After 9 months of development se has presented the launch of the new version of the platform for the construction of decentralized social networks hubzilla 5.0. This new version comes with some pretty important internal changes, such as the transition to the latest version of the Zot IV protocol, as well as the change to the use of the direct message mechanism compatible with ActivityPub.
For those who do not know about the project, they should know that it provides a communication server that integrates with web publishing systems, equipped with a transparent identification system and access controls in decentralized Fediverse networks. The project code is written in PHP and Javascript and is distributed under the MIT license.
hubzilla supports a unified authentication system to work as a social network, forums, discussion groups, Wiki, article publishing systems and websites. I also implemented a data warehouse with WebDAV support and we work with events with CalDAV support.
The federated interaction is based on the patented Zot protocol, which implements the WebMTA concept to transmit content via WWW in decentralized networks and provides a number of unique functions, in particular, transparent end-to-end authentication "Nomad Identity" within the Zot network, as well as a cloning function for ensure completely identical points of login and user data sets on multiple network nodes.
Sharing with other Fediverse networks it supports the ActivityPub, Diaspora, DFRN and OStatus protocols.
Hubzilla 5.0 Main New Features
The new version of Hubzilla stands out for the transition to the latest version of the protocol Zot IV, whose data transfer format is now fully supported with the ActivityStreams specification.
Although it is also reported that due to the update to the zot6 protocol, there are some drawbacks, such as:
- Source RSS feeds will not be federated through zot6 unless the "Forward posts with this channel as the author" option is selected. The authors are not valid actors.
- Anonymous comments will not be federated through zot6.
- Community tagging has been disabled. (will be activated later)
- The chess plugin has been moved to unsupported plugins until it is transferred to the ActivityStreams2 data format.
As well it is proposed to switch to using the direct message mechanism ActivityPub compliant, displayed in the general stream instead of previously used private messages.
The functionality of personal messages to interact with users of the Diaspora network remains available and has been moved to a separate "Mail" extension. In addition, the voting and polling system has been updated to support multiple choice and it also supports the same mechanism in ActivityPub networks.
Also, some of the more notable changes in the new version include:
- The notification system was changed to use Server Sent Events (SSE).
- Pinned posts are implemented on the channel page.
- Added a mechanism to sync DAV calendars and notebooks with clones.
- Enhanced end-to-end (E2E) encryption of posts using PSK.
- The obsolete and unsupported extensions have been moved to a separate repository.
Many improvements have been made to support third-party protocols and post content to popular social networks.
In addition, the main developer of Hubzilla, Mario Vavti, announced that the discovery fund NGI0, Owned by the well-known company NLnet, it has approved a grant for the future development of Hubzilla. The main focus of the efforts will be to improve the interfaces and the mechanisms of user interaction with the system.
If you want to know more about it, you can consult the following link.
Download Hubzilla
For those of you interested in getting the new version of Hubzilla, they can do it from the following link.
Or from the terminal with the following command:
wget https://framagit.org/hubzilla/core/-/archive/master/core-master.zip
As for the Hubzilla installation is really easy, since if you have installed WordPress, Drupal, Jumla, etc. Hubzilla installation will be very easy. It is important to mention that Hubzilla is designed to be installed on servers, even if for home kits, te you can support LAMP to facilitate the installation process.