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2025-01-09 22:13:10

monkeyborg@triangletoot.party

Reading up on #Hubzilla and Mike Macgirvinʼs criticisms of ActivityPub and Mastodon. I wonder if some of Macgirvinʼs innovations, like what he calls “magic-auth,” could fix some of the issues we see people complain about here frequently. I dunno. I will have to read more.

I havenʼt seen Hubzilla or Zot discussed here, but my window into the Fediverse is small and limited. Have there been conversations about it? What are common criticisms?

https://medium.com/we-distribute/got-zot-mike-macgirvin-45287601ff19

2025-01-09 22:19:59

Steve

SteveTux@mastodon.social

@monkeyborg

Hi.
Yes. For example see:
@jupiter_rowland
And @chris

If I ever will get to the point to understand the things more, I would run my own Hubzilla instance. But I get too easily distracted. :(

But maybe someday. :)

2025-01-09 23:59:52

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Steve Nice things about Mike's creations such as Hubzilla or (streams) are that they're fairly lightweight, and they don't need much more than a LAMP stack. So no fiddling with Ruby on Rails or big JavaScript deployments or whatever. (Related meme.)

In fact, Mike has just declared (streams) PHP8.4-ready.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #LAMPStack

2025-01-09 23:01:47

autumn 🐾 hyper-fixated on dogs

autumn@triangletoot.party

@monkeyborg i have nothing to add except that the dogs in the link preview are cute.

2025-01-09 23:18:33

Ben Pate 🤘🏻

benpate@mastodon.social

I know there are some "Fediverse Enhancement Proposals" to bring parts of Zot into the rest of the ActivityPub sphere. But that points to the underlying problem: the tradeoff between features and compatibility, and waiting for other big apps on the network to implement various features. It makes for slow progress.

Do you know if Zot is documented anywhere? I'd love to see how much work it would take to implement, compared to ActivityPub.

@monkeyborg

2025-01-09 23:22:55

Saiwal

sk@utsukta.org

The only valid criticism is the lack of a mobile application and that it is so versatile that it has a steep learning curve. A good comparison of features is done here: https://hubzilla.network/page/info/compare

2025-01-09 23:39:45

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@monkϵyborg ?? There is quite some talk about Hubzilla. Not so much on Mastodon, especially not widespread, but on Hubzilla itself, especially some of the Hubzilla forums on Hubzilla.

There's quite a bit of criticism within Hubzilla where we actually know it inside out. As powerful as it is, it isn't exactly easy to use. Not so much because it's so complex (that, too; you can have used it since the 2010s and still learn something new), but because its default (and now only official) UI is too convoluted and too confusing. It's basically stuck in 2012 when Hubzilla was still Red, and even for 2012 standards, it isn't pretty. New features seem to have been slapped onto the UI randomly. There are even UI pages with no links to them.

@Scott M. Stolz is working on all-new themes (which, by other Fediverse software standards, means entirely new UIs, but you can switch between them as a user). But I'm not sure if they will be officially shipped with new installs in the future.

Tying in with this is that there is practically no mobile app for Hubzilla. All there is is a glorified Web app on F-Droid that hasn't been maintained in over five years. But there are no mobile apps with fully native mobile UIs in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, especially not official apps. This alone makes Hubzilla not only unattractive, but practically non-existent for phone users, even though Hubzilla can be installed as a PWA.

Then again, in order for a native app to be useful and fully replace the Web UI for most users, it would have to be so massive and complex that FairEmail would pale in comparison. Also, while Hubzilla has a client API, no-one has ever tried to use it, so for all we know, it may not even work.

Another issue which the community is working on fixing is the built-in documentation which is hopelessly outdated to the point of being outright wrong (I've seen parts that were last touched in 2012 because they still speak of Red), and which in some parts has always been incomplete. @Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ ⚝ has this covered. He also has the Hubzilla KnowledgeDB which is currently mostly in German.

By the way: Since that article was published on Medium in 2017, Mike has done a whole lot more. A semi-chaotic tree of at least seven forks, all significantly slimmed down in comparison to Hubzilla, but increasingly modernised, before he presented the streams repository in October, 2021. It contains his latest stable creation which is intentionally not a project, without a name, without a brand, almost without any nodeinfo code and released into the public domain (except for some third-party add-ons). The community colloquially refers to it as (streams) with parentheses because it isn't really a name.

(streams) may not be the super-powerful "decentralised social CMS" that Hubzilla is. But it's still powerful. It has advanced a lot, as has its underlying protocol which is named Nomad now. It only supports its own and Hubzilla's versions of Nomad plus ActivityPub, but modern-day Nomad is geared towards ActivityPub compatibility so well that ActivityPub no longer has to be an optional, off-by-default add-on; instead, it has been merged into the core.

A few other things have been improved, too. The permission system has lost permission levels which no-one ever really needed or at least no-one needs anymore in today's Fediverse. In general, it has been made more secure by discarding the Public channel role and at the same time so easy and convenient to use that you don't even need a Public channel role anymore.

Sometimes Hubzilla is being called outdated because it uses BBcode for text formatting in posts, comments, DMs and also the optional articles and cards (wikis can alternatively use Markdown; webpages can alternatively use Markdown or HTML). (streams) doesn't have articles, cards, wikis and webpages anymore, but in posts, comments and DMs, you can use BBcode, Markdown and HTML next to each other. BBcode won't disappear anytime soon, I guess, because some specific features are only available via BBcode.

Officially, Mike has retired from Fediverse development at the end of last August, some two weeks after announcing his newest project, Forte (basically (streams) with only ActivityPub and therefore the first Fediverse software that relies on ActivityPub for nomadic identity). But this only means he has slowed down his development after a fast-paced summer.

Both (streams) and Forte are still being developed. Forte is still so experimental that only Mike is using it for his secret private channel, but (streams) has stabilised again after a troublesome summer. And even if it relies on the browser or being installed as a PWA for mobile, too, and even if it direly lacks public instances (I only know two with open registration), it could make for another safe and modern Facebook alternative.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte

2025-01-10 03:36:34

Scott M. Stolz

scott@loves.tech

@monkϵyborg ?? Hubzilla, unfortunately, is not well known to the outside world at the moment. We are working to change that.

Here is a comparison between Hubzilla, Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky.

https://hubzilla.network/page/info/compare

I suppose the biggest criticism about Hubzilla is that you have to learn some new concepts, like nomadic identity and federated single sign on, to fully take advantage of those features. And since it has more features, there is more to learn.

Although I would argue that you can do the basic social media stuff without knowing the advanced stuff.