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Reply to @sendpaws@mitra.pawslut.party
Jupiter Rowland@jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu (2026-06-10 06:52:11)
@Pawlicker @Phantasm Not the whole Fediverse is social media.

Social media is all about unidirectional followers and churning out content to as many people as possible. Mastodon is social media. It's modelled after Twitter which is social media. So are basically all other microblogging server applications in the Fediverse.

In stark contrast, Hubzilla, as well as its ancestors and descendants, is not social media. It is not modelled after Twitter. It is not nomadic Mastodon with unlimited characters. It doesn't even have unidirectional following. Intentionally in all cases. Also, something that has been around for longer than Mastodon can't be modelled after Mastodon.

Rather, at its core, it's modelled after the Facebook of the 2010s. The Facebook of the 2010s was not social media. It was a social network, dedicated to bidirectional interactions between people. To this day, Facebook doesn't have unidirectional following. Instead, it has "friends" which are always bidirectional.

Likewise, Hubzilla has bidirectional "contacts" as a default. Mind you, these are nothing like your usual Fediverse microblogging mutuals. They aren't one following connection plus one being-followed connection. They're one and exactly one connection which goes both ways.

Also, unlike most other Fediverse software, Hubzilla is extremely flexible in its use-cases. Unlike on most other Fediverse server applications, Hubzilla isn't hard-coded to always be public unless it's a DM which still is quasi-public. It can very much be used for enclosed communities as well, protected by a staggeringly advanced permissions system.

Let me put it this way: BlackMastodon was a disaster. Why? Because Mastodon has nothing much between fully public and mention-driven DMs, and its only ways of self-moderation are muting, blocking and calling the mods.

BlackZilla would have been a success (unless phone apps with native mobile UIs would have been a hard requirement). It would have allowed for discussions wit
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Phantasm@phnt@fluffytail.org (2026-06-10 20:07:09)
@jupiter_rowland @sendpaws 
>Not the whole Fediverse is social media.
>Social media is all about unidirectional followers and churning out content to as many people as possible...

The protocol is described as a social networking protocol in its abstract. That people managed to bolt on forums and marketplaces on top of it is more of a testament to its stupid levels of extensibility. And to me social media qualifies as anything that isn't a blog that allows comments. Since that is its dictionary definition more or less. AIM was social media, Twitter is social media, Fediverse is social media. They are all medias that allow social interactions.

Abstract
The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format.
---
websites and computer programs that allow people to communicate and share information, opinions, pictures, videos, etc. on the internet, especially social networking websites
- Cambridge dictionary

>It would have allowed for discussions with restricted permissions, made absolutely impenetrable even for Mastodon users. It would even have allowed for discussion groups which would have been both fully private and hidden from all directories. Most importantly, it would have empowered its users to moderate their own streams themselves with a whole arsenal of countermeasures, all the way up to the thermonuclear option of turning ActivityPub off entirely.

You can't have any of this when using ActivityPub. And if you turn off ActivityPub federation then you've created a website with comments. There is nothing private on this network besides end-to-end-encrypted DMs which are very much in a prototype stage still. This whole network operates on an implied trust that nobody does anything malicious, but that is a faulty assumption that never held up. Trying to make ActivityPub resilient to it would have reinvented XMPP with different semantics and probably much more complicated. Even stuff like Conversation

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Jupiter Rowland@jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu (2026-06-11 03:39:59)
@Phantasm The protocol is described as a social networking protocol in its abstract. That people managed to bolt on forums and marketplaces on top of it is more of a testament to its stupid levels of extensibility.
Where do you think ActivityPub came from?

It wasn't Eugen Rochko who invented it.

It was invented by @Erin Kissane and @Evan Prodromou. The same Evan Prodromou who started the Fediverse as early as 2008 with the microblogging website Identi.ca, the software Laconi.ca which it is based on and the server application StatusNet based on Laconi.ca. And I know from personal, first-hand experience that StatusNet had groups.

Also, the very first server application that implemented ActivityPub was Hubzilla in July, 2017, two months before Mastodon which started out on the same protocol as StatusNet. And Hubzilla's forums very much support ActivityPub, just like Hubzilla has full support for other ActivityPub-based groups.

The reason why Mastodon doesn't have groups isn't because ActivityPub doesn't really support them. It's because Twitter has never had groups.

And to me social media qualifies as anything that isn't a blog that allows comments. Since that is its dictionary definition more or less. AIM was social media, Twitter is social media, Fediverse is social media. They are all medias that allow social interactions.
Still, there's a big difference between how Twitter, Mastodon, Pleroma and Mitra work and how Facebook, Friendica, Hubzilla and its descendants work. And how Reddit, Hacker News, Lemmy and Mbin work.

In stark contrast what many believe, ActivityPub was never meant to be a pure microblogging protocol.

>It would have allowed for discussions with restricted permissions, made absolutely impenetrable even for Mastodon users. It would even have allowed for discussion groups which would have been both fully private and hidden from all directories. Most importantly, it would have empowered its users to moderate their own streams themselves with a w