What are the differences/similarities between Hubzilla and Forte?

2025-03-31 20:37:44

pfortalk@forte.fedi-verse.hu

Feral Ferment wrote the following post Mon, 31 Mar 2025 18:37:43 +0000
What are the differences/similarities between Hubzilla and Forte?
I know Hubzilla is based on the Nomad/Zot protocol, while Forte is based on ActivityPub.

What are the other differences/similarities between the two?

What are the differences in terms of UX and UI?

For example:

Does Forte have nomadic identity? If yes, how does it work in practice?
Does Forte decouple follows and followers like Mastodon/Twitter, or does it have mutual contacts like Hubzilla/Facebook?
Is there a character limit for Forte posts?
Can Forte posts have a title? Or a content warning? Or both?
Is an @ mention required for the recipient to receive notification of a response to their post?
Does Forte have conversation containers? Is the response to a new Forte post a "comment" or a "reply"?

These are questions off the top of my head. One can think of many others.

Would be glad to know more about Forte.

@Feral Ferment

2025-04-01 02:55:22

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Some things may be clearer if you know where Forte comes from.

Forte is a fork of the streams repository (October, 2021). The only difference between the two is that Forte doesn't support Nomad anymore, so it has to handle nomadic identity etc. entirely via ActivityPub.

The streams repository itself is a fork of a fork (Roadhouse, early 2021)
of one of three forks (Osada (III), Mistpark 2020, Redmatrix 2020)
of a fork (Zap, 2018)
of potentially another fork (Osada (I), 2018)
of Hubzilla.

Everything in this family tree was made by Mike Macgirvin who also maintains Forte. The last time that Mike created a Fediverse server application from zero was in 2010 (Mistpark, now Friendica). In other words, Forte has inherited a lot from Hubzilla.

Does Forte have nomadic identity? If yes, how does it work in practice?

Yes. And it works the same as on Hubzilla. Only that Forte does it via ActivityPub. Also, AFAIK, Forte doesn't sync between instances in real-time; I guess it needs a cronjob or something like that to trigger the syncing process.

However, you cannot clone between different server applications.

Does Forte decouple follows and followers like Mastodon/Twitter, or does it have mutual contacts like Hubzilla/Facebook?

Forte handles contacts pretty much like Hubzilla does: The default is mutual (= approved contact).

Is there a character limit for Forte posts?

Most likely the same as on (streams): over 24,000,000 characters. That's the limit of the database field for post texts.

Can Forte posts have a title? Or a content warning? Or both?

Both. In a sense.

Forte has the same title field as Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and everything in-between.

In addition, Forte supports the same summary field as Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and everything in-between that Mastodon has repurposed as a content warning field in 2017.

However, unlike Hubzilla (and like Friendica and (streams)), Forte does not have a dedicated entry field for summaries. Instead, summaries are added with BBcode ([summary]Summary[/summary]) or Markdown/HTML (<details><summary>Summary</summary></details>). The advantage of this is that it actually works in comments as well. Hubzilla does support [summary]Summary[/summary], too, but its "translation" into an actual summary is broken in comments.

As for actual content warnings, Forte handles them like the whole family has been traditionally handling them for well over a decade: It automatically generates them on the reader side by means of a keyword list. The feature is called NSFW. AFAIK, there is a difference between Hubzilla and Forte here: Forte (like (streams)) supports regular expressions in the NSFW keyword list.

Is an @ mention required for the recipient to receive notification of a response to their post?

Mike said something about (streams) having a "shadow mention" feature, i.e. it mentions whomever you reply to without showing the mention in the reply text. If (streams) has it, Forte has it (except Nomad).

However: If Bob has replied to Alice, Carol has replied to Bob, Dave has replied to Carol, and you reply to Dave, chances are that Forte will only shadow-mention Dave. If Alice, Bob and Carol are on Mastodon, they won't know you've replied to Dave unless you @-mention them all manually.

Does Forte have conversation containers? Is the response to a new Forte post a "comment" or a "reply"?

Conversation containers were invented on (streams). Forte is literally (streams) without Nomad. So, yes, Forte has conversation containers.

And it's a "comment".

Otherwise, you may want to take a look at the Mastodon/Friendica/Hubzilla/(streams) comparison tables I've made a while ago.

Just take the (streams) columns, replace (streams) with Forte in your mind, but consider the following differences between (streams) and Forte:

(streams) is not a project. Forte is.
(streams) is officially and intentionally nameless and brandless. Forte has an official name and an official branding.
(streams) was released into the public domain. Forte, like everything before (streams) (that is, before Friendica was relicensed) is released under the MIT license.
(streams) is from October, 2021. Forte is from August, 2024.
The code repository is different, of course.
The public instances are different (don't ask me about specific public Forte instances).
The support group is a different one.
On (streams), ActivityPub is optional, but on for new channels. Forte is based on ActivityPub; therefore, it is not optional.
Unlike (streams), Forte cannot federate via Nomad. I wouldn't count on Forte's directory listing Hubzilla and (streams) channels if they have ActivityPub off.

Otherwise, Forte is just like (streams).

Here are a few more differences:

Hubzilla has only one official, pre-installed theme: Redbasic 2.2. (streams) and Forte only have Redbasic 2.1 which isn't quite as configurable. In addition, they have a new theme named Fresh which can hardly be configured. On the other hand, the new third-party themes for Hubzilla are not available for (streams) and Forte.

(streams) and Forte do not have a dark mode switch in the burger/app menu. This was introduced to Hubzilla with version 9.0, along with Redbasic 2.2.

(streams) and Forte do not have an HQ page, nor do they have the Startpage app, nor is the Startpage app functionality part of the core now. When you log in, or you switch channels, you land on your channel page. This cannot be configured. The disadvantage of this is that this flags a lot of new posts, comments etc. read because they are technically read.

