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Frequently asked questions

The federated universe of social services - the Fediverse, or simply the Federation - is the idea, the movement, technology, and the resulting reality of an awesome online social super-space within the World Wide Web. It comprises a multitude of different open social networks between independent servers, cooperating via secure open source protocols, covering the full range of social media and collaboration.

Where the dark-net of closed networks locks the public out to shroud user data, and the gray-net of commercial centralized social services locks the public in to disclose and monetarize user data, the Fediverse can be understood as the light-net of open, decentral services, unlocking the public to communicate and intact via secure, privacy-respecting, and self-controlled means.

The Fediverse is not simply an alternative to, but the advancement of traditional social media. For illustration of the difference, please read the following fictive roadmap that commercial social media would have to undergo to become the Fediverse.

(If you think this vision is not likely to come true in the near future, prepare to be surprised - You should definitely read on!)

The leading social networks modify their server software and publish it open source, so everyone can run it on their own independent webhost, and register local accounts (for themselves, their friends, and whomever they feel sharing with) - for free.

All such local sites and their users are accepted as part of their global social network (just as their respective original website).

Different social media services for micro-blogging, video, photo, link, contacts, calendar, and file sharing agree on mutual protocols, interconnecting their user bases independent of their hosting network. E.g., a user of a social network can directly respond to a comment of a micro-blogging account to a video shared from a file cloud to a video channel.

Surveillance of user data, behavior, and communications within the platform and on a myriad external tracking-partner websites will be abolished. The business model of compiling user data and behavior into target profiles as well as auctioning them to ad customers will be abandoned.

Privacy policies will be changed from the legally required minimum to full differentiated control over any content shared or received - regarding the creation, modification, sharing, and deletion of any content without remains.

Users will no longer be required to release significant (or, for that matter, any) exploitation rights for any content shared about themselves or their friends and family.

Instead of central censorship mechanisms, local and personal mechanisms will be provided to individually filter undesired content.

And they lived happily ever after... Of course, this sounds to good to be true: You might suspect that the big players have no interest in making this fiction happen within the next few years. However...

... this actually has happened starting back in 2008 (the creation of StatusNet) - For reference: This is roughly the same time when Google launched Android, Apple the iPhone, WhatsApp and Instagram went online, and Facebook to the stock market. However, it was not the advertisement billionairs reforming their mainstream cash cow networks - but independent, visionary, dedicated techies who developed these systems in their spare-time from scratch, sharing them as Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).

Since then, the Fediverse has developed to a large community of millions of users, based on a large and growing variety of systems for all typical social use cases (overview), that federate and even interoperate via mature communication protocols. Long lists of personal or community servers (overview) are open for registration of new users, usually for free - no strings attached.... All this likely happened without notice from you, your friends, or many others...

But you actually might already have picked up some words from the Fediverse ecosystem:

  • Social media network examples include Microblogging (GNU social / formerly StatusNet, Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey), Macro-Blogging (Friendica, diaspora), image sharing (Pixelfed), video sharing (Peertube), audio sharing (Funkywhale), event, contacts, and file sharing clouds (Nextcloud), content management systems (Wordpress) - and all-in-one systems (Hubzilla and Streams).
  • Protocols include e.g. OStatus, diaspora, XMPP, DFRN, ActivityPub, and Zot/Nomad.
  • Even though not strictly part of the Fediverse, Messaging via Matrix (protocol) / Synapse (server) / Elements messenger (client) is often considered a related project with similar philosophy.

If you prefer a less comprehensive, yet still impressive functionality, you might want to have a look at Streams. This software was created by Mike after Hubzilla to

  • provide the "One" Zot/Nomad-core like in Hubzilla: full access control, security, privacy, redundancy (including mobile "nomadic" identity), and simple installation and update process,
  • with reduced "All" baggage: focussed on primarily simple social networking / macro-blogging, enriched with media files,
  • with less "In" complexity by discarding one-sided support for protocols not designed for cross-network connectivity (like disapora or GNU social) - with only native support for Zot/Nomad, for some family members also ActivityPub,
  • while providing a more focussed, easier-to-handle user interface.

Many new features from the Streams are backported to Hubzilla.

