Emergency account of a not-so-average OpenSim avatar. Mostly active on Hubzilla.
The source code is actually on Framagit.
Ignore the creation dates; Hubzilla is much older than that.
Some Fediverse server applications are being described as "the Swiss Army knife of the Fediverse" because they have so many features, and they cover so many use-cases. They're advertised as the most fully-featured Fediverse server applications to ever exist. By people who have never heard of Hubzilla, or who count on everyone else never having heard of Hubzilla.
Still, Hubzilla blows them clean out of the water, feature-wise and use-case-wise, without even breaking a sweat.
It does do blogs. And it does Facebook. And it does shit-tons of stuff on top of that. And if you choose so, it can do even more shit-tons of stuff on top of these shit-tons.
Hubzilla offers you, all under one roof:
- federated microblogging/macroblogging/long-form blogging with literally all the text formatting and then some with a character limit of over 16.7 million, with as many embedded images as you want, plus post/thread titles, plus summaries, plus local blog categories
- a social networking experience like on Facebook
- moderated forums (groups) with a variable and flexible level of privacy and secrecy
- a built-in file space that supports subfolders, and that can be accessed via WebDAV
- (optionally) fully formatted and titled, non-federated long-form articles (you can link to them in federated posts)
- (optionally) webpages, formatted either in Hubzilla's extended BBcode or in Markdown or in HTML
- (optionally) multiple wikis per channel with multple pages per wiki, formatted either in Hubzilla's extended BBcode or in Markdown
- a federated event calendar
- a CalDAV calendar server that uses the same UI as the event calendar; events in CalDAV calendars are shown among the event announcements, too
- (optionally) a headless CardDAV addressbook server
- (optionally) OpenStreetMap integration
- (optionally) QR codes dynamically generated in messages
- the second-most-advanced permissions system in the Fediverse, well over a dozen different permissions, on three levels, with seven or eight permission settings at per-channel level
- one of the most advanced filter systems in the Fediverse with a channel-wide keyword blacklist, a channel-wide keyword whitelist, optional blacklist and whitelist per connection, an optional filter list that just hides messages behind content warnings, RegEx support and, for advanced use-cases, even its own filter syntax
- multiple independent channels/identities (like accounts on other apps) on one account/login
- nomadic identity: just about the best and most advanced identity portability in the Fediverse, even with the possibility to have one or multiple live, hot backups of your channel on other servers with near-real-time bidirectional sync that you can use just like the original if you can't use the original
Hubzilla can be your microblogging platform.
Hubzilla can be your social networking platform.
Hubzilla can be your Fediverse blog.
Hubzilla can be your non-federating blog.
Hubzilla can be your NeoCities webpage host.
Hubzilla can be your forum.
Hubzilla can be your personal wiki.
Hubzilla can be your little cloud file storage.
Hubzilla can be the DAV server that you use to sync the addressbooks and calendars on your phone and your PC.
Etc.
And Hubzilla can be any combination of the above. Like, a website with its own forum, with its own news blog, with its own wiki, with its own event calendar. All within one Hubzilla channel.
Hubzilla isn't even new. It isn't someone's recent brain-child. It has been developed for 14 years now, longer than Mastodon. And it is still under active development. That doesn't even mean small patches every few months. Rather, it means that the devs actually keep whipping up new features and/or greatly improving existing features. And that says nothing about the third-party add-ons and themes which slowly get more and more, too.
Hubzilla is my number one daily driver (although I'm here as well). In fact, I've found this post on Hubzilla, forwarded by someone on Mitra, but I remembered just in time before commenting that I have a Lemmy account.
I guess the reason why hardly anyone seems to be talking about Hubzilla is that hardly anyone knows that it exists in the first place, and even fewer people know what it is and what it can do.
Let's just say that whenever some other Fediverse server software is declared "the Swiss Army knife of the Fediverse", then Hubzilla is the Leatherman Surge of the Fediverse by comparison. There's just so much that you can do with it.
