light new release of the platform for building decentralized social networks Hubzilla 5.2 . The project provides a communication server that is integrated with web publishing systems, equipped with a transparent identity system and access controls in Fediverse decentralized networks. The project code is written in PHP and JavaScript and is distributed under the MIT license.
Hubzilla has a unified authentication system to operate as a social network, forums, discussion groups, Wiki, article publishing systems and websites. Federated interaction is based on the proprietary Zot protocol, which implements the concept of WebMTA for transferring content over the WWW in decentralized networks and provides a number of unique functions, in particular, transparent pass-through authentication of “Nomadic Identity” within the Zot network, as well as a cloning function to ensure completely identical points logins and sets of user data on various network nodes. Supports exchange with other Fediverse networks using ActivityPub, Diaspora, DFRN and OStatus protocols. The Hubzilla file storage is also available via the WebDAV protocol. In addition, the system supports CalDAV events and calendars, as well as CardDAV notebooks.
In the 2 months since the previous major 5.2 release, numerous fixes and changes have been made to the code among which, in addition to the traditional fixes of identified problems and improvements, the following should be highlighted:
- Change to using the file system as the default image storage. Previously, a DBMS was used for this. Support for choosing a storage type now also applies to profile avatars imported from external servers.
- Support for importing any external publications from networks based on Zot, Diaspora and Activitypub protocols via the search bar.
- Experimental data import / export support between Hubzilla and Zap. Within the framework of the latter, a reference version of the Zot protocol is currently being developed.
- Improved system performance when displaying main pages due to the internal caching mechanism and the removal of a number of processing, which can slow down the display on large hubs or hubs hosted on low-power servers, to background processes.
- Declared Support for Latest PHP 8.