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Georgiana Brummell What are the differences between Diaspora, Pleroma, Hubzilla, Hometown, and Glitch? How do they compare to Friendica as far as features?
As for Hubzilla vs Friendica, I've made a series of tables that compare Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams). I've made them for those who are looking for a Facebook alternative in the Fediverse, but who only know Mastodon first-hand and Friendica from hearsay. But these tables are useless for blind or visually-impaired users, and I can't change that because it's in the nature of tables. Also, I don't have all data for Friendica yet. (In case someone sighted comes across this comment and wants to see the tables:
Here they are).
So I'll try to do a Hubzilla vs Friendica comparison here. Hold on and take some time, for this will be very, very, very long. 42 lines of comparison with over 10,000 characters.
Friendica was created by Mike Macgirvin in 2010.
Hubzilla started out as a Friendica fork by Mike Macgirvin himself in 2012, originally named Red (from spanish
la red = the network), then renamed Red Matrix. It was repositioned, reworked, massively extended beyond Friendica's features and renamed Hubzilla in 2015.
Friendica has native Android apps, a closed beta native iOS app and support for Mastodon apps, even though Mastodon apps only cover 20% of Friendica's features at most. Hubzilla doesn't have any mobile apps, at least none for iOS, none in the Google Play Store, none that could be installed on a new Android device and none with a fully native mobile user interface.
Hubzilla also also doesn't support Mastodon apps and never will. That's mainly because a Mastodon app can't cover over 90% of Hubzilla's features, including features which you need all the time such as file upload, image embedding, handling of connections and permission controls, simply because Mastodon doesn't have these features. Hubzilla would require its very own apps, and due to Hubzilla's immense complexity and wealth of features, a fully-featured, dedicated Hubzilla app would be absolutely gargantuan and just as complex as Hubzilla itself.
On Friendica, ActivityPub federation is available from the get-go. On Hubzilla, ActivityPub federation is optional, and on newly-created channels, it is off by default.
Friendica can integrate Bluesky and Tumblr accounts. Hubzilla can't.
On Friendica, your account is your identity. Your identity is firmly tied to your account. On hubzilla, your identity is independent from your account. It resides in a container called a "channel", of which you can have multiple, fully independent ones on the same account. This also allows you to switch back and forth between channels or identities without logging out and back in.
Friendica has limited capabilities of moving your identity to another instance. Hubzilla has nomadic identity. For one, this makes it possible to relocate an entire channel with all posts, all comments, all private messages, all connections, nearly all settings, all files in your file space etc. etc. to another instance. Besides, it makes it possible to clone a channel to one or multiple other instances. This gives you live, hot, real-time, bidirectional backups of your channel, and you can log into and use any of them. That way, your channel is much more resilient against instance shutdown.
If you delete a Hubzilla channel, you cannot create a channel with the same short name on the same Hubzilla hub unless the admin fully deletes your channel from the database.
If you delete a clone of a Hubzilla channel, you cannot clone the same channel back to the same hub unless the admin fully deletes your channel from the database.
Friendica has client-side support for OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on. Hubzilla has full support. This means that Friendica logins are recognised by instances with full OpenWebAuth support, but Friendica itself doesn't recognise logins elsewhere. Hubzilla logins are recognised the same, and Hubzilla does recognise logins elsewhere.
Friendica has some basic permission control. On Hubzilla, it is much more advanced and fine-grained.
On Friendica, you can set your profile to private. On Hubzilla, you can give permission to see your profile to anybody on the internet, anybody in the Fediverse, anybody on Hubzilla or (streams), anybody on your hub, unapproved and approved connections, approved connections, only those you specifically allow by contact role or only yourself.
On Friendica, you can set your list of connections to private. On Hubzilla, you can give permission to see your connections to anybody on the internet, anybody in the Fediverse, anybody on Hubzilla or (streams), anybody on your hub, unapproved and approved connections, approved connections, only those you specifically allow by contact role or only yourself.
On Friendica, you can set your timeline to private; as far as I know, this happens along with setting your profile to private. On Hubzilla, you can give permission to see your stream to anybody on the internet, anybody in the Fediverse, anybody on Hubzilla or (streams), anybody on your hub, unapproved and approved connections, approved connections, only those you specifically allow by contact role or only yourself.
I don't know if Friendica can give specific permissions to specific connections. Hubzilla has so-called "contact roles". Each contact has a contact role that grants or denies 17 different permissions. Permissions granted channel-wide from the channel role are inherited by all contact roles. Two of these permissions are for your contacts to send you their posts and for your contacts to send you private messages.
On Hubzilla, you can keep both everyone and specific contacts from sending you repeats/boosts/reposts/renotes with a line of filter syntax in a filter blacklist.
On Hubzilla, you can send any of your posts as public, only to yourself, to all members of a privacy group (which is similar to a circle on Friendica), to whoever is assigned a certain non-default profile, to one specific group/forum or to a custom selection of contacts. You can also define your default post audience, either one of your privacy groups, or your posts are public by default.
Hubzilla has three levels of reply control. At channel level, you can give permission to reply to your posts to anybody on the internet, anybody in the Fediverse, anybody on Hubzilla or (streams), anybody on your hub, unapproved and approved connections, approved connections, only those you specifically allow by contact role or only yourself. In addition, you can choose to let comments in from those who are not permitted to comment on your posts, preview them and then manually decide whether or not you accept each comment.
Reply control at per-contact level means that you can use contact roles to grant or deny permission to reply to your comments to certain connections.
Reply control at per-post level is optional and off by default. It lets you disallow comments on individual posts of yours entirely.
Likewise, there is quote-post control at channel level and at per-contact level.
On Friendica, you can report posts to the admin. On Hubzilla, you can't. This feature is currently being discussed.
