Hubzilla-History
If you don't just want a historical outline of the development of Hubzilla, but also want to understand the intention behind it and what it can do, you should take a look at the creator of this software, Mike Macgirvin.
Mike Macgirvin is a tech-savvy and ambitious software developer. His CV is impressive, as he has been involved in many things that we now take for granted on the internet (e.g. IMAP). He helped develop the protocol and system of e-mail and worked for NASA, for example, for whom he wrote an e-mail client and a forum software; he developed messaging systems for Netscape and led a group at Sun and AOL that developed groupware and communication servers.
In 2010, he turned away from Facebook out of frustration (he was particularly concerned about the importance of privacy on this network) and realised that there was no adequate alternative to this social media system. There was Status.net, which served more the Twitter area, and Diaspora, which saw itself as a Facebook alternative, but due to its design (pure hobby product) could not meet expectations.
And so he developed the protocol DFRN (Distributed Friends and Relations Network), which allowed the basic concept for establishing contacts and cross-server communication and also placed an emphasis on data protection. The core features were the authenticated channel between communication partners, which ensured that the user at both ends is actually the user they claim to be, and the ‘Magic Auth’, which makes it possible to access the content of another user's server (if they have shared it) without having an account there (one of the features that still enable Hubzilla's special capabilities today). DFRN was released on 2 July 2010.
His social network software called ‘Mistpark’ was also based on this communication protocol. Within a very short time, federation with OStatus was implemented, RSS feeds and e-mail were built in and interfaces to Facebook, Twitter and Google were provided.
At the end of 2010, the software was renamed ‘Friendika’, and at the beginning of 2011, the option of federating with Diaspora was added. At the end of 2011, Friendika was finally renamed ‘Friendica’.
In 2012, Mike realised that Friendica would never be able to be a real accepted alternative to Facebook. His basic idea was to create a system that would enable highly integrated, privacy-friendly and decentralised services, i.e. a decentralised, secure CMS. So he started developing a new communication protocol: Zot, which was introduced and published in July 2012. He developed a new system based on Zot called ‘red’ (Spanish for ‘network’), which was more of a groupware and a CMS system with cloud services, but still contained the social network components. It added blogging features, WebDAV, CalDAV and CardDAV, and a range of content management tools. Hubzilla, which was not yet called that at the time, was born. The system was then renamed ‘Redmatrix’ because it appeared in web searches under the ‘collective term’ red among others and was hardly found. An outstanding feature of red/Redmatrix was the nomadic identity, which not only simplified moving from one server to the next, but also allowed the simultaneous operation of automatically synchronised clones on different servers. This provided unbeatable reliability, because if one of the servers is not available, you can continue working with the identity on another server without any losses. Poorly functioning import/export functions for a move became redundant. This, in conjunction with the Magic Auth functionality, made red/Redmatrix the most flexible system available.
Incidentally, ActivityPump, which was later renamed ActivityPub, was launched at the end of 2012. Compared to Zot, it was much more ‘chaotic’ and not nearly as powerful.
In 2015, Mike Macgirvin and the Redmatrix team realised that their project was hardly noticed due to poor marketing decisions (poor communication of project goals). A fresh start was made in this regard and the project was renamed ‘Hubzilla’ because the old name was tainted by past mistakes. Mike resigned as active coordinator of the project in early 2015 and handed over leadership to the community. However, he remained active as a Hubzilla developer.
On 16 March 2016, Mastodon was released, which at that time was still based on the OStatus protocol. At that point, Hubzilla was almost four years old. ;-)
On 18 July 2017, ActivityPub was implemented in addition to the base protocol Zot as a communication protocol for interacting with other services in Hubzilla. On 3 September, Mastodon followed suit and switched to ActivityPub.
On 17 August 2018, Zot6 was released and Mike turned to new projects (Zap). Zot6 was adopted in Hubzilla on 20 February 2019.
Development of Hubzilla is still ongoing. In December 2024, Hubzilla version 10 was released, which, among other things, introduced conversation containers.
tl;dr
The history of Hubzilla goes back to July 2012.
- July 2012: The Zot protocol is published; Macgirvin publishes red / Redmatrix based on Zot
At that time, Mike Macgirvin left the Friendica project and started developing Zot and a new base project called red (Spanish for ‘network’). Pretty quickly, red was renamed to Redmatrix to be found more clearly in search engines.
To ensure that the Redmatrix concept could be quickly turned into a functioning and usable server software, a markup language for websites called Comanche was developed. This allowed a page to be described and generated based on bbcode tags.
- October 2012: ActivityPump is released
- September 2014: ActivityPump becomes ActivityPub
- Spring 2015: Redmatrix is renamed Hubzilla
In early 2015, interest in Redmatrix waned, not least because of a lack of marketing. The Redmatrix team agreed on a fresh start under the new name Hubzilla. Along with the new identity came a new focus: creating community websites that are linked together as part of a global community. Mike resigned as active coordinator of the project and handed over leadership to the community, but remained active as a Hubzilla developer.
- In 2016, there were reorganisations that enabled different server roles, but with the same code base.
- July 2017: Hubzilla now also supports ActivityPub
In July 2017, support for ActivityPub was added. Mastodon added support two months later, in September.
- August 2018: Zot6 is released
- February 2019: Hubzilla takes over Zot6
Zot6 was released in August 2018 and was taken over by Hubzilla in February 2019.
- December 2024: The current major version 10 of Hubzilla is released.
In December 2024, Hubzilla 9 was released with a number of ‘under-the-hood’ improvements, such as conversation containers, and features that improve integration with the now diverse Fediverse based on ActivityPub.