PresGas (FLOSS)

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Hubzilla and activitypub roadmap?

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 04:39:38 +0100 last edited: Thu, 06 Dec 2018 04:41:00 +0100

!Hubzilla Support Forum I am trying to figure out how far #activitypub is going to be supported in the future of #hubzilla.

Is there a plan or whatnot posted somewhere?!Hubzilla Support Forum

Hubzilla activitypub

show all 12 comments

Mike Macgirvin

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 05:25:33 +0100

You *may* be interested in looking at Osada which is an ActivityPub server built on Hubzilla technology.

https://zotlabs.com/osada

In any event, ActivityPub will be supported by Hubzilla well into the future, but it is an optional plugin since ActivityPub conflicts with and is incompatible with many of Hubzilla's core features (such as decentralised privacy, federated permissions, and nomadic identity).

In Osada ActivityPub is the primary protocol and the feature set was adapted to ActivityPub unique abilities and limitations. We also eliminated hundreds (possibly thousands) of configurations and settings which were outside the scope of fediverse social networking.

PresGas (FLOSS)

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 23:09:04 +0100

Thanks for the fast reply! I think I am trying to figure out the limits of the plug-in.

Then we see less and less hubs; from hubzilla to osada to zap. So where does one find a balance between support and community...

I am a gplus refugee attempting to find something decentralized and maybe more featurefull than that. ...but maybe having access to the people on activitypub.

M. Dent

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:07:02 +0100

Hubzilla - Osada - Zap are one family.

The brains behind them all is the same there are other developers involved in all three.

Each has a fairly defined use-case, but (once the transition to Zot6 in Hubzilla is complete) - all three will be able to intercommunicate with each other.

Hubzilla is the most established product. It should be considered more of an "application platform" or maybe a "publication platform" (kind of like what WordPress has become since it now has plugins that allow you to do almost anything - it's more than a Content Management System). "Social Media" on Hubzilla was one of the first use-cases adopted by a large number of people - and so many think it is primarily a social media platform. It is not. It is a privacy and security aware application platform that can support a huge number of use cases through the plugin/addon architecture which is lean and efficient.

Osada is more intended for end users interested specifically in Social Media applications that want to be able to communicate with ActivityPub but also have SOME of the privacy and security capabilities offered by Hubzilla. ActivityPub has a larger user base but is fundamentally incompatible with certain privacy and security models. So, anything related to ActivityPub is going to be a compromise. Osada is a social media platform that brings as much of the privacy and security features of Hubzilla as is possible while still providing integration with ActivityPub.

Zap is a social media platform for those who are privacy and security minded and are not willing to compromise privacy and security just because "everybody is doing it." It has the full range of privacy, security, and censorship resistant features inherent in the Zot protocol as Hubzilla (without Federation addons).

If you are an "end-user" of social media and want to be able to seamlessly communicate with ActivityPub, you want to use Osada. If privacy, security, and censorship resistance is important to you and you're willing to give up access to other protocols in order to maintain those things, you probably want Zap. If you are primarily interested in providing content and data to others on an extensible and robust manner with privacy, security, and with built in ability to provide redundancy in case of failure or as a censorship resistance feature, you want to consider Hubzilla.

As you can see, the choice between Hubzilla, Osada, and Zap is a USER centric question about what features you want or need.

I am a gplus refugee attempting to find something decentralized and maybe more featurefull than that. ...but maybe having access to the people on activitypub.

Given that, I would suggest Osada - If you have enough influence to pull most of those you want to communicate with over with you, Zap may be an option as well if you are all interested in privacy and security. There should be public Zap installations coming online shortly.

Full disclosure: I run the UseZot Osada instance ( https://osada.usezot.net ) and we intend to have a Zap server online before the New Year as well. I also run Zot.Social ( https://zot.social ) which is Hubzilla. However, Zot.Social will not be enabling the federation modules to talk other protocols. It will have some advanced discussion features and be more of a platform for "content providers" than end user social media.

