I think nodeBB also is included as part of the Threadiverse, although it seems not a full-fledged member, and I am not well-versed enough to know why (perhaps connection via the ActivityPub Protocol is still being rolled out to all the instances?).
Meta’s Threads is indeed entirely irrelevant to any of this, except that they wanted to horn in on our fun, but they killed themselves before they could begin, though not before we had already preemptively blocked it all! 🤣
Oh, and also they stole our name. Or rather tried to, but fuck that noise - we took it right back!!
Technically speaking, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte ought to be parts of the Threadiverse, too. They’ve always had enclosed threaded conversations and even discussion groups built in. Except for Friendica, they support FEP-171b “Conversation Containers”.
But look at how few people on Lemmy have even only heard of Mastodon. Friendica is much more unknown there. Those who know Hubzilla are a subset of those who know Friendica. And (streams) and Forte are next to completely unknown beyond Hubzilla’s actual users.
Tbf if you are interested in topics rather than people, then Mastodon is simply inferior to the Threadiverse - as you gave the best description I’ve ever seen on that point.
Friendica is inferior as well, but more on the technical side. It is struggling and instances shutting down due to lack of stability and efficiency, with costs rising far too high along with number of users. They’ve put out calls for programming aid to help fix those issues. As a non-user, I thought their main focus was on people rather than topics of conversation though?
The Threadiverse has quite the reputation for having such solid products - whether written in Rust with custom front-end or in Python with flask front-end (and Postgresql back-end), or Mbin is in PHP, and nodeBB uses Node.js.
My guess is that Friendica’s issues lie in its various federation connectors. They seem like leftovers from Friendica’s early days or derived from such.
Part of Friendica’s concept is to be able to connect to just about everything and then some. Friendica itself is based on a combination of its own DFRN protocol and ActivityPub. It connects via ActivityPub. It connects via the diaspora* protocol. It can crosspost to WordPress, any other XML-RPC-based blog, LiveJournal, Libertree and Dreamwidth. It can integrate accounts from Twitter, Tumblr and Bluesky. It can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds. It can “federate” via e-mail.
Sound fine and dandy. The actual issue is two-fold: Friendica’s federation code is terribly inefficient. As I’ve said, it seems to be Mike Macgirvin’s first shot at building such stuff, either untouched since ca. 2010/2011 or derived from similarly old code. Besides, if I remember Friendica right, none of this is really optional. If the server admin activates it, it’s permanently on for all accounts, regardless of whether they actually use it or not.
Sure, it worked well under lab conditions when there were only few connectors. And it worked well while Friendica was just a few very early adopters playing and tinkering around with it. But when these became a few thousand people actually daily-driving it, and the number of connectors gradually grew, shit got real.
I remember Friendica nodes closing their registration at not even 150 users back in the day because they were full. Granted, these were mostly nodes that had the Facebook connector on (which worked like the Bluesky connector nowadays), and people would mirror their entire Facebook timelines with hundreds of “friends” into Friendica. Still, nodes without the Facebook connector didn’t fare that much better.
And yes, there were public Friendica nodes disappearing spontaneously all the time. That’s why Mike invented nomadic identity and created Hubzilla in the long run.
One of the first steps on the way was in 2012 when he took Red, the fork of a fork of Friendica that would eventually become Hubzilla, and re-wrote the entire backend against his new Zot protocol. In the course of doing that, he must have redone all the federation stuff. In addition, he made all protocols that aren’t Zot, RSS and Atom optional and turned them off by default on each newly created channel.
I have no other explanation as to why hub.netzgemeinde.eu is working that well with 3.5K channels (only a bit over 220 of which have recently been active, but the inactive ones cause their share of load, too), including cloned channels as well as clones, with a whole lot of add-ons activated, on an ARM-based server, operated by a guy who pays for the server himself and refuses to accept donations.
Ah, thank you for sharing your experience there. So it’s possible but difficult, like Mastodon (where behavior is also inconsistent) - good to know! I should probably stop listing nodeBB as a major player in the Threadiverse then.
Well said.
I think nodeBB also is included as part of the Threadiverse, although it seems not a full-fledged member, and I am not well-versed enough to know why (perhaps connection via the ActivityPub Protocol is still being rolled out to all the instances?).
