User guide

It is primordial for a Hubzilla user to choose the right hub. It may take some time to find the hub you can rely on and trust its administrators, to be sure your data is safe. Best is if you know the administrators' characters and how they works. After having selected potential public or approval-requiring hubs which might fulfill your needs, try to contact their administrators and ask them about their commitment: What's their purpose to run that hub and how do they get a remuneration for their commitment? The best case is when administration is done by a team instead of by only one person. Observe their communication style: How do they announce updates and changes concerning their hubs and how do they handle support requests by users? Of course these questions are answered best when you know the administrators in person.

When not knowing an administrator in person, it might be best to start – before building up your channel, profile and connections seriously – as a reluctant / guarded user to test the hub's functionalities, while being still careful with your sensitive data.

Make sure you have checked these points before registering on a hub:

1. What are the terms of service? They are indicated under the page /help/TermsOfService of any hub, i.e. hubzilla.org/help/­TermsOfService. The same way you need to be able to trust an administrator, the administrator needs to be able to trust you. That's what the terms of service are for.
2. Who are the administrators of the hub? You see their contact information under the page /siteinfo.json of any hub, i.e. hubzilla.org/­siteinfo.json.
3. What's the uptime of the server? The higher, the better. For that information, the sortable list hubzilla.fediverse.­observer comes in quite handy. Be aware that running a good public hub is a tough job, so public hubs might have lower uptimes. hub.hubzilla.de is a hub administered by a larger team of several well-known Hubzilla actors, so this might be the most stable public hub at the moment.
4. Is the software always kept up to date? You can always compare the latest release number announced under hubzilla.org/channel/info with the version of the hub you're looking at, indicated on its page /siteinfo, i.e. hubzilla.org/­siteinfo
5. Beside the built-in protocol Zot, do you want to use other protocols? The provided protocols by a hub are always listed on its page /siteinfo.
6. Which apps do you want to use? Hubs usually provide only a specific set of apps. These are always listed on the page /siteinfo.json of the hub.

Beside hubzilla.fediverse.­observer, there's also the sortable table the-federation.info/­hubzilla, which doesn't provide infos about the protocols the hubs use and the uptime though.

You also find less detailed lists of hubs which are open for registrations under

• the page /pubsites of any Hubzilla server, for example hubzilla.org/pubsites
• the page /communities?project=hubzilla of any Streams server, for example unfediverse.com/communities?project=hubzilla

When you have chosen your hub, read the basic concepts and start with the registration and setting up your channel. See the tutorials for how to do that in detail. You can also read the user guide which you always find on the page /help/member/­member_guide of any hub, i.e. hubzilla.org/­help/member/­member_guide (although some aspects in it are not up to date anymore, i.e. the mention tag).

If you're concerned about loosing your data due to a not premonished out-of-service of your hub, you can regularly perform manual exports of your channels as local backups or clone your channels. See the tutorials or the documentation for how to do that.

The admin of your hub should offer on the /siteinfo page both a link to the channel of the admin and a way of getting into contact with the admin by other means, e.g. a clone on another hub and/or something outside Hubzilla. Write down this info somewhere outside Hubzilla, thus you can contact the admin even when your hub is temporarily unavailable.

If you have questions, connect to hubzillauserssp@zotum.net, then go to their channel zotum.net/channel/­hubzillauserssp and enter your question there into the "Share" text box, and send it.

If allowed to do so, identities on Hubzilla connect with each other across server and administrative boundaries through the communication protocol Zot/Nomad (and if provided by your server, also throught the protocols ActivityPub and Diaspora).

Except for posts / messages, all published content stays your server. While you can publish content publicly, it is also possible to share local content with only some specified connections. Latter is only possible with connections through Zot/Nomad (thus with identities on Hubzilla and Streams).

In summary, Hubzilla is thus not a central website, but a decentral network of independent servers: You can register with any site in the network (and even operate your own) to connect and communicate to people on all other sites. The sites communicate with each other via their mutual protocol - Just like Email is not one website, but a network between the Email-server of your choice and other POP/IMAP/SMTP servers. What is special about Hubzilla is that it "speaks" most other protocols of the Fediverse, cross-connecting to almost all other networks. It also provides an incredible range of social formats, so there is hardly any social purpose with any user in the Fediverse (and beyond) that Hubzilla is not capable of. An account on an Hubzilla server gives you nearly universal access to nearly all open social media.

Your content can be "visited" by those Zot/Nomad based connections who got the permission to do so from you. By assigning your connections to connection lists (so-called "privacy groups"), you can also permit access to specific content to all members of that list.

You can send posts / messages (also using the ActivityPub or Disaspora protocols) to one connection, to a privacy group or to the public. It's possible to define a duration for expiring a post / message.

"Do you know me? -- Yes I do, welcome!"

"Visiting" non public content on a remote server should only be possible when you can authenticate yourself to that server. Fediverse software which only use the ActivityPub or the Diaspora protocol can authenticate only accounts from the local server though.

The Zot protocol on the other hand has built in a mechanism which makes it possible to a server to grant or refuse access to content and actions to identities which are registered on a different (remote) server.

The Zot/Nomad protocol allows your channels to be unbound from the hub where you created them. You may port them to a different hub, or you may clone them, in which case the channel's identity and data will exist simultaneously in more than one location. This provides resilience to channels should a hub shut down or become unavailable.

Hubzilla provides for each functionality a separate app, i.e. the cloud, photo, gallery, chat, wiki, calendar, contacts or the connections app. A server administrator decides which apps should be available for the users of that server. A user then can install or uninstall the available apps.

Following shared private spaces allow to work as teams using Hubzilla:

• As a user you allow selected connections to read and edit your webpages and wiki pages.
• Allow them to read and edit your files, calendar and contacts using the web user interface (the cloud, calendar and contacts apps) or WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV.
• Use conversation threads (posts) which are only visible to your collaboration group by setting the access control list accordingly.