Once the Zot6 implementation on Hubzilla is complete, all of these projects will be able to intercommunicate with users on each of the others with fine-grained access control.

PresGas (FLOSS)

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 01:57:52 +0100

@M. Dent That is a great amount of info! I appreciate the summary. I have actually created an account on your osada server to look things over, but can only make one channel ( @presgas@osada.usezot.net ).

M. Dent

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 02:07:02 +0100

When you're logged in visit: https://osada.usezot.net/cart/usezot-osada/catalog and get the free upgrade. It will allow you at least one more channel (I think it's actually up to 5, but I don't remember off the top of my head). It also gives you more storage and the ability to initiate more contact requests.

M. Dent

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 02:08:11 +0100

Just double checked - you get up to 3 identities (channels) with the free upgrade.

PresGas (FLOSS)

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 02:12:30 +0100

Thanks for that! I am hoping to explore this and report back to a couple of communities within G+ along with my findings. Fortunately we have plenty of time.

I have thought about offering hosting post G+ of a hub, and was wondering if there are many performance stats listed about the three family members?

M. Dent

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 02:42:58 +0100

There aren't any formalized studies.

Anecdotally, both the Hubzilla and Osada server are currently running side-by-side on the same box with some other things. With some "tweaks," the server itself barely breaks a sweat. The stock configuration does pretty well for a personal low volume site. If you're going to be hosting for more than a handful of users, there are some things that can help significantly - the community is a pretty helpful bunch - and I can give you some details about the config I'm running if you want. If you do run into performance issues, the devs are pretty responsive.

For more than a personal node, at least a VPS would be recommended - "shared hosting" is probably not going to be sufficient (it is probably sufficient for a small family/friends server, but beyond that, you really do want something a bit more robust). That would mean either pay real $ to have the server itself managed, or, if you have decent administration skills with the LAMP or LEMP stacks (or comparable), you should be fine. My personal recommendation is Linux, OpenResty (NGINX), MariaDB (mysql), and PHP - a very standard stack. Others run on other things - so it's somewhat dependent on what you are familiar with.

A short time ago there was some talk by some community members about offering pre-configured "managed" hubs. I don't know what the status of that is at this point.

Yuki (雪亮) 🇵🇭 🌏

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 03:31:08 +0100

Mine is on a VPS with a Wordpress running side-by-side. I'm alone in my hubzilla hub with a few low volume RSS feed channels in it. The Wordpress site is, I can say, medium volume on terms of visits. My VPS have 8 cores and I very rarely see it reach 1.00 and above. (I have almost 200 connections in this channel alone, mostly diaspora and ActivityPub.)

For Osada, Mike, the father of Zot, he's running his Osada server in a shared hosting with the hyperdrive tech working in full.

Personally, a VPS is a good choice. You have plenty of room for growth or a wide buffer if anything. But again, people have demonstrated that it works on sharid hosting for solo t small use.

One more thing, some hosts at home, using those "plug in your outlet" server boxes, with a dynamic IP at that. (You'll notice them going down usually for 8 hours when they go to sleep or work.)

phani (Hubzilla)

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 06:29:15 +0100

agree with @Yuki (雪亮) 🇵🇭 🏙️: VPS is the best choice if you can be bothered with maintaining a server -- or paying for a managed VPS, which doesn't come cheap. shared hosting works too, but you should make sure that you have shell access (SSH), so you can update the Git repos for hubzilla-core and -addons. doing all that via SFTP would be a real pain.

PresGas (FLOSS)

Sat, 08 Dec 2018 02:13:26 +0100

@phani (Hubzilla) Thanks for that. Am I recalling correctly that you may have some kind of hub on nearlyfreespeech.net or was that someone else I saw? If it was you, did you have to do anything for performance there (can NFS.net handle a hub?) and how many active channels are there?