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Hubzilla Start

bsmall2@zotum.net
Starting to "do everything" with hubzilla
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I should have taken the time to back up my account.


THE decisive advantage of Hubzilla over Diaspora*: Backup and clones can be used with other instances.

I myself have already had to change various Diaspora* accounts because pods were closed. But even a backup doesn't help because you can't take it with you to a new account.
bsmall2@zotum.net
I liked Diaspora* because it was simple, there seemed to be fewer distractions on its pages than there are on other SNSs. The community is great too, I had a lot of friendly and worthwhile conversations. WIth Diaspora* I had imagined a way to make use of backups was on the way, that maybe I just had to research how to make a clone and transport it. Now I see that it was not possible to clone and account even if I had been organized enough try it.

When I first started Diaspora* I had a Hubzilla account too (maybe with libre.net?). Back then Hubzilla only offered bbcode, but I was only able to get accustomed to markdown. Markdown is great for quick posts, and I love the footnotes. After reading Nicolas Carr's The Shallows I came to believe that it's good manners to keep links out of text. Apparently coming across a link while reading is distracting as it activates parts of the brain that are not usually used while attentively reading. To protect my attention-span I I print out on-line pages, or put them into offline ebook readers. So I try to help any on-line readers by moving links to the very end of my posts.

Another Hubzilla advantage for me is that Hubzilla makes it easier to use your own photos in other posts too. I remember it was challenging to get the image links from a Diaspora* album post and then put the proper markdown around the links. It's much easier to find my photos in a Hubzilla account.

Hubzilla's pdl-editor add-on makes me think I'll be able to design distraction-free pages for my account. If I can do that Hubzilla will then also have the main advantage that Diaspora* had for me.

Hubzilla's wiki and webpage add-ons can probably meet the needs I had thought to meet with a website and wordpress blog too.

I am very impressed. While I've been trying to avoid on-line time, I I have to do work on-line, Hubzilla seems to be the most likely approach that will let me do it right.

Thanks for making it possible to gain experience with Hubzilla, @Périclès Soupalognon y Crouton

I wish I could become a hub-administrator and manage a private site for my family, and maybe for students and local people too. I quit facebook and refuse to begin Line so I don't communicate on-line with students or locals. But I chat and share photos with family through Groupme but it seems like an invasion of privacy. Some day I'd like to make it easy for parents, siblings, nieces and nephews to keep control of their privacy and digital rights. Being able to set people up with hubzilla acccounts as an administrator would be a great way to get people thinking about free software and online privacy and various other issues. But I don't think I can take enough time to safely install and maintain my own freedombone instance1 with the DNS service and Let's Encrypt certificats.

I've been looking into shared hosting, after seeing that hubzilla is now among the one-click installers offered right along with Wordpress, Drupal etc... But I'm afraid something might come up, and I might not be able to sit down long enough to make sure the add-ons (wiki, webpages, gallery...) work. Maybe if there is time to really read and understand the docs, feel confident that I can use Comanche and the privacy groups to implement a simple Groupme-style family chat, maybe then I can dedicate a few days during the spring or summer vacation to attempt setting up an instance.

I like working with the Racket language, and feel the keep to one language given the limited amount of programmign that I do. But Hubzilla has got me thinking about reading a PHP7 book, one of the books that explains how web-site work as the teach PHP. Maybe a book like that would give me the knowledge and confidence needed to become a hub-administrator. But it will take me a while (if ever) to get the confidence to plunge into something like freedombone1 or Yunohost.2

Do you have any recommendations for the most important things to study, or the best way to prepare, to become a hub-admin? I put the Administrator's Guide3 into an e-book reader but it's hard to guess if there will be enough time to get comfortable with all the necessary background.
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