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 nothing like Reddit, it’s nothing like Twitter has ever been, and it’s nothing like most of the rest of the Fediverse. The closest would be (streams), a fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork)? of Hubzilla itself, and everything in this chain is/was by the same creator. Followed by Friendica and Forte, still by the same creator, and Forte’s only instance is currently the private instance of said creator. But everything else in the Fediverse is nothing like Hubzilla.

First newbie obstacle: You can’t follow anyone on Mastodon. Or almost anywhere else in the Fediverse. That’s because ActivityPub is optional, and it’s off by default so that your new channel only supports that one nomadic protocol at first. Non-nomadic protocols kind of disturb nomadic identity, mostly because you have to re-connect non-nomadic contacts manually, one by one. And back when Hubzilla was made, it was actually a tempting idea to run a purely nomadic channel.

To add to the difficulty, there is no ActivityPub switch in the settings. ActivityPub is an “app” that needs to be “installed”. Hubzilla is very modular, and so are its channels where not all its features are enabled by default.

And then there’s the permissions system. Something like this exists nowhere in the Fediverse that isn’t made by the Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte creator Mike Macgirvin. Not even Friendica has it to such an extent. It’s extensive, it’s fine-grained, and it’s powerful.

But unlike everything in the Fediverse not created by Mike, it does not default to “everything is allowed to everyone unless muted or blocked”. Its default settings are still geared towards 2012 when it was still named Red (from spanish la red = the network), when the Federation, the precursor of the Fediverse, was still small, and four years before Mastodon was launched. In those days, the idea of a purely Red/Red Matrix/Hubzilla network that offers a maximum of privacy, safety and security was not too far-fetched.

And so, by default, certain things are disallowed unless explicitly allowed to certain contacts by means of contact role. By default, your posts all only go to a privacy group (think Mastodon lists on more coke and even more 'roids) instead of to everyone. Before you can really get going, you’ll have to install multiple apps of which you don’t know what they do and adjust things of which you don’t know that they exist, much less what they’re for. It takes months to become a halfway routined user, and it takes years to be come a power user who realises that setting everything to public is actually stupid, and who knows how to tone down the settings again while not keeping your existing contacts out.

Yeah, the UI/UX is far from top notch. But keep in mind that Hubzilla is a fork of Friendica. Which is from 2010. In 2010, social networks and social media were still mostly geared towards the desktop, and phone apps were gimmicks rather than bare necessities. Both Friendica and Hubzilla were created by only one person. And he’s a protocol designer and not a full-stack Web developer. Mike can make UIs work, but he can’t make them as pretty as what Apple whips up.

Hubzilla is very themeable, but it currently has only got one official theme. Its name “Redbasic” indicates its origin: Red. As in Hubzilla, three years before it was Hubzilla. 2012. It hasn’t changed much since then, except it became more configurable with Hubzilla 9 this year.

There used to be more themes, but even after the community took over from Mike in 2018, Hubzilla never had more than two core developers. And, again, it’s an utter monster. The devs invested most of their time into the vast backend, consisting of the core and the more essential apps. Over time, not only several apps fell to the wayside (including a chess game which was dropped in 2020 because of a big protocol upgrade), but so did all themes except Redbasic. The devs only had time to upgrade one theme to new or changed features, and so the other themes became incompatible and were eventually dropped.

Brand-new third-party themes are in the making, and a few will soon be rolled out. But I wouldn’t count on them being included into every new Hubzilla installation, much less all existing hubs.

Speaking of apps: There’s no official Hubzilla app, neither for iOS nor for Android. There’s one app for Android named Nomad. It’s only available on F-Droid. And it hasn’t been updated in a whopping five years. On more recent devices, it doesn’t even work anymore. And, in fact, it’s a Web app. It integrates Hubzilla’s Web interface instead of having everything on a dedicated, native mobile UI. In other words, there aren’t that many advantages of using Nomad over using a browser.

There’s also a very, very, very bare-bone Android app, I think it was made by Hubzilla’s main dev, that can only post to Hubzilla and nothing else. You can’t even use it to read anything. It isn’t available in any app store.

The best you can do if you want to use Hubzilla on a phone is install it as a Progressive Web App.

Low engagement and tends towards geeky grumpy right wing old men. Or Germans.

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