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.

Friendica and NodeBB

And Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte. All from the same family. Although there has yet to be someone to start a group on Forte.

The main issue with Mastodon is that literally every single last Mastodon newbie is being told (or at least implied to) during on-boarding that the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Nobody learns upon joining Mastodon that Mastodon is not an enclosed network. That the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. That there’s non-Mastodon stuff connected to Mastodon and constantly pumping non-Mastodon content into Mastodon.

Why? Because that’s easier to understand. A network of tens of thousands of virtually identical Twitters is already much harder to grasp than one Twitter website. It’s basically the maximum of what most people out there, even many die-hard übernerds, can grasp.

Tell them that it’s ackchually a network in which lots of Twitters and lots of different Twitters and lots of yet again different Twitters and lots of Reddits and lots of Facebooks and lots of YouTubes and lots of Instagrams and whatnot are all joined, and that you can follow what amounts to Facebook users or YouTube channels or subreddits from what amounts to Twitter. And they’ll nope out. Whoosh. Too complicated.

At least every other Mastodon user at this point in time “knows” that Mastodon is alone in the Fediverse, that the Fediverse consists of only Mastodon. Many Mastodon users spend literal years believing that. Reply to them from Friendica or Hubzilla in a typical Friendica or Hubzilla way, and they’ll shit brix and block you.

Mastodon’s entire culture is geared towards a Mastodon-only Fediverse. It was basically defined in mid-2022 (which is why it doesn’t include any Mastodon 4.x features either) by those who had fled Twitter in early 2022 after Elon Musk’s announcement to buy Twitter out. None of them knew about a Fediverse outside of Mastodon at that point.

And so you have a Mastodon culture that’s all about Mastodon’s features (or lack thereof), and that at least implies that any features that Mastodon doesn’t have (and that isn’t craved for by the majority of Mastodon users) are bad. You know, like more than 500 characters per post. And yet, Mastodon users are trying hard to force Mastodon’s culture upon places in the Fediverse that are very very much not like Mastodon at all, e.g. Lemmy or PieFed or Friendica or Hubzilla.

This is also why mainstream media, including most tech media, keep hammering on the Fediverse being Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. For starters, the truth would be incomprehensible to their audience. Besides, the journalists themselves haven’t understood that either.

As for BlackMastodon, it was another Fediverse = Mastodon thing. At least, nobody there was really Fediverse-savvy worth mentioning. Blackzilla or Blackstreams might have been a success. If only anyone there had known about Hubzilla or (streams).

Thread title goes into the top line. It’s mandatory. Top line/paragraph must be only the thread title. No post text.

Line below: Mention the Lemmy community that you want to post to. The Lemmy community must be mentioned between the title and the post text, as in, under the title and above the post text. Nothing else must be in this line/paragraph.

Below that: post text in as many paragraphs as you need.

No further mentions anywhere else in the post.

Also, no hashtags. They won’t break anything, Lemmy simply doesn’t support hashtags. But some 99% of all Lemmy users come from Reddit (as opposed to almost everyone on Mastodon coming from Twitter), Reddit doesn’t have hashtags, and so they aren’t used to hashtags. Lemmy’s culture is basically Reddit’s culture, and Mastodon’s culture is irrelevant and invalid on Lemmy.