Hubzilla 5.0 what's new?No doubt, it has been quite a while since the last release of Hubzilla. If you wonder what took us so long to get 5.0 ready while the
changelog does not look
so big (well, it's not so small either), you might find some answers in this post.
Zot6 ProtocolA lot of time-consuming work has gone into research on how to approach the implementiation of the zot6 protocol as the primary protocol in Hubzilla. Then, of course, make the necessary changes to the code and make the numerous cogwheels work together again. You hopefully won't notice anything about those changes except that in your connections list the network field for your connections will change from Zot to Zot6 as soon as your connections will upgrade their hub to version 5.0.
Mail app moved to addonsThe private mail app has been deprecated in favor of direct messages. This is because there is no concept of private mail in the zot6 protocol. If you require access to your legacy mail, you will need to ask your hubmin to install the mail addon. The backend code for legacy mail is still in core because it is required for compatibility with legacy zot hubs and diaspora. It will be moved to the diaspora addon as soon as legacy zot will be sunset which is in about a year from now.
Direct messagesDirect messages are messages that are addressed to one or more single connections. They are accessible from your network stream. A direct messages filter has been added to the stream filter widget for quick access. In the course of the next year direct messages will receive a separate frontend module.
ForumsThe way we interact with forums has changed. In order to make a forum post, it is now required to send a direct message to the forum. This has the advantage of better cross-protocol compatibility. The
!tag mentions for forums are marked deprecated.
PollsHubzilla now has support for polls with multiple options. This feature is compatible with activitypub polls and is available directly from the editor. The vote feature has been deprecated in favor of polls.
Community tagsCommunity tags have not yet been ported to zot6 and have therefore been disabled for now. The reason is that it is not very clear yet how to implement them in regard to compatibility with other networks (mainly activitypub/pixelfed which provides a similar feature). Be patient - they will come back!
NotificationsThis is again one of the big “under the hood“ changes. The entire notification system has been rewritten to implement server sent events. It is required to install the SSE addon to be able to get real time notifications. In the course of this rewrite some useful new notification features were implemented: infinite scroll, name and address filters for current or complete data set, content preview on hover.
We have also worked on the addons. There are some useful new additions: hide aside, navbanner options, sse. Many of the existing addons received improvements. Unmaintained or broken addons were moved to the addons-unsupported repository where they are waiting for maintainers.
As always, we have fixed many little bugs which will remain unnamed here.
I guess that's about it...
