I ran it some years ago, and over all it wasn’t bad.
The UI is a bit old fashioned and some of the built in plugins seem pretty useless, but the webdav/carddav/caldav integration is nice.
Nomadic identity also works fine, but if you are selfhosting it there will be probably not much use for it.
nanook@friendica.eskimo.com
on 03 Dec 01:22
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It is reliable, reasonably light weight, and has connectors for a number of protocols. I've been running one for a couple of years now. Very low maintenance compared to other social media software I am running. Feel free to check it out, hubzilla.eskimo.com/
I really like it, though the UI is a bit “old facebook”. I would have loved to use it for a club I’m in, but it doesn’t seem to have the organisational capabilities I’d need, like user roles and default channels to follow, and stuff like that.
That said, as a single user instance, I don’t have any issues. It is easy to install and keep up to date. And the connectors to other protocols seems to work fine
nanook@friendica.eskimo.com
on 03 Dec 02:55
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I interpreted TheLugal as considering the old Facebook vibes as a bad thing - but each to their own!
As you're using Friendica - Is the old school Facebook aesthetic part of what makes Friendica appeal to you? Did you move there directly from Facebook back in the day?
And if you have been around for a while, what has the recent growth of ActivityPub felt like from your corner of the Internet?
Friendica has been around since 2010 - it is very cool to me that the content we post here might reach users of a platform that was created almost a decade before ActivityPub was specified.
nanook@friendica.eskimo.com
on 05 Dec 11:09
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@aasatru@ALostInquirer@TheLugal I got kicked off of Farcebook three years ago for not going along with the Covid-19 Vax agenda. I started a friendica at that time because of all the fediverse software available at the time, it looked the most like facebook. My intent was to provide an alternative platform where you were free to say what you wanted.
Since that time I've also put up a Misskey, a Hubzilla, and a Mastodon. I personally don't like the micro-blogging format, thus I don't use Misskey or Mastodon much, just enough to make sure they are working. I prefer long format macroblogging because they make actual intelligent discussions possible (even if it is a capability people rarely use), where as microblogging isn't good for much beyond an occasional snarky remark.
Of the two macroblogging applications, friendica and hubzilla, I prefer friendica because it displays full photos by default and it also makes better use of a wide display (I have a 2560 x 1440 monitor) so I find it more readable.
I also like it's support for bbcode, which while not 100% complete is still better than most other platforms. The only downside to Friendica is that it is relatively resource intensive. Originally I had it on a six core 3.6 Ghz i7-3850 with 128GB of RAM, but it had a hard time keeping up and responsiveness wasn't great. Now it is running on a 4.4 Ghz 18 core 36 thread i9-10980xe (the machine will run at 4.8Ghz but not 100% stable) with 256GB of RAM.
Friendica is not that hard on the database however, averaging around 300 tps, and I've tested MariaDB and found it, on this hardware, to be capable of almost 14,000 tps, so not straining. Seems the PHP code is just not particularly efficient.
Hubzilla, in spite of supporting more protocols, is quite a bit less resource intensive, and Mastodon and Misskey are very resource light.
Thanks - it's interesting to hear what brings people to different platforms.
It sounds like there's a lot of potential in Hubzilla for front-end developers seeking to make it a friendlier experience - from what everyone here is saying the back-end seems pretty solid.
There’s no real mobile app for it, is kind of my personal main reason why I didn’t pick it up…
JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works
on 03 Dec 12:06
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You mean as an end user or as a hub admin?
Hubzilla is my main daily driver in the Fediverse and has been since before the big Twitter migration of 2022. In fact, I’ve never used Twitter.
A few attributes that could describe Hubzilla are “powerful”, “complex”, but also “unusual”.
Hubzilla is basically Facebook on coke and 'roids (without what sucks on Facebook) meets a full-blown blogging engine meets Google Cloud or iCloud services meets Dropbox with a small Web hoster on top, a simple wiki engine etc. etc. plus federation into all kinds of directions (Twitter if your hub admin has the money, diaspora*, WordPress cross-poster etc.), and that still isn’t all that Hubzilla can do.
If Friendica is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, then Hubzilla is a full-blown Leatherman.
There’s little that you couldn’t possibly do with Hubzilla. You can use it for Facebook-style social networking, actually even better than Mastodon. You can run moderated forum/discussion groups on it. You can use it as a blog with all the shebang (except it sends Note-type objects rather than Article-type objects over ActivityPub, and text formatting is done in BBcode), and you don’t even have to worry about where to upload your images because Hubzilla has a built-in file space, complete with subdirectory support and file managers. You can use it as your personal WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV server. You can run simple websites on it (hubzilla.org, the official Hubzilla website, is built on a Hubzilla channel itself).
Friendica, which Hubzilla was forked from back in 2012 (although it didn’t become Hubzilla before 2015), already has multiple profiles per account. You can assign profiles to contacts so that different people can see different sides of you. You can have a public profile with only basic informations. One profile for work and colleagues. One LinkedIn-style career profile. One profile for your family. One profile for your booze buddies or nerd friends or whatever. All with different information about you.
