Good bye Hubzilla

2 minute read Published: 2020-03-27

#Hubzilla is a jack-of-all-trades. It's a cloud storage, allows pictures, blogging, allows staying in contact with others. The privacy controls are top-notch. It even has pretty much automated channel migration between hubs if you want to move to another server.

Mastodon probably didn't even notice Hubzilla as it steamrolled past Hubzilla's usage numbers and became the de-facto standard. At least it's also using a public protocol, so Hubzilla can exchange messages. I registered on a private Mastodon server a while back to join that community.

Then I had to share a bunch (>1000) pictures with someone and had a closer look at the cloud storage implementation in Hubzilla. It does the job, but the user experience wasn't that great and it was too complicated for my father. I set up Nextcloud a while back to share files, he's happily using it on his own. Only sent him a username and password and asked him to change the password. Pictures are just files and Nextcloud even allows viewing them on a map.

So it's just some blogging left for Hubzilla. Well, until I saw Writefreely. If I set the Firefox Developer Tools to throttle the download speed to GPRS, my channel page takes more than 60 seconds to load. Writefreely is at about 30 seconds and it responds notably faster. Writefreely's interface is a lot more basic, but it offers RSS and ActivityPub subscriptions, which is more than most blogs do.

The only thing left is reading RSS feeds. That never worked well for me, feeds were only updated every couple of weeks and I never figured out why. As far as I can tell it has something to do with my Hubzilla setup and works fine on other hubs. I've used selfoss for maybe 3 years and have recently switched to FreshRSS, so I never used Hubzilla for that.

I've replaced all my needs with other tools now, so I'll be shutting down my hubzilla server soon.

Thank you Hubzilla and thank you Hubzilla Devs, it's awesome what you managed to do.