@dogzilla @Exiled New Yorker - Connie To be fair, it's undeniable that there are these vastly different factions in the Fediverse.

The Old Guard, @crossgolf_rebel on Calckey :firefish: is one of them, has been around since long before there was even Mastodon. The Fediverse didn't start with Mastodon. The Fediverse as we have it now started in 2010 with Friendica, almost 6 years before Mastodon, and it also included Hubzilla which started life in 2012. Both projects which were and still are for extreme tech geeks because even Friendica is too unwieldy for your typical casual social media user.

So that Old Guard consists of absolute über-geeks on Linux PCs and laptops, many of whom run their own instances without any help from Docker or Yunohost. From their perspective, it was Mastodon which had arrived and federated with Friendica and Hubzilla, not the other way around, because Friendica and Hubzilla had been there first, and Mastodon had always spoken a language which they spoke, too.

Needless to say that they find Mastodon ridiculously underequipped and underwhelming. In fact, Mastodon's refusal to even support certain features of other projects makes life harder for them if they want to stay compatible with Mastodon.

Then you have the millions of Twitter refugees, almost all of whom were mollycoddled and railroaded to their first Fediverse home with as little explanation as possible. They're completely different. They're mostly not very interested in technology, and more of them feel disturbed by Linux talk than use Linux. In fact, most of them are on phones.

Many didn't even know that Mastodon is decentralised until a few months in. Most thought that the Fediverse is only vanilla Mastodon for at least their first three months, during which they got used to their nice and cosy and fluffy and friendly Mastodon-only Fediverse with no posts longer than 500 characters and no text formatting and no quotes etc.

As they're so numerous, they managed to shape Fediverse culture around being non-tech and, worse yet, around the Fediverse being only vanilla Mastodon. And yes, completely disregarding the Old Guard because they knew neither the Old Guard nor the places where the Old Guard resides.

When they came across their first "toot" that looked "weird" because it wasn't a vanilla Mastodon toot, they were greatly disturbed. They felt like whatever project that post came from, Akkoma, CalcKey, Friendica, Hubzilla, whatever, had maliciously intruded into their nice and cosy and fluffy and friendly Mastodon-only Fediverse. And they wanted that to go away again.

They did not want to read what they were told then: Friendica and Hubzilla are not intruders. They were here first. They had been here years before there was even Mastodon. There has never been a time during which the Fediverse was only vanilla Mastodon.

It's such people who demand that the users of everything that isn't vanilla Mastodon limit what they do to what's possible on vanilla Mastodon in order not to disturb those who want the Fediverse to be only vanilla Mastodon. No posts longer than 500 characters, no text formatting, no quotes, no embedded images which don't work on Mastodon anyway, no embedded hyperlinks (only URLs in plain sight instead) etc.

I guess it's clear why the users of everything from Akkoma to Firefish to Friendica to Hubzilla refuse to let themselves be limited by the vastly more numerous Mastodon users.

Well, and then there's the third faction. It's those who have never really arrived in the Fediverse. They don't want anything different. They want Twitter without Musk. Now they're sitting on mastodon.social or another big general-purpose instance and patiently waiting for Bluesky to open registrations because Bluesky is much closer to Twitter without Musk.

These people use Mastodon exactly like they used to use Twitter. Official app only, no more than 280 characters, no alt-texts, no hashtags (what do you mean, Mastodon does not have The Algorithm), no content warnings etc. The only way they've adapted to Mastodon, if at all, was s/tweet/toot.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #TwitterMigration #TwitterRefugees