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Hubzilla Hub?


Oh well... I've started my Hubzilla hub on https://silverhaze.eu/ some months ago and I'm already the 7th largest Hubzilla hub according to: https://the-federation.info/hubzilla

Some weeks ago I also started my Mastodon instance on https://nerdculture.de/ which is still quite small.

But somehow Hubzilla seems to be a little awkward or strange in my eyes. For a public hub some features are missing in my eyes. For example a user quota for uploaded files. I do miss that feature in Friendica as well, but the situation in Hubzilla is worse, because you can also enable generic websites, WebDAV, generic Files etc. in Hubzilla. It's more like "one size fits all" approach. If you don't have Nextcloud, you can use Hubzilla. If you don't have a blog, you can use Hubzilla. etc.

But I never got really warm with Hubzilla. One main advantage in my eyes is that it can run on PostgreSQL as a database.

So, I'm thinking of shutting down my Hubzilla hub at the end of the year to give the users enough time to move away...
But maybe I haven't understood #hubzilla yet and missed some points? If so, please shout and convince me to continue my hub... 😀
in reply to Ingo Jürgensmann

For example a user quota for uploaded files

You might want to have a look at service classes: https://silverhaze.eu/help/en/admin/administrator_guide#Service_Classes
If you don't have Nextcloud, you can use Hubzilla. If you don't have a blog, you can use Hubzilla. etc.

None of those services have internet-wide ACL.
So, I'm thinking of shutting down my Hubzilla hub

That is of course up to you...
in reply to Mario Vavti

Thanks for hinting me to the Service Classes. Are they new or why don't they have a configurable option in the settings GUI?
in reply to Ingo Jürgensmann

As @Steffen K9 🐰pointed out, quotas are defined as service classes so you can offer a 'free' service with limited disk space and a 'paid' or 'gold' membership with higher quotas or no limits.

Hubzilla wasn't actually designed as a social network, but more as an inter-networked groupware development platform. Many people get confused by this, because if you look at the world through social network coloured glasses, everything tends to look like a social network and then is judged by its ability to match your expectations of what a social network should do.

Should point out that if you find it has too much functionality or complexity for your liking, a couple of sibling projects were just released that might be more suited to your needs. Osada is an ActivityPub server with a wide range of "Facebook features", and Zap is similar but has more privacy and account mirroring options. As a result Zap will only federate with other Zot6 servers. Both of these are originally based on Hubzilla code but are restricted primarily to a "social networking" feature set without all the extra web publishing and shopping and groupware bits.
in reply to https://nerdpol.ch/u/zotlabs

As I already pointed out in the original posting, I think Hubzilla is great when you don't already have other parts of software Hubzilla is offering like WebDAV and such. Then it's great to have one platform that fulfills all of your needs.

About all the other forks: I find it quite confusing to choose the right solution out of all these options. Of course it's always good to have more options then no option at all. 😀

I have to also admit that one cause that lead to my considerations to shutdown my hub is the issue I wrote in https://silverhaze.eu/channel/ij/?f=&mid=7ddd8739f23562ae25cf55476cd1d0d7edce2c218e84a04f91677b340f6134bc@silverhaze.eu - it happens again and again that php7.0-fpm runs wild on Hubzilla. After adding rotatelogs it did help with not filling up my harddisks, but not with the root cause, and new log files are opened every second, meaning that there is sooo much output that it's more than 10 MB/s of logs. Usage of rotatelogs means also, of course, that the root cause error is quickly rotated out and is gone.
Each time this happens I need to restart php7.0-fpm
Unknown parent

Ingo Jürgensmann
Yeah, as mentioned to Mario I wasn't aware about this.
But as stated as well, I can understand that new options are only available through the config file, but when these new features are stable and in production they should have a setting in the web GUI.
in reply to Ingo Jürgensmann

@zotlabs@nerdpol.ch: Are you planning addons for D* and Mastodon like Hubzilla has, or is this meant to be pure ActivityPub?
in reply to Ingo Jürgensmann

Mastodon is mostly ActivityPub now. The bigger problem is that Diaspora and ActivityPub aren't compatible and can't talk to each other (both actually block/disallow communications which don't support their protocol).

This turns out to be a huge support problem in Hubzilla and Friendica because commenters using D* protocol can't see comments from AP folks and vice versa. I'm not playing that game any more. The ActivityPub train left the station. It isn't perfect (not even close) but Diaspora is going to be forced to deal with it sooner or later. If either protocol breaks down their bloody walls I'll be happy to federate with both. Until then I've had to choose which I think has the better chance of success long term.
in reply to Ingo Jürgensmann

Try Osada : it is powerfull like hubzilla and much more light and user friendly.