Survey 2026 results:Access Controlling, Connections and Directory
The access controlling mechanism needs a better user interface. Choosing custom access should become possible without a lot of scrolling. When clicking on "is visible to", and a connection group or custom selection is shown, that should be expandable to see all members of that group. Switching to "post to public by default" should become simpler and more obvious. A friendlier way than selecting a contact is asked for private messaging. This shows that the @! tag is not known to all users.
Users find privacy roles complicated or say they don't understand them. There should be more predefined roles. "can edit wiki" should be possible to set per wiki, and from the wiki page.
Users ask for bulk actions to become able to be performed on contacts, such as "delete user", "assign user to privacy role", "no boosts from this user", "not following this contact", "mute this contact", and add category/tag. It should become possible to add notes to a contact as well. Users ask for a better filtering/searching/sorting order of contacts (i.e. filter by contact role, by privacy group, by category). The contact list should adapt dynamically to the filtering and searching. An export feature of optionally filtered (i.e. blocked) contacts would be appreciated, as well as an "import a contact list" feature which applies bulk actions (i.e. "block") on it. It's considered very hard to find a contact without already knowing the handle. I.e. the "add connections" field should search for the user whether the @ is in front or not. It's not clear what "New connections" means (how many days, weeks, month,...). The UI should offer less and clear navigation choices: Items from the "Contact tools" dropdown should be moved into the main dialog. Instead of editing a contact it in a pop-up, it should be done in a proper page where we have an overview of all contact settings. We should get an info when a contact unfollows you, and what the red/orange/green buttons stands for. A filter "via zot/activitypub/..." to be applicable on the timeline would be appreciated, also a filter by preferred language(s) of channels to be appicable on the directory.
Publishing (composing, editing), searching, and filtering content
Users wish drafts to be autosaved so posts can be edited on a different device later. Posts should not be reformatted when saving them, so that the user can edit the original post, not some modified version of it. A good graphical editor would be appreciated, and better interoperability between Markdown and BBCode when Markdown is enabled. Markdown should become supported by all kinds of Hubzilla apps. Some help/manual for formatting should be provided beside the composing window. Commenting should not be done in a pop-up, to be able to read previous comments while typing.
It is wished to make it easier to embed media in general. How it is done now is felt slow and complicated. Drag/drop and copy/paste for media is missed, as well as the option to add alt text (with character count) to pictures and videos, and a GUI-supported way to choose its preview size, original size and alignment. Alt-text should be taken over by the Photo app. Audio Players should be stylable (width, height, waveform on/off, cover on/off, title on/off), and support a "Buy in high resolution" option, in connection with the cart addon eventually, or adding an outbound link to that option - with support for multiple players in the post, and compatibility with Activitypub. There should be an UI for setting the thumbnail of a video. There should be a video only storage space.
The hidden text feature should become Activitypub compatible and able to be used with an icon for "hide and show on click" at the bottom of the editor field.
Both composing and displaying language-based content needs improvement. Mastodon is mentioned as setting the standard here. When composing, now we can choose only = or !=. We would want also "in (list of languages)" or "not in (list of languages)". The User language preferences should be captured in profile and matched to directory and content.
A fully functional full-text search covering all public (and internal, regardless of access rights) posts, articles and maps, as well as a fully functional full-text search on the wiki, would be desirable. Make searches more intuitive with filters (i.e. only my own posts). Documentation search needs to be fixed.
Collaboration
There should be a way to give individuals access to certain wikis, but not to all wikis in the user's channel (see above, under access controlling). Wikis should be categorizable. How to share calendars is not obvious to all, while others ask a more small screen friendly way to do this.
Apps/Addons
The distinction between Hubzilla Apps and Addons is not clear. Apps/Addons should become searchable and filterable. Available and installed apps should show on the same page. Activating/desactivating should be possible to do with one click on that page. The philosophy for updating apps ist not clear for some users. It would be appreciated if revisions could be added to each app, so that it is clear if an app needs to be updated. Admins should become able to install Addons directly from the Admin UI.
Placing apps/addons in the navigation should become possible to do by drag and drop. The star for the app tray could be replaced with the three dots so it's more obvious at first glance what it does.
Ideas and wishes for UI/UX:
The UX needs to be more streamlined from the perspective of a new user so the learning curve can be reduced. The UI/UX needs to be user language and mobile friendly. The number of necessary clicks should be reduced in general. It is asked that development concentrates on a few core functionalities and improve those rather than trying to offer everything. A better integration with Open Street Maps is asked, so that location features could be more like in (streams). It is proposed that the default theme should be other than redbasic. It should look more like one of the adminlte themes. Having the timeline, calendars, contacts, etc. in one place, like in MS Outlook, is wished.
Hubzilla Association's thoughts and plan:The Hubzilla Association appreciates all these ideas about improvement a lot. Above, they're grouped into the topics (1) access controlling, (2) content publishing, (3) collaboration, (4) apps, and 5 (general UI/UX). The Hubzilla community could launch fundraising campaigns (containing some of the collected concrete ideas), seperately for each topic (or for parts of them), and hope for a big support of the campaigns by the community. And we could start by thinking together about what topic should be worked first, and what next. The Hubzilla Association could take care of the organizational part of such fundraising campaigns. Ideas for fundraising initiatives are welcome.
Concerning the proposal of concentrating the development on a few core functionalities: We already did so by moving apps like Wiki, Articles and Cards out of the core repository into the Addons repository. Like that, other developers than the core developers can take care of them. Existing functionalities will not be removed.
What do you think should we do next, concerning these ideas for improving Hubzilla? Please share your thoughts as comments.
