Yesterday I did a quick test drive of a #Hubzilla instance. It was a somewhat mindtwisting experience for me as a Mastodon user, in a similar way to how Mastodon/Twitter was mind-twisting for me coming from a Livejournal/Dreamwidth/Facebook background.
But it has some really nice features and might be exactly the thing that some folks are looking for.
Unlike Mastodon, Hubzilla doesn't come with all functinality pre-loaded. Hubzilla comes with some core functionality, but depending on what you want to do with it, you---as a user, mind, not an admin---may need to install feature sets.
I think these feature sets are the equivalent of extensions or plug-ins but are called "Apps", which confused me slightly.
I'd been under the impression that Hubzilla runs on ActivityPub, but evidently that isn't quite correct. As I understand it, Hubzilla runs on a protocol called Zot.
If you want to federate with accounts on ActivityPub, you need to install the ActivityPub app on your Hubzilla account.
This was fairly straightforward to do, but realizing that this was necessary was not straightforward.
Hubzilla is more than just social media. It has capabilities for data storage, file sharing, galleries, social calendar, and wikis. I was focused on seeing how it interoperated with Mastodon, so didn't explore most of these.
But it's useful to keep this broader functionality in mind if you decide to check it out.
Now, on to the stuff I did explore: Hubzilla a social media.
First: Hubzilla is really, really not a microblogging platform. It's probably better understood as a social blogging platform.
The major distinction here is that content on your stream is organized as posts. Replies to (or comments on) posts are grouped with the post, and can't be viewed as separate items.
The experience is similar to Facebook or Friendica, but the organization feels more "bloggy" to me.
When I say that the organization of comments on Hubzilla feels "bloggy", what I mean is that it's structured for all comments to be replies to the top-level post.
There doesn't seem to be an interface for replying to other people's comments, so I think there's no capacity for nested threading. I was able to use Mastodon to reply to comments, but on Hubzilla these just showed up as more recent comments.
So comments on Hubzilla posts are not structured in a way that facilitates dialog between commenters. Everything appears as a reply to the top post.
This blog-like structure is compounded by the fact that comments are also organized in reverse-chronological order. The first thing that you see below a post is the most recent comment.
I'm sure this is something people can adapt to, but it doesn't feel comfortable to me.
Hubzilla's capacity for multiple identities and for nomadic identities are often mentioned together, but they are really very separate things, and so should be talked about separately.
To understand how Hubzilla supports multiple identities, the first thing to know is that user accounts do not directly interface with other user accounts.
Instead, a user account gives you a space in which you can create "channels." Channels are identities.
I find this nomenclature confusing because the word "channel" has other meanings in different contexts.
On Hubzilla, a channel is an identity. Your user account doesn't have relationships with other users. Your channels do. And each channel can have different sets of relationships.
So you can have one channel for personal updates, one channel for professional updates (with a different visible name), one channel for your business, one channel for a club's announcements, and so on.
To drive home the extent to which Hubzilla channels are distinct identities, you can even create social connections between your various channels, the same way you could create social connections between alt user accounts on other platforms.
I haven't gotten to experiment yet with with Hubzilla's channel import and export, but the documentation indicates that when you do this, you then get to decide which copy of the channel is the primary copy and which one is the backup channel containing relayed data.
So you're both copying over the data and setting up a system to keep the data sync'd between the two locations.
The bottom line: if you've ever gone through the experience of migrating accounts on Mastodon and been disappointed to realize that migrating accounts only migrates your identity and relationships, not your content, Hubzilla behaves the way you wanted.
The catch is that you can only use this method to migrate between Hubzilla servers and other Hubzilla servers. You don't get to port all of your content to arbitrary platforms.
One final point on nomadic identity on Hubzilla: remember again that channels are identities. You only copy over one channel at a time, and there's nothing to stop you from having different channels relayed to different backup servers.
Like Friendica, Hubzilla gives fine-grained user control over what other users can see.
Unlike Friendica, access rules are set at the channel (identity) level, not at the level of individual posts.
When one of your channels creates a connection with another identity, you can set a "role" for that person. Each role has distinct permission rules, analogous to roles on a platform like Discord.
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Here's a screenshot of the role configuration options.
As you can imagine from all of the above, there are a lot of different things you can do and settings that can be adjusted from a Hubzilla user account.
Finding where all of this stuff is can be challenging. The user interface is geared toward minimizing clutter rather than toward making all options visible, which is nice in some ways, but also means that some capabilities are a bit harder to find. Expect a learning curve to internalizing all of this.
Overall, after a quick dip into Hubzilla, I think it's an extremely powerful platform for giving users better control over information dissemination, with much better privacy controls than Mastodon.
It seems to be well-suited for blogging or social blogging, but less well-suited for public discourse in comment threads.
The ability to have multiple identities from one user account, and the capacity for genuinely nomadic identity may be valuable for many users.
@dynamic just really wishing there was a proper Docker image for #Hubzilla as when I moved from cPanel hosting to Docker based, I could never find one. I'd love to run my own Hubzilla insance again with all its additional app functionality, nomadic ID, mirroring, etc.
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