Robert tested Hubzilla and Osada.

Robert tested Hubzilla and Osada.

Originally shared by Robert Freeman-Day

====== Hubzilla and Zot options for Post G+ ======

We have all been talking about where to go and what to do once G+ shuts down. Many of us have taken off on the very first bandwagon that passed by (MeWe) without much thought on staying power, ethics or even if there was a real way to hone it. Others have been sticking around and taking a bit of time to talk it over and explore options.

I have taken the explorer bit to heart and played with what I have been told is part of the same family of communication/publication software. I started this journey after some experience with #mastodon and #diaspora (G+ ers have been hearing mostly of #pluspora, but diaspora is the same). Many other Plussers have spent enough time with these and plenty has been written (from what I can see).

This group of social apps has not been explored too much by the group, so I thought I would take a little crack at it. They are suites based on the #Zot protocol, called #Hubzilla and #Osada.

===== Hubzilla =====

I started with hubzilla. Hubzilla is really the swiss army knife of the family. It seems to try to do it all. Providing ways to post, blog, wiki, calendar, photo sharing and general web publishing. In addition, it offers plug-in integration with the Diaspora-style protocol and activitypub (mastodon, pleroma, et al).

One feature that the project sees as very important is the concept of Nomadic Identities. My understanding is that in hubzilla, you can "authenticate" to other hubs seamlessly and get permissions assigned solely with your originating hub identity. Additionally, it allows one to "clone" a channel to another hub. This feature strengthens the hubzilla federation along with robustness: If one node goes down for some reason and you have a cloned channel, you can simply continue to post and interact from the other node. When the other node comes back up, all syncs together and you can move right back without issue.

Mostly, the issues I encountered were with behaviors of the #activitypub plugin. It was hard to direct message people, hard to find users and discover them. Could not really search for activitypub users without adding a number of them already (so one would already need to know a couple of people's identities and add them manually). One interesting feature was that messages would appear on my feed when friends commented on other users; offering another method for discovery, but also opening up the venue for thread hijacking. I personally like the idea of chiming in as long as it is topical and enhances the conversation (this is more often than not from my point of view).

The diaspora plug-in worked well. Discovery really worked to my satisfaction in "following" hash tags. Integration worked much better. I think there may be possible better privacy (blocking) using Hubzilla with the Diaspora plug-in. I know some people had blocking concerns with Diaspora itself in that you could only ignore people.

There were possible G+ like features, but the concepts were really hard to grasp. There is a great group that is actively working on supporting G+ expats here:

https://zotum.net/channel/gplus2?f=&owt=67b12f25e21c72102bdf9ce6ac22e9ae

The help documentation describes the main hubzilla identity concepts like so:


==== Accounts, Profiles and Channels: ====

Once you have registered an account you have also created a profile and a channel.

- Account

You have one account. This consists of your email account and your password. With your account you access your profile and your channel.

Think of your account as the way you authenticate at one Hubzilla site. It lets you do things, such as creating profiles and channels with which you can connect to other people.

- Profile

You have surely registered with some other internet services, such as forums or online communities. For all of them you provided some information about yourself, such as date of birth, country, age and the likes.

Unlike other services Hubzilla offers you the advantage of creating many more profiles. That way you are able to distinguish between profiles targeted specially at everyone (your public profile), your work mates, your family and your partner.

Think of your profile as the basic information about yourself you tell other people.

- Channel

During the registration you created your first channel. Yes, besides several profiles you are able to have several channels. This might be a bit confusing in the beginning, but let's clear things up. You already have created one channel. You can use this one for the public, to communicate with people about every day life. But perhaps you are an avid book reader and many people are bored by that. So you open a second channel just for the book lovers, where you all can talk about books as much as you like. Obviously this is a new stream of posts, with a new profile (... or new profiles ...) and completely different contacts. Some connections might exist in both channels, but there will be some that are exclusive to only one of both. You yourself just switch between both of them just like you would in real life switch when talking to people you meet on the street or people you meet specially to talk about books. You can even connect to yourself, or better: to your other channel.

Think of a channel as different spaces dedicated to different topics where you meet with different people.


This was the hardest concepts to really grasp and the above really was difficult to find. I would have a tab and sometimes the node would direct me to the top of the help page instead of this little gem and I would have to find it again. Hence, why I am quoting it here. It is really the best explanation of the three concepts.

===== Osada =====

Next I tried Osada. It is the activitypub version of the family, deeply integrating the protocol over the other features from Hubzilla. It also provides ways to post, blog, wiki, calendar, photo sharing and general web publishing. Almost all of it is through the activitypub protocol.

The discovery was much easier on the activitypub side. Searching for users auto completed well and it still offered the ability for you to see the people you follow commenting on other users as well as your follower's original posts. Like I said above, this can have its own benefits of growing your followers along with possible banes of hijacking.

The largest issue at the time of writing was there wasn't a great deal of plugin support. There is no Diaspora integration at all and the hubzilla federation may have issues until hubzilla gets the zot protocol to the save version as osada. It was unclear to me what was missing though.

You can still have the separate channel and profiles within Osada. However, because of the tighter integration with activitypub, it does not support the Nomadic Identity concept (this is the ability to "clone" a channel to another server, further supporting the decentraization/federation concept). I get the reasons for this since activitypub identities are based on email address-like syntax (presgas@freeradical.zone). Having a Nomadic Identity would change that domain name part and introduce a possible trust issue.

Additionally, it was noted by mastodon users that threading can get broken by osada user's posts. Osada (maybe hubzilla too) would also not quite post double spaces properly and create Non-breaking spaces (rendered like " " in mastodon). I had NEVER heard this term before and was sent a link to learn more; passing this knowledge on below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space

===== Conclusions =====

In the end, I am not so sure that the Zot family of federated social networks is ready for a huge influx of expat G+ users. However, I think zot has great potential for the future. I also think small groups that were using G+ for coordinating themselves, but not necessarily outside groups would be good candidates for this. I can see a whole DIY publishing group or other close knit community gathering around these tools, maybe using Osada to keep a toe into the broader activitypub/mastodon group.

I can't say that I have been convinced to make any major social changes as a result of this odyssey. I am DEFINITELY keeping an eye on Zot development because I am hopeful and feel like there are some great ideas therein. I plan on continuing to use mastodon and diaspora occasionally, but would like to get a blog going for sure. I have come to the belief that blogs are in line with decentralization, more informed thought processes, and better resilience. People just need to take that time to not pick an easy, low hanging, big-tech-company provided blogging engine without taking into account portability of your data. This includes comments and linking!

Souce links (in no particular order):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking
* https://hub.disroot.org/channel/presgas_floss/?f=&mid=e949759fa8694aad9be38c005d133e60de4a92302283e5c019b0365cb4c7954a@hub.disroot.org
* https://zot.social/display/c7c714b2bce5f756f278f58070649727180345faf099779f9b4496980f3c0f96@zot.social
* https://project.hubzilla.org/help/accounts_profiles_channels_basics
* https://start.hubzilla.org/articles/andrewmanning/hubzilla-publishing-explained
* https://medium.com/@tamanning
* https://medium.com/we-distribute/got-zot-mike-macgirvin-45287601ff19
* https://macgirvin.com/wiki/mike/Zot%2BVI/Home