It has just about all the capabilities of a good blogging platform, up to and including its own WebDAV-enabled cloud file space that you can also use to upload images for your blog. Or for your webpages because, yes, Hubzilla can do that as well. In fact, the official Hubzilla website itself is a webpage on a Hubzilla channel.
In addition, it introduced nomadic identity to the wider Fediverse; or rather, an earlier incarnation of Hubzilla named Red did back in 2012. This also means that we aren't talking about something that was cobbled together during or after the 2022 Mastodon hype, but something that's actually older than Mastodon.
However, its learning curve is steep. For starters, that's because it's so powerful. It doesn't dump features upon you; in fact, it's very modular, and many features are actually add-ons that have to be activated. But that actually kind of adds to Hubzilla's complexity. Besides, it isn't and doesn't try to be a clone of anything. It doesn't mimic anything. It isn't quite like anything else out there except maybe its other own family members.
At least Hubzilla probably has the best built-in help system in the Fediverse, and if that should fail, it has its own Hubzilla-based support forum.
Also, Hubzilla is very modular at hub (server) level. Not all features are available on all hubs. But there's a way to check what optional features are available on which hub: Go to a hub that you're interested in and add
/siteinfo/jsonto the domain. I'm not sure if that page lists installed third-party themes, though, because there certainly are third-party themes that make Hubzilla even better for blogging.There have already been too many spare-time devs who came to Mastodon, got totally excited about everything, decided to develop something for "the Fediverse", built it hard against only Mastodon and then learned that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon.
See FediDevs which, for quite a while, was built against only Mastodon and against Mastodon-specific elements of Mastodon, which did not work with anything that isn't Mastodon, but which still kept "Fedi" in its name.
Old and busted: Mastodon DDoSes the non-Mastodon Fediverse due to design decisions.
New hotness: Mastodon DDoSes itself due to design decisions.
Some 22% of the entire Fediverse (except Threads).
When someone's on Mastodon, and they say, "Fediverse," chances are very good that it's only Mastodon that they're talking about.
Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are all built in PHP. All they need to run is a LAMP stack. That's why even a feature monster like Hubzilla needs fewer server resources per user than Mastodon.
They only have a little bit of JavaScript for some UI elements such as spoiler tags.
Friendica and NodeBB
And Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte. All from the same family. Although there has yet to be someone to start a group on Forte.
The main issue with Mastodon is that literally every single last Mastodon newbie is being told (or at least implied to) during on-boarding that the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Nobody learns upon joining Mastodon that Mastodon is not an enclosed network. That the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. That there's non-Mastodon stuff connected to Mastodon and constantly pumping non-Mastodon content into Mastodon.
Why? Because that's easier to understand. A network of tens of thousands of virtually identical Twitters is already much harder to grasp than one Twitter website. It's basically the maximum of what most people out there, even many die-hard übernerds, can grasp.
Tell them that it's ackchually a network in which lots of Twitters and lots of different Twitters and lots of yet again different Twitters and lots of Reddits and lots of Facebooks and lots of YouTubes and lots of Instagrams and whatnot are all joined, and that you can follow what amounts to Facebook users or YouTube channels or subreddits from what amounts to Twitter. And they'll nope out. Whoosh. Too complicated.
At least every other Mastodon user at this point in time "knows" that Mastodon is alone in the Fediverse, that the Fediverse consists of only Mastodon. Many Mastodon users spend literal years believing that. Reply to them from Friendica or Hubzilla in a typical Friendica or Hubzilla way, and they'll shit brix and block you.
Mastodon's entire culture is geared towards a Mastodon-only Fediverse. It was basically defined in mid-2022 (which is why it doesn't include any Mastodon 4.x features either) by those who had fled Twitter in early 2022 after Elon Musk's announcement to buy Twitter out. None of them knew about a Fediverse outside of Mastodon at that point.
And so you have a Mastodon culture that's all about Mastodon's features (or lack thereof), and that at least implies that any features that Mastodon doesn't have (and that isn't craved for by the majority of Mastodon users) are bad. You know, like more than 500 characters per post. And yet, Mastodon users are trying hard to force Mastodon's culture upon places in the Fediverse that are very very much not like Mastodon at all, e.g. Lemmy or PieFed or Friendica or Hubzilla.