Of all non-Zot-Fediverse networks, Friendica might have the most complementary profile to Hubzilla and Streams. Like Streams, it is focussed to social networking (macro-blogging), but with its own native protocol DFRN, it lacks many of the Zot/Nomad-specific "One" features (e.g. mobile "nomadic" idenity, and the fine access control) - Though it supports multiple identities per account, with identity export and import (but no sync). However, like Hubzilla, it supports not only ActivityPub, but also other protocols (e.g. diaspora, OStatus) - some even natively without plugins - and also allows connects to some commercial social services (e.g. Twitter, tumblr, and before its shutdown Google+). If you prefer to operate your own Friendica server, it might be a bit more demanding to install, though.

  • plink = Permalink. The definitive source of the information located on the origin server.
  • llink = Local link. A pointer to a copy of the information on your server.
  • mid = message id. ActivityStreams/ActivityPub permalink. This is where you can get the JSON object (machine-readable representation). On most platforms it is the same URL as the permalink but this isn't guaranteed.

    • You find these links in the "View Source" of the action menu. They are mostly there for developers to compare how different sites render the contents for display. View Source exists for a more technical audience to examine the structure and rendering details; and if you're an admin you might also have a link to various internal object encodings.

Every post or other object (card, article and so on) should have a "link to source" in the action menu. This points to the permalink. It's best to share these links by right clicking and copying the link rather than left click and visiting. This is the link you nearly always want and that's the recommended way of getting it onto the clipboard for sharing on other services. On phones you need to long click instead of right click.

Channel suggestions are based initially on how many of your friends you have in common (when permissions allow). We randomise these slightly in the suggestions widget to keep it from showing the same two channels forever. In the case of Hubzilla this list is "seeded" by volunteers who opt-in from their channel settings page ; so we always have suggestions even for somebody new with no friends at all. So if you list "linux" as a profile keyword, you may find other folks with "linux" in their profile in their suggestions - even if you have no friends in common at all.

The only correct answer is - "it depends". That said, Mike suggests some rough guidelines here: "I think we can safely say that shared hosting or raspi installations will generally support 1-10 light/moderate-use channels (at best). A VPS with 512M memory might support 30-40 (at best) before it gets into trouble; whereas once you get to 1G memory you can probably support a couple hundred (depending on your admin skills). The relationship is non-linear because the LAMP stack uses a fair chunk of base memory just to run. Replacing Apache with nginx can probably double your small site's capacity; and responsiveness will depend entirely on how much memory you can dedicate to the database caches. A dedicated hardware server can probably do several thousand channels without too much difficulty (again depending on your admin skills), as can a larger VPS with "many" gigs of RAM where "many" is on the order of 16-32G. Splitting off the database to a separate server with its own dedicated memory can dramatically increase performance for any of these solutions. If you stick it all in a datacenter with elastic components, you can theoretically scale as much as you want - based on your ability to pay."

If you want to keep yourself protected from the noisy world of the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse, which shows a considerable amound of spamming and harassment (especially on Mastodon), but still want to reshare some posts from there, you might be interesed in following setup. Don't enable the ActivityPub protocol for your main Hubzilla channel. Create a secondary, empty channel, on which you enable ActivityPub, and connect to this channel from your main channel. On the secondary channel, you can import individual posts (paste the URL into the search bar), then share them publicly. As a last step, re-share that from your main channel.

Differently to most ActivityPub software as Mastodon, when using Hubzilla you have to create a new thread if you want to answer to a comment privately (so that your answer can be read only by a single person or a part of the receivers/readers of the orininal thread). That is because Hubzilla uses a comment based concept in contrast to most ActivityPup software which uses a reply based concept. Comments will always inherit the privacy from the toplevel post. A comment based concept has many advantages over a reply based concept: Thanks to it, we can have private groups and also private threads where still every receiver gets all comments. Another advantage is that the thread owner is in control of the thread. This concept was chosen six years before Mastodon. Hubzilla's ancestry (Mistpark/Friendica) goes back to 2010 when Mike Macgirvin decided to develop a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated Facebook alternative. And like blogs and forums, Facebook uses the post-plus-comments model, too. That was one reason to use it on Friendica. Another one was that Friendica was to have discussion forums/groups built-in right away. Of course a comment based concept also has its limitations.