@Ur Ya'ar I guess I can call myself a Hubzilla veteran. I was there when it introduced "tech levels" which are long gone. I currently have multiple cloned channels, and I do use Hubzilla's special features like articles and wikis occasionally.

That said, I also use something that you may not have heard of. It's at the end of a long line of forks which leads back to Hubzilla and Friendica, all from the same creator. Officially, it's intentionally nameless and brandless. Colloquially, it's named (streams) after its code repository. I've got two channels there as well.

If you want to dive in headfirst, but your Fediverse experience is largely limited to Mastodon, then I'd say that (streams) is easier to get into (only few public, open-registration instances are the biggest obstacle).

Most importantly, (streams) makes handling permissions a great deal easier, and on both Hubzilla and (streams), permissions are everything, and everything is permissions. I mean, I've started writing a Hubzilla getting-started guide, and it contains a whole lot of configuration and app installations and stuff before you can even think about connecting to anyone, much less post.

I'd say that (streams) is better for groups/forums as well. You can do private groups/forums on Hubzilla, but they require the "dreaded" Custom channel role plus getting past a warning pop-up to configure the channel-wide permissions. That's because the only pre-defined channel role for a forum is public.

(streams), on the other hand, has four channel types for groups/forums:

• Normal (public, with file upload for group members to the group channel)
• Limited (like Normal, but without file upload for group members to the group channel)
• Moderated (like Limited, but posts and comments from new members have to be approved by those who are appointed admins; this isn't possible on Hubzilla at all AFAIK)
• Restricted (like Normal, but with membership approval by admins and with profile, members and stream hidden from non-members)

To make a group even more private, you can choose for your group to not be listed in directories, and you can of course choose for it to not be indexed by search crawlers (Google etc.).

As a normal user, you can hide any of your connections from spying eyes, including groups/forums which you don't want to openly admit you're a member of. But that's possible on Hubzilla as well.

(streams) has a few more perks in comparison to Hubzilla. For example, alt-text. (streams) lets you add alt-text to images either when uploading them to the file space of your channel or after uploading. And whenever you embed that image into a post, you always get the same alt-text. Hubzilla, on the other hand, always requires you to manually edit the image-embedding BBcode in your post draft and add the alt-text to it.

Speaking of BBcode, Hubzilla only supports that in posts. (streams) supports any combination of BBcode, Markdown and HTML.

Hubzilla's big advantage are of course the several extra features: Articles, Cards, Wikis, Webpages. And unlike (streams), it still keeps newer versions of some of Friendica's many connectors around, including to diaspora*.

In case you're curious, I've made an article with a number of tables that compare the features of Mastodon, Friendica (as far as I know them), Hubzilla and (streams). Here it is.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Groups #FediverseGroups