This is also why mainstream media, including most tech media, keep hammering on the Fediverse being Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. For starters, the truth would be incomprehensible to their audience. Besides, the journalists themselves haven't understood that either.
As for BlackMastodon, it was another Fediverse = Mastodon thing. At least, nobody there was really Fediverse-savvy worth mentioning. Blackzilla or Blackstreams might have been a success. If only anyone there had known about Hubzilla or (streams).
Thread title goes into the top line. It's mandatory. Top line/paragraph must be only the thread title. No post text.
Line below: Mention the Lemmy community that you want to post to. The Lemmy community must be mentioned between the title and the post text, as in, under the title and above the post text. Nothing else must be in this line/paragraph.
Below that: post text in as many paragraphs as you need.
No further mentions anywhere else in the post.
Also, no hashtags. They won't break anything, Lemmy simply doesn't support hashtags. But some 99% of all Lemmy users come from Reddit (as opposed to almost everyone on Mastodon coming from Twitter), Reddit doesn't have hashtags, and so they aren't used to hashtags. Lemmy's culture is basically Reddit's culture, and Mastodon's culture is irrelevant and invalid on Lemmy.
TikTok:
- Loops
Facebook meets blogging:
- Friendica
Facebook meets blogging meets Apple iCloud/Google Cloud Services meets the nomadic identity that the ATmosphere has yet to prove to have:
- (streams)
- Forte
Facebook meets blogging meets Apple iCloud/Google Cloud Services meets the nomadic identity that the ATmosphere has yet to prove to have with a ton of other stuff on top:
- Hubzilla
Instagram:
- Pixelfed
Twitter:
- Mastodon
- Pleroma
- Akkoma
- Misskey
- Sharkey
- Iceshrimp
- CherryPick
- and a whole bunch more
Reddit, Hacker News:
- Lemmy
- Mbin
- PieFed
YouTube:
- PeerTube
Twitch:
- Owncast
SoundCloud:
- Funkwhale
BandCamp:
- Bandwagon
Medium:
- WriteFreely
- Plume (half-dead; devs recommend WriteFreely)
Tumblr:
- wafrn
Vkontakte:
- Smithereen
Goodreads:
- BookWyrm
This would require a whole lot of discipline, namely the discipline of everyone always adding all appropriate tags to their content. In a Fediverse which most people use like Twitter/a Threadiverse which most people use like Reddit where there simply are no such tags.
Even if there was a *booru clone in the Fediverse, you'd still have shit-tons of people who upload their stuff with literally zero tags whatsoever because they can't be bothered. Just like on every last already existing booru.
No-one is willing to build Fediverse software upon discipline as a requirement.
They're among the very very few Hubzilla hosters. And I think they are the only (streams) hoster.
Don't make it a scratch-built, stand-alone Fediverse server app.
Make it a third-party add-on for Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte that sources the profiles of channels that activate that add-on. I mean, you've gotta see the number of profile fields available on these three.
But, but, unlimited characters aren't purist, old-skool, original-gangsta microblogging! And understanding threaded conversations isn't purist, old-skool, original-gangsta microblogging either!
What do you want next, full HTML rendering support? Embedded in-line images? More than four options for polls?!
Go ahead. Try to force that upon Friendica that has called its instances "nodes" for almost 15 years now.
Or Hubzilla that not only calls them "hubs" but also resists any and all cultural or technological influences from anything that wasn't created by Mike Macgirvin.
Also
<insert Morpheus here>
what if I told you that (streams) and Forte call them "communities"? You know, like Lemmy's and PieFed's "subreddits"?Mostly Hubzilla. Also (streams), WriteFreely and Lemmy for special purposes.
I guess that's because most information about the non-Threadiverse Fediverse comes into Lemmy via Mastodon. And next to nobody on Mastodon knows that Hubzilla exists, much less what it can do.