. Perhaps Medium (with add-ins) or perhaps #Friendlica or ... or ... choices?😎

Mass/mainstream media struggle to even conceive of a non-commercial/non-advertising revenue driven platform *at all* so tbh even #Mastodon sends their minds in a headspin eg. this kind of article?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/18/mastodon-users-twitter-elon-musk-social-media

Keep up the good work!

@defcon42 (Mirko) :fediverse: Yes, certainly there is a large target audience for whom #Mastodon is the appropriate choice. Those who like microblogging with the essential functions and like the way it is displayed are well served with it.
But for months now there are calls from (new?) Mastodon users complaining and wining about what Mastodon can't do and demanding that the developers should finally implement it immediately (quoted posts, groups, chats, more poll options, more list functions, etc.).
All the functions, which are then so painfully missed, are possible with almost all other text-oriented #Fediverse softwares, partly even with Mastodon-Forks or even with another instance, which e.g. increases the character limit (there are also public ones).
Who points out that there are already some alternatives and that they can try them, often gets aggressive reactions (not from you @defcon42 (Mirko) :fediverse: : Who is satisfied with Mastodon, that's good. But from those who explicitly want something else, but don't want to hear that (exactly) that already exists)?
What exactly the background of these reactions is, I do not know. Possibly it plays a role that through the media coverage the expectation was created that people here may join a Twitter only without Musk, that they can consume passively? And that then overload occurs when it is seen that there are many more possibilities? That the Fediverse is not equal to Mastodon, but that it is much much more
@m@thias.hellqui.st @Ada