One year of Eternal November: The good, the bad and the ugly

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Duothematic channel. Primary topic is virtual worlds/OpenSim, secondary topic is the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. Follow me from Mastodon or anywhere else in the Fediverse.

Ort:: The Hypergrid

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Homepage:: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/profile/jupiter_rowland

One year of Eternal November: The good, the bad and the ugly

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 13:43:25 +0100 zuletzt bearbeitet: Sun, 05 Nov 2023 13:43:21 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

If you're bored, and/or you've got a lot of time to spare, I've written an article on how I saw and still see the Eternal November.

Content warning: It isn't only about Mastodon. And I'm not necessarily going easy on those who thought or still think the Fediverse is nothing but Mastodon. It also mentions Bluesky.

#Fediverse #EternalNovember #Mastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Bluesky

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 15:43:08 +0100 zuletzt bearbeitet: Sun, 05 Nov 2023 15:43:04 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@vid The big iOS influx was mostly during the Twitter migration waves since early 2022.

But keep in mind that Mastodon wasn't launched in 2022. It's from 2016. That early, Mastodon's target audience was similar to that of Linux. It was a mixture of "Twitter, but free, non-commercial and decentralised" and "Friendica, but easier to use and with much more capacity per instance". It simply wasn't attractive to your typical average Windows user, and it wasn't cool enough for the Mac crowd.

Linux probably became less dominant when Mastodon became the new home for masses of furries and otaku who had been chased away from Twitter. I remember times when it seemed like one out of three Mastodon users was a furry.

Mastodon didn't have an official mobile app named "Mastodon" right away, only third-party apps. It took years to whip one up when it was decided that Mastodon needed one. And even then it still took a while until there was an official app for iOS. Not only did it have to be ported, but I think the original Android app is/was GPL-licensed, and it's next to impossible to comply with both the Apple App Store rules and the GPL at the same time, so the iOS app had to be made from scratch.

Basically, Mastodon wasn't flooded with iPhone users until they could load an app named "Mastodon" from the Apple App Store. And even still in early 2022, it only seemed worth developing Mastodon clients either for Android and then F-Droid or for the desktop and then free, open-source and cross-platform.

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 16:02:18 +0100 zuletzt bearbeitet: Sun, 05 Nov 2023 16:02:15 +0100

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@vid I don't know much about these people. The only one I "know" who's very involved in ActivityPub is Evan Prodromou, and he has previously invented OStatus. I don't know what OS he prefers.

I also know that Diaspora* was created by four Mac fanbois and originally only built against OS X as a server operating system as if nothing else existed. It took some work to get it to run on Linux, and even then you had to compile Ruby on Rails from sources because Diaspora* was built against a version that wasn't available on typical server distros.

But what you say makes sense, considering they keep turning Mike Macgirvin's suggestions down. And this guy has single-handedly created more federated protocols than anyone and invented nomadic identity.