Hubzilla Survey 2026 Report

Analysis and interpretation of the Hubzilla survey 2026 results

Introduction

The survey was done March-April 2026 and got in total 54 (including non-complete) responses. The Hubzilla Association would like to thank to all participants! This survey provides an excellent foundation for taking further action, but we should keep in mind that only a portion of the community participated in the survey, so the results aren’t 100% representative.

The Hubzilla Association presents in the following its analysis and interpretation of the survey, which it wants to be understood as a source for inspiration for what the community with the support of the association can do in the future. It should not be taken as a roadmap of the association. The association doesn't have enough resources yet to realise a roadmap.

The survey shows that the community cares a lot about Hubzilla and has excellent thoughts about how to improve it. The responses are attached at the bottom of the report.

This analysis and interpretation of the survey is an invitation to the community to try to identify some focal points on which we can join our efforts in the near future. The association could accompany such a focalising process by initiating, and then organisationally taking care, of

working groups and meetups (in which the responses to the survey could also be discussed)
bringing more developers on board (reaching out to them; providing good documentation and support)
raising funds (specifically for well-defined development goals)

This focalising process can start now. On the International Hubzilla Meetup 2027 in Vienna, Austria, on February 27 - 28, 2027, which is open to anyone, we intend to continue the discussions and working groups.

Meanwile, the association intends to grow. Eventually, we will have enough resources in the future to kickoff development efforts ourselves. New members are always welcome.

Who is currently using Hubzilla?

Survey 2026 results:

According to the survey, Hubzilla is used mainly by individuals. There are also a few businesses and organisations using it. While most individuals use it frequently, most businesses and organisations use it occasionally. Most common fields for which individuals use Hubzilla are Tech, Human Relation, Art and Science. For businesses, it's Tech, Art and Education. For organisations, it's Tech, Human Relation, Education and Science.

The software features of Hubzilla, and Hubzilla being an open source project, are clearly reasons for which Hubzilla has been chosen to be used. Also the interests and communication culture of its community seems to be rather important for that choice. Hubzilla being backed by the Hubzilla Association seems to be relevant for the choice of the platform, whereas the image of the Hubzilla project (name, public appearance) seems to be less relevant.

Under the presumption that certain aspects improve, current users would use Hubzilla more often or more intensively as an individual. For that to happen, the software features and functionalities have to improve, whereas the organisational structure, the communication culture of the community and the image of the Hubzilla project are considered partially important for that to happen.

Most of the current users use Hubzilla for more than three years now, while there are also some new or less longtime users. We interpret this as Hubzilla being the "last haven" where most users stay, once they settled.

Hubzilla Association's thoughts and plan:

The Hubzilla Association's takeaway from this is that while the dominating demographic is individuals, but with almost 20% using it in the capacity of some sort of organization, we definitely think it's worth keeping that use case in mind. We think it is important to develop Hubzilla further to satisfy the needs of the current user group, which is using Hubzilla for Tech, Human Relation, Art, Science and Education, and which values a good communication culture of the community. We want Hubzilla to keep satisfying long time users, and to become the daily driver for future long time users. The main focus for future developments should be on improving the software features, while organisational and PR efforts should not be neglected. We want to continue to support the healthy communication culture of the community.

How are current users using Hubzilla?

Survey 2026 results:

According to the survey, the time for a user to get familiar with Hubzilla so that they felt comfortable to use it varies a lot, from "some days" to "more than 6 months", with more than half of the responses indicating 2 weeks to 2 months. Most users use it once or several times a day.

More than half of the current users use Hubzilla on an own hub. Finding a trustful hub run by someone else seems to be not so easy. Most of those who don't run their own hub wish to do so in the future. For that, most need more own resources.

Hubzilla Association's thoughts and plan:

We want to simplify the user experience so the user interface becomes self-explainatory, and to include a tour for beginners into the user interface, to make onboarding easier and to shorten the time needed to become familiar with the software.

We think that encouraging web hosting companies to offer Hubzilla as a service (and offering them support for doing so) could be a great way to lower the barriers for users for running their own hub.

What use cases is Hubzilla suited for?

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.

Which improvements of existing features and UI are demanded by current Hubzilla users?

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.

Final remarks

The final remarks section in the responses of the Hubzilla survey 2026 contains a lot of encouraging words for the Hubzilla project, and shows that the community cares a lot about it.

The Hubzilla Association feels encouraged by the feedback that Hubzilla is important to many users, and intends to harness this energy to create even more joyful and satisfying experiences for current and future Hubzilla users.

Annex I: Methodology

Timeline

Publishing of questionnaire, public invitation to participate in survey: 19th of March.
Return due for responses: end of April.
Evaluation of responses: during May.
Presentation of evaluation: mid June. Based on this presentation, topics for the Hubzilla Meetup which will happen on February 28/29 2027 can be discussed beforehand.

Purpose, Goals

With this survey, we wanted to get more clear about

the target group: Who should we aim the development of the software for? (Which use cases should be satisfied?)
with which convincing features we can approach the target group. (Popular satisfactory features)
the demands for improvement of existing features and for missing features. This knowledge can be the basis for future fundraising campaigns.

The results of the survey may further serve as a basis of initiatives developed during the Hubzilla Meetup which will happen on February 28/29 2027.

Form

Lime survey (an online survey software).

What kind of questions to ask

According to the General Assembly of the Hubzilla Association on January 16th, 2026, the questions of the questionnaire should deal with these topics:

Use cases: Find out about the motivation for using Hubzilla. (The more detailed, the better?)
Popular satisfactory features: Identify the needs which are covered to a satisfactory degree by existing features of the software.
Identify existing features of the software which need some improvement to become more handy.
Missing features: Identify the needs which are not yet covered by the existing features of the software.

