I finally mostly got #
Friendica working: It's slow, but it doesn't time out anymore, at least. Settled in at last into just enjoying the social media platform I've put so much work into self-hosting. Then some absolute asshole comes along and says, hey, I'd love to use your platform, but have you ever considered Hubzilla instead?
... So anyway now I'm running a #
Hubzilla instance. It's a little jank, but easier than I thought it would be, and extremely powerful. Imagine something like a cross between Livejournal and Old Facebook in terms of its UI, where you can do anything from post to walls, to start private chats, to host files and images, to create a website or a wiki. I can see what people mean when talking about it: It's very powerful. There's a sliding scale for how 'close' a contact is to you, so you can choose to share things just with certain people. I can host files, I can change my landing page and which pages appear on my top bar. The post editor is also very robust; I can even encrypt text.
I just had to import all of my contacts by hand, because there's no import feature for #
ActivityPub. I have nothing but time on my hands right now, though, so it was fine, and maybe if I end up sticking with Hubzilla, I'll learn some PHP and write an addon so no one else has to do that.
There's also some real baffling jank. For instance, it just seems to randomly not import some people's profile pictures, even though it'll import other people on the same instance as you just fine. Some #
Mastodon instances also just straight up can't be connected to, including some major ones; again, not sure why, but maybe they have the protocol blocked somehow.
Some of this stuff, like different layers of privacy, are on Friendica, too, and Friendica is amazing — except it absolutely chugs. I've tried hosting it, on its own, on two separate machines — full on quad-core computers with 8GB of RAM — and depending on traffic, pages still take over a minute to load sometimes. We'll see if Hubzilla gives me the same issue, but I'm told it's even more resource-efficient than Mastodon is. At least so far, even though there's two other public-facing services running on the same host, it's been blisteringly fast.
Registrations are open if you wanna play around in it and help me test it:
https://hub.workersofthe.worldHubzilla
