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Firefish Mastodon alternative (joinfirefish.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I found Firefish which is a better alternative to the standard Mastodon application. It's compatible with Mastodon and has better features. It allows users to create web pages and the character limit is 3,000 instead of the 500 on Mastodon. It feels like a good limit for the type of site that it is. Plus this means that it can handle long posts from users on customized Mastodon instances.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is part of the overall concept of the fediverse and the activitypub protocol.

Think of it this way - what is the difference between Twitter and Instagram? They're very similar. The one key difference being that Instagram requires you to include a picture. But you can include pictures in Twitter too. So wouldn't it be nice to be able to see Instagram accounts from your Twitter account? Speaking only of the technology and not the content or corporate shenanigans that is. (by the way, Pixelfed is an activitypub clone of Instagram, and it can interact with Mastodon)

What if you have an idea for a microblogging platform, but it's a little bit different from the vision that the developers of Mastodon have? You can try to submit code to Mastodon's code base but there's no guarantee they'll accept it. You can fork Mastodon, but then you have to work within the framework that they've laid.

Or you can create your own platform. The benefit is, you can implement the same set of interoperability standards that the community has agreed upon. You don't have to attract all the users to your service to the exclusion of other services.

So why is all of this a good thing? There are a few reasons. If Mastodon starts heading in a direction that users dislike, they aren't stuck with Mastodon. For example, if they started behaving like Twitter, users could just jump to a different platform, but they would be able to continue to interact with Mastodon users who choose to stay.

If someone has a much better idea for a platform and puts the time and effort in to make it truly great, there's no reason for users to be stuck on a now inferior platform.

And if one software package tries a cool new feature that Mastodon doesn't presently have, and that feature catches on, Mastodon and other services can choose to also implement the feature. It increases competition, but also increases potential for collaborative development.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

if we keep on creating new ones, it would lead to fragmentations
there's no way that all these numerous admins would agree to enshitify the internet in a uniform manner like what happened with the big companies (e.g. with Twitter and Reddit); and even if they do we can just create a new instance or fork the good older version
for a lot of people, they'd just use what other people are using without caring about the technical prowess; 3000 char limit increase means nothing to them
most of the people who run these things don't care about competitions, they don't get more money (or perhaps even anything meaningful) from staying on top; they probably won't care about the next-door shop got better stuff