Hubzilla

[the_genderman]

First impressions: Extremely poor.

Firstly, it took me having to click the "Resend email" button because they just never? sent? my confirmation email? Which was, in hindsight, clearly A Sign.

Secondly, I am stuck on the "Create a Channel" page because it does not explain what this is or why I need to do it, only that it is mandatory. And the Hubzilla help document pre-assumes that if you're reading it, you already have a Hubzilla account or channel or whatever the fuck it is. No help to create one.

Tumblr may have been a disaster mess, but it at least made some sense. In signing up for Tumblr, you know you're creating a blog. Is Hubzilla a blog? A messageboard? A Twitter? What am I creating? Yeah, it's "like an email" in that it doesn't matter which part of the fediverse I'm in, it works across all of it, but what is a channel? And how is it different from a "network address"? Is it different from a network address?

And yes, I'm pissed. Sure, it makes sense to get away from the corporate spots that want to tell us we can't upload our smutty fanart, but is it really worth it to move to sites that make no fucking sense to "casuals" or people who have zero (and I really mean zero) experience with coding or p2p or whatnot? Sure, I understand on some level that p2p is "like Limewire" but ok, I never used Limewire. I did not have that opportunity. If fandom only wants to be open to the tech-savvy and those "in the know" and push out the "casuals," then it has lost its way.

Comments

[mrs_d]

a service claiming it's "like Limewire" is not exactly a vote of confidence in my mind...

[potofsoup]

Yeah, Hubzilla is not the most intuitive, but then again, neither is DW -- like, what even is a "Reading Page"? On Hubzilla, your channel is basically your blog. It sucks that it's called channel, though. I've personally found the gallery/image aspects easier than DW, but YMMV

[daphneblithe]

I think if I post here then @the_genderman can also see the comment? I am not as good at DW :D

------
You are right, @potofsoup, Hubzilla instances (rather than a single monolithic "Hubzilla", because they are all going to be subtly different) are definitely not intuitive, but people are working on it. it will take a lot of time and fans working together to do it.

I am a bit startled at anger at Hubzilla-creating fans, to be honest? It IS experimental, we are all building it together, making it user friendly, hours are going into it. It's not as if people are maliciously making hubzilla code more difficult, it’s actually the opposite. Everyone is working to make it MORE user friendly.

The people who join now are people who like the experiment and want to help to build it, work out new user interfaces, and we are all trying and all trying to find solutions. Being angry at people doing that is probably counter-productive.

Speranza and I wrote a bit of text at the top of the guide document that will reassure I think, and Speranza has made a similar DW post yesterday. I will paste it here as reassurance.
---

CAVEAT FOR NEW USERS: the various fandom Hubzilla instances are in experimental mode, not even beta. This means that entering them is entering a building site, literally, with virtual architectures emerging around you. The users desired at the moment are ones that feel a degree of glee about the inevitable chaos -- it’s getting more user friendly every minute, but it’s not polished yet, and there is no rush to join. And it's possible that the whole thing falls down and we have to start again!

So you won’t miss out if you wait! In fact, that's the whole point of federation: that we can keep spinning up servers that serve 150-250 people, and linking them together. Future Hubzilla instances (once we've got the bugs out and the interface more friendly and the help guides all clearly written) might organize in a variety of ways: groups of fan-friends, by fandom, pairing or theme, by art (vidders, podficcers, artists) - though even these will be only sort of "home" rules: the whole POINT of federation is that you can integrate material from people on other federated instances on your Feed/Timeline - and not just from Hubzilla instances, but from all the federated software networks: Mastodon (if you like Twitter), Plume, PeerTube, etc.

As an example of the reigning happy chaos, yesterday was the first day we tried to get tentacle emojis available to users ;) - and that whole effort was spearheaded by a non-techy fan, who dived into the challenge. So it’s that kind of vibe really. Playful and adventurous experimentalists welcome now. :) The rest of you: WE WILL COME BACK FOR YOU, NEVER FEAR!


----------------

[the_genderman]

I think a big part of why I felt like the guide wasn't working was because everything else was spelled out in detail, but it felt like it jumped from step 1 ("how to find an instance to join") to step 3 ("how to view and customize your profile") without any help on step 2 ("how to create your account in the first place because you can't poke and experiment until you have a channel and Hubzilla didn't bother to explain what a channel was nor why both a channel and a nickname are needed and what's the difference between them?) The signup page was extremely sparse and non-helpful. Basically "Do this before we'll tell you anything" like, no, I need to know what I'm doing.

[potofsoup]

Yeah, I can definitely see that. I remember it taking a while for me to figure out how to use Hubzilla, too. It's like, super early-stage level of development, like if I poked my head into the kitchen expecting cookies and people are still trying to figure out what to put in the mixing bowl.

Honestly, I didn't quite figure out the channels thing or the streams thing -- I basically set up an account a month ago, couldn't figure out where to find the dashboard/reading page, couldn't figure out how to friend people, so then I left. Then recently I logged back in because I got email notifs of people friending me, so I friended them back (or something? I'm actually not sure), but then I was able to find the reading page (the "Stream"). But yah, there's definitely a bunch of confusing phrasing that makes things harder. But I feel like that's stuff that can also be easily changed later.

I'm sorry it was so frustrating! It's definitely not going to be my main place any time soon, but rather a place I'll go whenever I have the extra brainspace and want to see what's going on in the kitchen. :X

[the_genderman]

I dunno, I found "Reading Page" a little easier to figure out because I had already created my account to be able to poke around by then. I was stuck on creating my account in the first place because it gave zero indication of what exactly I was creating. "Channel? Nickname? I thought I was joining a channel? Why do I have to create a new channel entirely to join someone else's?" It only told me that it was mandatory, not what it was that I was doing and why I needed both a channel and a nickname. The sign-up page was extremely sparse.

[daphneblithe]

Improving all these things is what we are all helping identify. I don't even like differtiating between users and admin in this right now tbh, it's so much a team effort right now.

Right now, Hubzilla instances are best for people who see problems like that and go 'Interesting, this is a problem, how can we improve it' but don't feel stress about that, but a kind of glee.

If glee at hiccups isn't a person's thing then best to wait. There is no down side to waiting, as Speranza says. But it's good that there ARE people using and working on it because otherwise it would never be improved at all.

So I think it makes sense to cheer on the gleeful experimenters who don't mind the chaos, because their efforts will eventually bear fruit for people who want it more streamlined.
I know I am very very grateful for the admins and volunteers working on bringing it to pass x

[kore]

Seriously? People have known what "reading pages" are since there was a "friends page" on livejournal. There's a "friends feed" on Facebook. It's a feed where you see the entries of the people you've subscribed to on the service. Comparing it to Hubzilla is really disingenuous, if not misleading.

[potofsoup]

honestly, when I moved here from LJ back in 2007, the reading page thing threw me for a loop, because it's a verb, whereas friends is a noun. Going from "this is a page of all your friends' posts" to "this is a page where you read posts from your subscription circle" was pretty confusing, especially since I was used to thinking in terms of friends and not subscription/access circles. (Facebook's "friends feed" has the word "friend" in it, too.) fwiw, when I first signed up for tumblr, it asked me to create a blog, and I was like "I just want to sign up for an account so that I can follow people, I don't want a blog". They've since changed their language around signups. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