Right now they are the big kid on the block, and they feel like they can do what they want and tell everyone else to live with it, but that is not always going to be the case. There are a lot of competitors in the space and eventually someone else will dethrone them as king of the hill.
The aim of this issue is to define
* A universal post attribute that communicates if the author of a post wants their post to be quote-posted or not, and
* Any UI elements required for the user to control that post attribute.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/25735
the issue here is not the aim of the function - the function is good and desirable but to make it work across other apps as well.
[quote][/quote]
tags. If it's posts that are flagged, the mention check is unnecessary. Either way, if no-quote post content is detected, the "Send" button would be disabled/greyed out.Quote
I really think a lot of good things are forming in the Hubzilla project, and Neuhub. But Mastodon obviously does at least some things better that we can learn from, for external awareness.
Mastodon has a monopoly on mobile app compatibility because just about all iPhone apps and almost all Android apps are built against Mastodon and its API rather than the ActivityPub standard.
Well, Lemmy is pretty much established right now and growing as well, despite being something different. Right now, this seems the biggest competitor to Mastodon in a way. But the limitation of Lemmy accounts not being able to follow other accounts (and only communities instead) makes it a bit of an outsider. Like, you can follow users from Friendica, Mastodon, even Hubzilla I think, and see their activity (comment, post), but they cannot see yours.
This also leads to the creation of a more specific culture, with people that are also unaware of other platforms and capabilities (albeit less pronounced, as the devs did a better job of keeping the whole ecosystem decentralized). For example, some users are surprised to hear that you can see their upvotes on other platforms.
Kbin and Mbin could have brought a solution to this issue, as they do support following users, even those from *blogging platforms, but because the projects are younger and less stable - and more so at the time of the Reddit migration - they failed to gain the required traction (i.e. more servers, user numbers more spread out across them) until now. There is still activity on these, they are still growing (people are joining them mostly because they are dissatisfied with the political leanings of the Lemmy devs, as well as their moderation policy on .ml which is subjective to say the least), but you can clearly see a bigger culture formed around Lemmy as of now.
There seems to be something similar happening to Pixelfed, with user numbers growing month after month, and I am sure something similar will happen to Peertube when YouTube will flop badly again and PeerTube will be mature enough, or with Bookwyrm, Friendica, Hubzilla etc.
The latter is mostly because the vast majority of Lemmy users didn't come from Mastodon but from Reddit.
The latter is mostly because the vast majority of Lemmy users didn't come from Mastodon but from Reddit. They weren't told much about the existence of a Fediverse, only that there's a thing called Lemmy which is many copies of Reddit before its enshittification, and these are connected with each other. That's all that many know. Just like many Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
It doesn't help that Lemmy barely gets any interaction from other projects. Mastodon is huge, and Mastodon users should be all over Lemmy. But many Mastodon users have never heard about Lemmy. Those who have may find it too inconvenient to follow a Lemmy community because that involves using the account search and copy-pasting. Don't forget that the huge majority of Mastodon users is on phones. And those who do manage to follow Lemmy communities say that the interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is too limiting.
/kbin made bidirectional *blogging-style following possible only by bolting microblogging onto a Reddit clone.
As for lemmy.ml, that instance doesn't matter that much anymore. Even lemmy.world has been surpassed as the biggest instance.
Pixelfed could become big if Instagram was enshittified so tremendously that everyone except the biggest attention whores ("But muh followers, but muh fame") will start looking for alternatives. The advantage of Pixelfed for Instagram users over Mastodon for Twitter users is that Pixelfed allows direct imports of Instagram accounts with all content.
I'm not so sure about PeerTube, not only because that'd require gigantic amounts of hard drive space, but also because many users are on YouTube for the money, and PeerTube won't pay them a penny. If they moved to PeerTube, they'd lose a source of income. Also, fewer YouTube users have ever heard of PeerTube than 𝕏 users have heard of Mastodon.
BookWyrm would be easier, but I can't see right now how Goodreads could be enshittified enough to cause a mass migration. Maybe, however, BookWyrm becomes interesting for people who don't even know Goodreads and its whole concept, and they find out about BookWyrm before they find out about Goodreads.
As for Hubzilla, it'll first need a lot of polish. And then I can't see from where people would come flooding to Hubzilla. [...] Hubzilla could be something for companies, for organisations, for political offices, for journalists, for scientists etc.
It would make sense that Reddit users would just go straight to Lemmy.
The major downside of letting people discover first decentralisation and then the greater Fediverse is that they get too used to their first impression of wherever in the Fediverse they land, they adjust their action to this first impression, and they may end up deeply disturbed when they find out what the Fediverse really is.