Hubzilla goes even further: Your identity is not tied to your account anymore. Your identity is containerised in what Hubzilla calls a “channel”. And you can have multiple channels on one account. Each channel is like a separate account mostly everywhere else, a fully separate Fediverse identity, but all on the same login. And each channel can have multiple profiles.
For example, you can run one channel as your personal daily-driver channel. Three channels as forums/discussion groups (think Lemmy communities/subreddits) for different topics. One channel with a webpage on it. Whatever. And nobody can tell that these channels are on the same account, save maybe for the hub admin if they’re eager to do some SQL-fu in the database. (Or everyone if all these channels are on a private, single-user hub.)
Or what if you need another Fediverse identity for special purposes? On Lemmy or Mastodon, you need another account. On Hubzilla, you create a new channel on your existing account. You don’t even have to log off and on again to switch between channels.
The channels system was basically introduced to make one of Hubzilla’s killer features possible: nomadic identity. What most Fediverse users consider utter science-fiction was actually already introduced in 2012. Granted, this is only possible because Hubzilla is based on its own protocol rather than ActivityPub, but still.
Nomadic identity makes it possible to have a channel, one and the same channel, on multiple hubs at the same time. Not with dumb copies, but with real-time, live, hot, bidirectional backups of just about everything. You can have as many clones as you want to/as you can find appropriate hubs to clone to.
Your channel always has one main instance which also defines its ID (at least from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla) and one or several clones (which, from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla, all have the same ID as the main instance). Whatever happens on your main instance is copied to the clones within seconds. You can also log onto your clones and use them. E.g. when the hub with your main instance is offline, you lose nothing. Whatever happens on one of the clones is copied to the other clones and to your main instance.
Oh, and if the hub with your main instance goes down for good, or if you want to move, you can define one of your clones your main instance, and your old main instance is demoted to clone. This means that if your channel is nomadic, one server going down won’t take your channel with it. You’ll still have the self-same channel elsewhere. Your home server gives up the ghost, you lose nothing.
But don’t expect Hubzilla to be easy to get into. It’s noth
Thanks for the detailed reply! The potential complexity (depending on how much you want to do with it) is a major part of why I was asking, both in terms of use and administration.
Despite the challenges that poses and absence of mobile apps, it still sounds great, but definitely something to go in with an idea of what you do and don’t want to do with it.
threaded - newest
I ran it some years ago, and over all it wasn’t bad.
The UI is a bit old fashioned and some of the built in plugins seem pretty useless, but the webdav/carddav/caldav integration is nice.
Nomadic identity also works fine, but if you are selfhosting it there will be probably not much use for it.
It is reliable, reasonably light weight, and has connectors for a number of protocols. I've been running one for a couple of years now. Very low maintenance compared to other social media software I am running. Feel free to check it out, hubzilla.eskimo.com/
I really like it, though the UI is a bit “old facebook”. I would have loved to use it for a club I’m in, but it doesn’t seem to have the organisational capabilities I’d need, like user roles and default channels to follow, and stuff like that.
That said, as a single user instance, I don’t have any issues. It is easy to install and keep up to date. And the connectors to other protocols seems to work fine
@TheLugal @ALostInquirer If you want an old facebook look, take a look at friendica. friendica.eskimo.com/
I interpreted TheLugal as considering the old Facebook vibes as a bad thing - but each to their own!
As you're using Friendica - Is the old school Facebook aesthetic part of what makes Friendica appeal to you? Did you move there directly from Facebook back in the day?
And if you have been around for a while, what has the recent growth of ActivityPub felt like from your corner of the Internet?
Friendica has been around since 2010 - it is very cool to me that the content we post here might reach users of a platform that was created almost a decade before ActivityPub was specified.
@aasatru @ALostInquirer @TheLugal I got kicked off of Farcebook three years ago for not going along with the Covid-19 Vax agenda. I started a friendica at that time because of all the fediverse software available at the time, it looked the most like facebook. My intent was to provide an alternative platform where you were free to say what you wanted.
Since that time I've also put up a Misskey, a Hubzilla, and a Mastodon. I personally don't like the micro-blogging format, thus I don't use Misskey or Mastodon much, just enough to make sure they are working. I prefer long format macroblogging because they make actual intelligent discussions possible (even if it is a capability people rarely use), where as microblogging isn't good for much beyond an occasional snarky remark.
Of the two macroblogging applications, friendica and hubzilla, I prefer friendica because it displays full photos by default and it also makes better use of a wide display (I have a 2560 x 1440 monitor) so I find it more readable.
I also like it's support for bbcode, which while not 100% complete is still better than most other platforms. The only downside to Friendica is that it is relatively resource intensive. Originally I had it on a six core 3.6 Ghz i7-3850 with 128GB of RAM, but it had a hard time keeping up and responsiveness wasn't great. Now it is running on a 4.4 Ghz 18 core 36 thread i9-10980xe (the machine will run at 4.8Ghz but not 100% stable) with 256GB of RAM.