On (streams) and Forte, you have the same stream filtering options as on Hubzilla. Unlike on Hubzilla, they're all hard-coded (on Hubzilla, filtering events and polls is optional). Also, you can filter videos on (streams) and Forte.

On Hubzilla, dislikes are optional. On (streams) and Forte, they're hard-coded. I guess everyone since old Mistpark times who came across this option turned it on anyway, so there was no point anymore in keeping it optional and off by default.

(streams) and Forte still handle likes, dislikes and repeats like Hubzilla 9 and older, i.e. the counters and the buttons themselves are still separate.

(streams) and Forte do not have "Save to folder". They do still have bookmarks, though.

On (streams) and Forte, mention auto-complete works with @! as well. On Hubzilla, you first have to complete the mention with @ and then add the exclamation mark afterwards.

Hubzilla's mention auto-completion lists all actors it can find at once. The list can be pretty long and take quite a while to load. (streams) and Forte only list a maximum of ten actors. The list is a great deal faster than on Hubzilla. If the actor you're looking for isn't on the list, add more characters.

(streams) and Forte don't auto-complete code. That's probably also because posts, comments and PMs can be formatted not only with BBcode, but also with Markdown and HTML. (streams) and Forte would have to be able to auto-complete these as well, just like Hubzilla can auto-complete BBcode.

Hubzilla has emoji auto-complete (if emoji are activated on the hub). (streams) and Forte don't even have emoji.

(streams) can make Mastodon blank out the images in a post if the post contains the #sensitive and/or #nsfw hashtag. I guess the same applies to Forte. Hubzilla does not have this feature.

On (streams) and Forte, both the image upload dialogue and the image editor dialogue have a new text field for an alt-text. Whenever you embed that image in a post, the alt-text is automatically added to the embedding code.

Hubzilla has a graphical PDL editor with drag-and-drop. On (streams) and Forte, the PDL editor is 100% code-based.

On Hubzilla, the channel-wide permissions are defined by the channel role. You have two social networking channel roles and one forum channel role as presets. If you want more fine-grained control, you need the Custom channel role. Before you can edit it, you're warned that stuff can break.

Unlike Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte show you what kind of server software a post or comment is from. Or rather, they show you the string by which a Fediverse server identifies its "type" ("hubzilla", "mastodon", "friendica", "misskey" etc.; this itself is not consistent on (streams) because (streams) doesn't have an official name or branding).

The settings are under the burger menu on (streams) and Forte. Also, the little cogwheel towards the left of the navbar is gone.

On (streams) and Forte, you have the channel type. It doesn't pre-define nearly as much as on Hubzilla. You have the following six channel types:

Social - Public. Social networking channel, and you post in public by default.
Social - Restricted. Social networking channel, and you post to the Friends access list by default.
- Note: On (streams) and Forte, privacy groups are named access lists. And they aren't an app anymore. Instead, they are integrated into the core, and they are configured under the settings.
Group - Normal. Forum channel, public profile, public stream, members may upload files to the channel.
Group - Limited. Forum channel, public profile, public stream, members may not upload files to the channel.
Group - Moderated. Forum channel, public profile, public stream, members may not upload files to the channel. Posts and comments by new members must be manually approved by the admin(s) until they manually upgrade these new members' permissions.
Group - Restricted. Forum channel, profile and stream only visible to members, members may upload files to the channel.

There is no Custom channel type. It is superfluous because the vast majority of permissions settings for the channel are individual switches/controls now.

(streams) and Forte have a permission setting for searching your channel. Hubzilla doesn't.

Hubzilla only imports posts from your contacts and, of course, DMs as well as comments on your own posts. By default, so do (streams) and Forte. Optionally, however, they can also import comments by your contacts under other people's posts. Not only the comments, but the comments with the whole respective thread around them. And again, you can grant this permission to all your contacts on a channel level or to individual contacts.

If you want to get rid of boosts on Hubzilla, you have to add this line to the appropriate filter blacklist: ?verb == Announce. (streams) and Forte have a dedicated switch for that in the contact editor.

In the settings on (streams) and Forte, under Security and Privacy, there is a text field labelled, "Accept messages from strangers which include any of the following hashtags". You can enter keywords here, comma-separated, and (streams) and Forte will let you follow hashtags, much like on Mastodon. (I've yet to see this in action, seeing as all content that comes by the (streams) instances that I'm on comes from approved contacts of mine.) You can also filter your stream by these individual hashtags.

Contact roles are named permission roles on (streams) and Forte. And permission roles are an app now. That's because they are no longer necessary. On Hubzilla, you can only define the permissions of a contact by assigning a contact role to that contact. On (streams) and Forte, you can flick any permission that isn't granted by the channel settings on and off in the contact configuration. Permission roles are nothing but optional presets to make assigning the same set of permissions again and again easier and more convenient. If you configure the permissions of a contact manually, and your configuration happens to match one of your permission roles, (streams) and Forte automatically "assign" the permission role to the contact.

(streams) and Forte have a Communities page which lists all Fediverse server known to the (streams) or Forte server that you are on. It can be filtered by "community type", i.e. the string which identifies the server type (the same string that you see in posts and comments). Hubzilla doesn't have anything like this.

Hubzilla's app lists are actual lists. (streams) and Forte have them arranged in three columns which take up a whole lot less space.

Under "Available apps", Hubzilla lists all apps available on a particular hub. (streams) and Forte only list apps that aren't installed.

(streams) and Forte let you, as a user, block entire Fediverse servers.

Like on Mastodon, and unlike on Hubzilla, you can verify external pages/identities on (streams) and Forte. Unlike on Mastodon where you can only verify one external identity, the number of possible verifications is unlimited.