Meta’s Threads is indeed entirely irrelevant to any of this, except that they wanted to horn in on our fun, but they killed themselves before they could begin, though not before we had already preemptively blocked it all! 🤣
Oh, and also they stole our name. Or rather tried to, but fuck that noise - we took it right back!!
Technically speaking, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte ought to be parts of the Threadiverse, too. They’ve always had enclosed threaded conversations and even discussion groups built in. Except for Friendica, they support FEP-171b “Conversation Containers”.
But look at how few people on Lemmy have even only heard of Mastodon. Friendica is much more unknown there. Those who know Hubzilla are a subset of those who know Friendica. And (streams) and Forte are next to completely unknown beyond Hubzilla’s actual users.
Tbf if you are interested in topics rather than people, then Mastodon is simply inferior to the Threadiverse - as you gave the best description I’ve ever seen on that point.
Friendica is inferior as well, but more on the technical side. It is struggling and instances shutting down due to lack of stability and efficiency, with costs rising far too high along with number of users. They’ve put out calls for programming aid to help fix those issues. As a non-user, I thought their main focus was on people rather than topics of conversation though?
The Threadiverse has quite the reputation for having such solid products - whether written in Rust with custom front-end or in Python with flask front-end (and Postgresql back-end), or Mbin is in PHP, and nodeBB uses Node.js.
My guess is that Friendica’s issues lie in its various federation connectors. They seem like leftovers from Friendica’s early days or derived from such.
Part of Friendica’s concept is to be able to connect to just about everything and then some. Friendica itself is based on a combination of its own DFRN protocol and ActivityPub. It connects via ActivityPub. It connects via the diaspora* protocol. It can crosspost to WordPress, any other XML-RPC-based blog, LiveJournal, Libertree and Dreamwidth. It can integrate accounts from Twitter, Tumblr and Bluesky. It can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds. It can “federate” via e-mail.
Sound fine and dandy. The actual issue is two-fold: Friendica’s federation code is terribly inefficient. As I’ve said, it seems to be Mike Macgirvin’s first shot at building such stuff, either untouched since ca. 2010/2011 or derived from similarly old code. Besides, if I remember Friendica right, none of this is really optional. If the server admin activates it, it’s permanently on for all accounts, regardless of whether they actually use it or not.
Sure, it worked well under lab conditions when there were only few connectors. And it worked well while Friendica was just a few very early adopters playing and tinkering around with it. But when these became a few thousand people actually daily-driving it, and the number of connectors gradually grew, shit got real.
I remember Friendica nodes closing their registration at not even 150 users back in the day because they were full. Granted, these were mostly nodes that had the Facebook connector on (which worked like the Bluesky connector nowadays), and people would mirror their entire Facebook timelines with hundreds of “friends” into Friendica. Still, nodes without the Facebook connector didn’t fare that much better.
And yes, there were public Friendica nodes disappearing spontaneously all the time. That’s why Mike invented nomadic identity and created Hubzilla in the long run.
One of the first steps on the way was in 2012 when he took Red, the fork of a fork of Friendica that would eventually become Hubzilla, and re-wrote the entire backend against his new Zot protocol. In the course of doing that, he must have redone all the federation stuff. In addition, he made all protocols that aren’t Zot, RSS and Atom optional and turned them off by default on each newly created channel.
I have no other explanation as to why hub.netzgemeinde.eu is working that well with 3.5K channels (only a bit over 220 of which have recently been active, but the inactive ones cause their share of load, too), including cloned channels as well as clones, with a whole lot of add-ons activated, on an ARM-based server, operated by a guy who pays for the server himself and refuses to accept donations.
That is neat to hear that back-story, thanks for sharing! 🤯
Having attempted to use Lemmy communities via NodeBB, it’s a pain. No surprise we rarely see posts or comments from NodeBB users.
Ah, thank you for sharing your experience there. So it’s possible but difficult, like Mastodon (where behavior is also inconsistent) - good to know! I should probably stop listing nodeBB as a major player in the Threadiverse then.
The inverse (using Lemmy to follow NodeBB boards) seems to work fine, but I haven’t been able to find any that interest me
Oh neat! Or… I guess not, as you said 🤣 - either way it’s good to know! 😉