Friendica is not that hard on the database however, averaging around 300 tps, and I've tested MariaDB and found it, on this hardware, to be capable of almost 14,000 tps, so not straining. Seems the PHP code is just not particularly efficient.
Hubzilla, in spite of supporting more protocols, is quite a bit less resource intensive, and Mastodon and Misskey are very resource light.
Thanks - it's interesting to hear what brings people to different platforms.
It sounds like there's a lot of potential in Hubzilla for front-end developers seeking to make it a friendlier experience - from what everyone here is saying the back-end seems pretty solid.
There’s no real mobile app for it, is kind of my personal main reason why I didn’t pick it up…
You mean as an end user or as a hub admin?
Hubzilla is my main daily driver in the Fediverse and has been since before the big Twitter migration of 2022. In fact, I’ve never used Twitter.
A few attributes that could describe Hubzilla are “powerful”, “complex”, but also “unusual”.
Hubzilla is basically Facebook on coke and 'roids (without what sucks on Facebook) meets a full-blown blogging engine meets Google Cloud or iCloud services meets Dropbox with a small Web hoster on top, a simple wiki engine etc. etc. plus federation into all kinds of directions (Twitter if your hub admin has the money, diaspora*, WordPress cross-poster etc.), and that still isn’t all that Hubzilla can do.
If Friendica is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, then Hubzilla is a full-blown Leatherman.
There’s little that you couldn’t possibly do with Hubzilla. You can use it for Facebook-style social networking, actually even better than Mastodon. You can run moderated forum/discussion groups on it. You can use it as a blog with all the shebang (except it sends Note-type objects rather than Article-type objects over ActivityPub, and text formatting is done in BBcode), and you don’t even have to worry about where to upload your images because Hubzilla has a built-in file space, complete with subdirectory support and file managers. You can use it as your personal WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV server. You can run simple websites on it (hubzilla.org, the official Hubzilla website, is built on a Hubzilla channel itself).
Friendica, which Hubzilla was forked from back in 2012 (although it didn’t become Hubzilla before 2015), already has multiple profiles per account. You can assign profiles to contacts so that different people can see different sides of you. You can have a public profile with only basic informations. One profile for work and colleagues. One LinkedIn-style career profile. One profile for your family. One profile for your booze buddies or nerd friends or whatever. All with different information about you.
Hubzilla goes even further: Your identity is not tied to your account anymore. Your identity is containerised in what Hubzilla calls a “channel”. And you can have multiple channels on one account. Each channel is like a separate account mostly everywhere else, a fully separate Fediverse identity, but all on the same login. And each channel can have multiple profiles.
For example, you can run one channel as your personal daily-driver channel. Three channels as forums/discussion groups (think Lemmy communities/subreddits) for different topics. One channel with a webpage on it. Whatever. And nobody can tell that these channels are on the same account, save maybe for the hub admin if they’re eager to do some SQL-fu in the database. (Or everyone if all these channels are on a private, single-user hub.)
Or what if you need another Fediverse identity for special purposes? On Lemmy or Mastodon, you need another account. On Hubzilla, you create a new channel on your existing account. You don’t even have to log off and on again to switch between channels.
The channels system was basically introduced to make one of Hubzilla’s killer features possible: nomadic identity. What most Fediverse users consider utter science-fiction was actually already introduced in 2012. Granted, this is only possible because Hubzilla is based on its own protocol rather than ActivityPub, but still.
Nomadic identity makes it possible to have a channel, one and the same channel, on multiple hubs at the same time. Not with dumb copies, but with real-time, live, hot, bidirectional backups of just about everything. You can have as many clones as you want to/as you can find appropriate hubs to clone to.
Your channel always has one main instance which also defines its ID (at least from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla) and one or several clones (which, from the POV of software that understands nomadic identity as used by Hubzilla, all have the same ID as the main instance). Whatever happens on your main instance is copied to the clones within seconds. You can also log onto your clones and use them. E.g. when the hub with your main instance is offline, you lose nothing. Whatever happens on one of the clones is copied to the other clones and to your main instance.
Oh, and if the hub with your main instance goes down for good, or if you want to move, you can define one of your clones your main instance, and your old main instance is demoted to clone. This means that if your channel is nomadic, one server going down won’t take your channel with it. You’ll still have the self-same channel elsewhere. Your home server gives up the ghost, you lose nothing.
But don’t expect Hubzilla to be easy to get into. It’s noth
Thanks for the detailed reply! The potential complexity (depending on how much you want to do with it) is a major part of why I was asking, both in terms of use and administration.
Despite the challenges that poses and absence of mobile apps, it still sounds great, but definitely something to go in with an idea of what you do and don’t want to do with it.
Low engagement and tends towards geeky grumpy right wing old men. Or Germans.