I don't know about Friendica, but Hubzilla has a channel-wide filter with a whitelist and a blacklist, and optionally, it has an individual filter for each connection with a whitelist and a blacklist.
Hubzilla allows regular expressions in filter lines, but only for normal keywords, not in lines with filter syntax.
Hubzilla's filter syntax can recognise posts, comments and private messages. This is of very limited usefulness, however: If you want to whitelist certain keywords for posts, but let all comments and all private messages through, you'd have to use filter syntax in a whitelist. But in whitelists, keyword lines are connected with "or" whereas filter syntax lines are connected with "and" which means that you cannot combine keywords with filter syntax. There is also filter syntax for keywords, but these lines are connected with "and" in whitelists, too, and each line can only contain one keyword with no regular expression.
On Friendica, summaries or Mastodon-style content warnings are created with a pair of BBcode tags, either
[abstract][/abstract] or
[abstract=apub][/abstract]. This works for posts, comments and private messages. Hubzilla has a dedicated summary field for posts, but none for comments. In theory, it also has the BBcode tag pair
[summary][/summary], but in practice, it is broken.
Friendica optionally offers Markdown for text formatting in addition to BBcode. Hubzilla only offers BBcode.
Friendica doesn't have or support polls. Hubzilla has full support for basically unlimited polls.
Friendica calls reposting "sharing" and quote-posting "quoted sharing". Hubzilla calls reposting "repeating" and quote-posting "sharing".
On Hubzilla, you can optionally be notified when a stranger mentions you out of the blue outside any conversation on your stream.
On Friendica, you can make a group restricted or private. On Hubzilla, you can give a group or a forum privacy, too, but by choosing the "Custom" channel role instead of the "Community forum" channel role, and you have to adjust the level of privacy by hand. The advantage is that you have fine-grained control over what exactly you want to be private in your group or forum.
Private Friendica groups can be joined by users on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and probably also Forte. Private Hubzilla groups or forums can only be joined by users on Hubzilla, (streams) and maybe Forte.
Friendica has a central directory of users, groups etc., the
Friendica Directory. Hubzilla doesn't have such a thing.
Friendica nodes have their own directories; I'm not sure if they only list Friendica accounts or accounts and channels of everything that uses ActivityPub, or if they even include diaspora* users. Hubzilla hubs have such directories, too, but they only list Hubzilla and (streams) channels because they can only list what uses the built-in and permanently activated Nomad protocol.
In your Hubzilla directory, you can hide channels that are flagged not safe for work.
Hubzilla has an option that gives those who are permitted to see a post the permission to also see any media embedded in the post, regardless of the permissions set for the respective media in your file space. This was introduced due to the wide-spread issue of people uploading images and setting them or the directores the images are in to private, then embedding them into public posts and the audience of the posts not seeing the images.
On Hubzilla, you can give guest access tokens to people whom you want to access certain files or directories in your file space.
The file space built into your Hubzilla channel can be accessed via WebDAV.
Hubzilla also has a built-in CalDAV calendar server which can use the event calendar as a simple frontend and an optional headless CardDAV addressbook server.
Hubzilla optionally has "articles", long-form text posts with the same full text formatting capabilities as normal posts, but which don't federate.
Hubzilla optionally has "cards", basically planning cards with the same features as articles plus a few extra features.
Hubzilla optionally has multiple wikis per channel with multiple pages per wiki. Wikis can be set up to use either BBcode or Markdown as their markup language with a few wiki-specific additions in both cases.
Hubzilla optionally has simple, static webpages which can be formatted with either BBcode, Markdown or plain HTML. Hubzilla's own official website
hubzilla.org is a webpage on a Hubzilla channel.
I think that's about it.
As for diaspora*: Forget it. For one, it does not support ActivityPub, and it does not federate with most of the Fediverse. The diaspora* developers staunchly refuse to add any other protocols to diaspora*, especially ActivityPub. One has actually said that you don't implement ActivityPub, you implement Mastodon. And the diaspora* developers don't want to make themselves dependent on Mastodon.
Besides, diaspora* is withering away. Around December 29th, a number of major diaspora* pods shut down. According to one source, diaspora* lost over half its user accounts in three days. And the closure of diasp.org, one of the biggest pods, is scheduled for April 1st now.
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Are there any other networks I should know about?
End quote.
From the same creator as Friendica and Hubzilla, there is something he created in 2021 at the end of a long and somewhat complex line of forks. It is officially and intentionally nameless, brandless, not a project and released into the public domain. Colloquially, it is named (streams) in parentheses after the name of its code repository. You can find the latter with an extensive readme
here. It is slimmed down in features from Hubzilla, and it doesn't offer nearly the connection and federation options of Friendica and Hubzilla. But it is easier to handle while still having a steeper learning curve than Friendica, and especially its permission system is both another bit powerful and significantly easier to use than Hubzilla's.
(streams) has no mobile apps and no compatibility with Mastodon apps either for the same reasons as why Hubzilla doesn't isn't compatible with Mastodon apps.
(streams) is included in my comparison tables, too. If you want me, I can rattle down another comparison with Friendica like the one with Hubzilla above.
In August, 2024, Mike made another fork based on (streams) named Forte. It's basically (streams), but with a name, with a brand identity, as a project, released under the MIT license and with no support for the Nomad protocol anymore. It does everything using only ActivityPub. This also means that it relies entirely on ActivityPub for nomadic identity. Since especially this is still highly experimental, Forte itself has not officially been released yet, it is not recommended as a reliable daily driver, nor does it have public, open-registration instances.
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Finally, will the interface of the page on Friendica change depending on my instance?
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As far as I know, different Friendica nodes have different default themes, especially now that the Facebook-like Bookface theme may be officially included into Friendica.
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