Survey 2026 results:According to the
survey, Hubzilla is considered by the majority to be suited well for
hosting webpages, while a minority considers lightweight or standard CMS a better option, stating Hubzilla to be too powerful for just that purpose with a too big database footpring, missing simplicity of use, accessibility and first class support for Markdown/Aasciidoc/RestructuredText.
Almost all survey participants find Hubzilla to be suited well for
networking within the Fediverse and macroblogging. When it comes to
microblogging, a few prefer Maston, Sharkey or Mitra, while missing in Hubzilla a mobile client (respective Mastodon API support), or MS Outlook-like apps showing a timeline or managing contacts and calendars.
The majority of survey participants find Hubzilla useful for
sharing events. A minority disagrees with that, prefering Mobilizon, WordPress, Email newsletters or the Nextcloud calendar. They miss nicer looking event pages, compatibility with Mobilizon and events reaching Mastodon, and outside the Fediverse.
A big part of survey participants find Hubzilla not suited for
decision-making (scheduling etc.). Nextcloud or Framadate are preferred tools for them, which offer more scheduling tools, as well as an easy guest/anonymous access management.
The majority of survey participants find Hubzilla useful for
sharing data (cloud). A minority prefers Nextcloud. Missed features in Hubzilla are a desktop app to sync the data, Open Cloud Mesh support, a better UI for file sharing (with an optional expiration date, anonymous access, and the option to protect by a password).
Half of the survey participants find Hubzilla useful for
presenting pictures/photos. One fourth prefers Nextcloud, Pixelfed, Lychee or "an own website". The other fourth didn't answer the question. Missed features are photo tagging, timeline view and other organizational tools. Mastodon not blanking out sensitive images when a message coming from Hubzilla containing the hashtag "nsfw" or "sensitive" is mentioned as suboptimal.
Half of the survey participants didn't answer if they find Hubzilla useful for
hosting and moderating forums. A big majority of those who answered find it useful. The remaining participants prefer dedicated forum software such as Discourse or NodeBB. Missed features in Hubzilla forums are the possibility to participate from other Fediverse platforms, easy ways to find threads and responses, upvoting, marking as solved, and grouping of threads.
Most survey participants agree only partially with Hubzilla being useful for
syncing via WebDAV, CalDAV, CardDAV. Nextcloud is preferred by many. An easier webinterface and a desktop app are missed in Hubzilla, as well as more and better options to protect such data with a password.
In the survey, we didn't get enough responses about Hubzilla being suited or not for these use cases:
streaming audio,
streaming video,
learning management,
extending device storage via WebDAV, and
collaboration on documents (Wiki, Collabora). We refrain from drawing any conclusions on these matters.
Hubzilla Association's thoughts and plan:The Hubzilla Association could now, in order to get fast "results", secure funding and developer resources for improving user satisfaction for some of the use cases. We could for example focus on those for which satisfaction is already high, which are, in this order, (1) networking within the Fediverse, (2) macroblogging, (3) microblogging, (4) hosting webpages, and (5) presenting pictures/photos. Another strategy, which might demand more effort and time, could be securing funding and developer resources for improving (and empowering more broadly) one (or some) already favourable basic conditions of Hubzilla, such as built-in OpenWebAuth, and enhance their qualities to make fitting missing features happen. Or, since there are developers out there who could build things on our platform to make it friendly for specific use cases, we could let them know this, and provide them additional documentation on how to do it. We have heard several people say that they want to build something and use Hubzilla to do it, but didn't yet because they could not figure out how to do it. So, if we provide more resources for developers, we may find a lot of interesting addons, themes, and widgets being built. For that, a revision of the "Developer's Guide" is planned. Also, we would like to encourage developers of addons etc. to ask in the @
Hubzilla Development forum, so everybody can learn from it together.
What do you think should we do next, concerning use cases for Hubzilla? Please share your thoughts as comments.