Annex II: Raw responses (in numbers)

In the following, counts of the responses are indicated by a number in parentheses for each question.

Current user characteristics

We/I use Hubzilla as a...

... private person. *
Please choose only one of the following:

Never (2)
Sometimes (7)
A lot (34)
No answer (2)

Please specify the field(s) for which you use Hubzilla as a private person: *
Only answer if you chose "Sometimes" or "A lot".
Please choose all that apply:

Art (19)
Education (10)
Science (18)
Human Relation (25)
Tech (30)
Other: __________ (8)
- Social networking, Sharing files and photos with other people, Wiki for public and private information and notes
- Music, Literature, Networking, Code
- Politics (2)
- As a personal blog
- Travel
- Share information and memories with friends, Organizational issues like planning of events
- Blog and Wiki

... private company/institution. *
Please choose only one of the following:

Never (34)
Sometimes (8)
A lot (1)
No answer (2)

Please specify the field(s) for which you use Hubzilla as a private company/institution: *
Only answer if you chose "Sometimes" or "A lot".
Please choose all that apply:

Art (3)
Education (3)
Science (1)
Human Relation (2)
Tech (6)
Other: __________ (2)
- Social networking, Sharing files and photos with other people, Wiki for public and private information and notes
- Music, Networking, Code

... public institution. *
Please choose only one of the following:

Never (36)
Sometimes (6)
A lot (1)
No answer (2)

Please specify the field(s) for which you use Hubzilla as a public institution: *
Only answer if you chose "Sometimes" or "A lot".
Please choose all that apply:

Art (1)
Education (2)
Science (2)
Human Relation (3)
Tech (5)
Other: __________ (1)
- It's unclear, where you draw the lines between a private person, a private company and a public company, as per se any person or institution on the internet is public.

Remark: "public" means "being a or run by an executive, legislative or judicative entity". We can mention this in the next survey.

As stated with the previous answers, we/I don't use Hubzilla. That's because... *
Only answer if all previous answers were "Never".

... we/I don't know about Hubzilla. (1)
... Hubzilla seems too difficult. (1)
... we/I use something else.
... of another reason: __________ (1)
- Back when I was self-hosting, HZ seemed to be more complicated than other options (Friendica, GNUsocial). I’m currently not hosting anything, but hoping to get back to it soon.

We/I chose Hubzilla or like it because ...

... of its software features/functionalities.

Disagree
Agree partially (4)
Agree (36)

... it's an open source project.

Disagree (1)
Agree partially (3)
Agree (36)

... it's backed by an association.

Disagree (8)
Agree partially (13)
Agree (12)
No answer (7)

... of its community (users, admins, developers) and their interests and communication culture.

Disagree (5)
Agree partially (11)
Agree (23)
No answer (1)

... of its image (name, identity, appearance).

Disagree (16)
Agree partially (13)
Agree (8)
No answer (3)

Our/my usage of Hubzilla

We/I've been using Hubzilla for... *
Please choose only one of the following:

... less than 2 months now. (2)
... 2 months to 1 year now. (4)
... 1 to 3 years now. (7)
... more than 3 years now. (24)

To get familiar with Hubzilla so that we/I felt comfortable to use it, it took us/me ... *
Please choose only one of the following:

... some days. (7)
... 2 to 3 weeks. (11)
... 1 to 2 months. (10)
... 3 to 6 months. (4)
... more than 6 months. (5)

We/I use Hubzilla... *
Please choose only one of the following:

... less than once a month. (2)
about 1 to 4 times a month. (2)
... about 1 to 5 times a week. (3)
... about once a day. (12)
... several times a day. (18)

Under the presumption that certain aspects improve, we/I would like to use Hubzilla more often or more intensively as a...
Please choose only one of the following:

... private person. (22)
... private company/institution. (4)
... public institution. (2)
No answer (9)

For that to happen, the software features and functionalities have to improve.
Only answer if a choice above was selected.

Disagree (1)
Agree partially (10)
Agree (12)
No answer (5)

For that to happen, the organizational structure has to improve.
(open source project backed by the Hubzilla association)

Disagree (7)
Agree partially (4)
Agree (5)
No answer (12)

For that to happen, the communication culture of the community has to improve.
(users, admins, developers)

Disagree (11)
Agree partially (4)
Agree (4)
No answer (9)

For that to happen, the image has to improve.
(name, corporate identity, software and hubzilla.org appearance)

Disagree (12)
Agree partially (7)
Agree (2)
No answer (7)

Hosting Hubzilla

We/I use... (*)

... Hubzilla on an own hub (beside possibly having clones elsewhere). (21)
... one or several accounts only on hubs we/I don't own. (16)

It was easy to find a Hub where I could register an account.
Only answer if: "... one or several accounts only on hubs we/I don't own."

Agree (5)
Other: __________ (7)
- I went from the English language Hubzilla Website to a German English Hub. I should be going from English Hubzilla to English only Hub.
- Though finding an open hub was easy, it's difficult to figure out who runs this and subsequently whether or not the hub is trustworthy. Exposing this information would help.
No answer (4)

We run Hubzilla on a ... (*)
Only answer if: "... Hubzilla on an own hub..."

... shared hosting service. (3)
... virtual private server hosting service. (12)
... dedicated server hosting service. (1)
... managed hosting service. (1)
... home server (Raspberry Pi etc.) (4)

We/I would like to run our/my own hub in the future. (*)
Only answer if: "... accounts on hubs we/I don't own."

Disagree (5)
Agree (11)

To run our/my own hub in the future, we/I ...
Only answer if: "Agree"

... need more own resources. (8)
... need more documentation. (2)
... need more support. (3)
... are looking for a managed hosting service. (3)