Accounts, Profiles and Channels

Once you have registered an account at the grid you have also created a profile and a channel.

Account

You have one account. This consists of your email account and your password. With your account you access your profile and your channel.

Think of your account as the way you authenticate at one Hubzilla site. It lets you do things, such as creating profiles and channels with which you can connect to other people.

Profile

You have surely registered with some other internet services, such as forums or online communities. For all of them you provided some information about yourself, such as date of birth, country, age and the likes.

If you like you can see your profile here: [baseurl]/profile/[webname] and edit it by clicking on the pencil icon next to your avatar image.

Unlike other services hubzilla offers you the advantage of creating many more profiles. That way you are able to distinguish between profiles targeted specially at everyone (your public profile), your work mates, your family and your partner.

Think of your profile as the basic information about yourself you tell other people.

Channel

During the registration you created your first channel. Yes, besides several profiles you are able to have several channels. This might be a bit confusing in the beginning, but let's clear things up. You already have created one channel. You can use this one for the public, to communicate with people about every day life. But perhaps you are an avid book reader and many people are bored by that. So you open a second channel just for the book lovers, where you all can talk about books as much as you like. Obviously this is a new stream of posts, with a new profile (... or new profiles ...) and completely different contacts. Some connections might exist in both channels, but there will be some that are exclusive to only one of both. You yourself just switch between both of them just like you would in real life switch when talking to people you meet on the street or people you meet specially to talk about books. You can even connect to yourself, or better: to your other channel. :)

Think of a channel as different spaces dedicated to different topics where you meet with different people.

Channels

Channels are simply collections of content that are stored in one place. A channel can stand for anything. It can represent you, a website, a forum, photo albums, anything. For most people, their first channel is ‘Me’. The most important functions for a channel that represents ‘me’ are:

• Secure and private ‘spam-free’ communication
• Identity and ‘single sign-on’ across the entire network
• Privacy controls and authorisations that extend to the entire network
• Directory services (like a phone book)

In short, a channel that represents you is ‘me on the Internet’. With one account at a hub, several different channels can be created and used, each with its own individual configuration.

Create channels

Once you have created your account, you will be presented with the ‘Add Channel’ screen. Normally, your first channel will be one that represents you - so it's a good idea to use your own name (or a pseudonym) as your channel name. The channel name should be considered the title or short description of your channel. The ‘Choose a short nickname’ field is similar to a ‘Username’. With what you enter here, you create a channel address (also known as a ‘handle’ in Fediverse) that other people can use to connect to you and that you can use to log in to other websites. This address looks like an email address and has the form <nickname>@<your_hub>.

Note: In other Fediverse services, the handle is preceded by an ‘@’. With Hubzilla, this character must be omitted if you want to connect to another user or search for a handle, as an example.

You can create additional channels via the ‘Channel manager’ link.

As soon as you have done this, your channel is ready for use. Under <your_hub>/channel/<nickname> you will find your channel ‘Stream’. Your most recent activities are displayed here in reverse chronological order.

Channel roles

When you create a new channel, you will be asked to select an permission role depending on how you want to use this channel. The most popular permission roles are the social network roles. You have many more choices comparable to Facebook groups and pages, collaborative spaces, news feeds and more. These roles automatically configure various system variables, from the permissions granted to friends to the default privacy and visibility settings. Advanced configurations are available to customise each of these parameters to your needs, but our experience has been that most users prefer to set it and forget it. Below are some of the different roles that are currently available and how they affect your privacy and interaction options.

There are four channel roles:

• Public
• Personal
• Community Forum
• Customised

Public

The channel is a very permissive social network profile that is compatible with other federated social networks. Privacy is a lower priority than ease of access and connection with others. Anyone on the network can comment on your public posts and send you private messages. By default, posts and published articles are public, but you can override and restrict this when you create the article. You are listed in the directory. Your online presence and connections are visible to others. This mode can increase your susceptibility to unsolicited messages and spam. The ‘classic’ social media account.

Personal

By default, posts and published items are public, but you can override and restrict this when creating the item. You are listed in the directory. Your online presence and connections are visible to others. Only your direct connections can comment on your public posts and send you private messages.

Community Forum

The channel is a typical forum. By default, posts and published articles are public. Members can post articles via !mention or wall-to-wall. The posting of photos and other published articles is blocked. The channel is visible in the directory. Members are added automatically.

In order to be able to view media as a forum user, some of which may have restricted authorisations, it is necessary to activate the option ‘Enable OCAP access’ in your own user channel under Settings → Privacy settings (<hub>/settings/privacy).

Custom

This is the most precise setting for channel rights. All rights can be set in fine granularity. Caution: If you select the wrong settings here, you can render your channel unusable. Fortunately, the rights can also be changed again so that such malfunctions can be rectified. It makes sense to consider the effects of each individual permission for yourself as the channel owner, but also for other users.

The following settings are possible for each control point:

• Only me
• Only those you explicitly authorise
• Accepted connections
• Any connections
• Everyone on this website
• All Hubzilla members
• Anyone authenticated
• Anyone on the Internet

To edit the custom role, select ‘Privacy settings’ in the settings. At the bottom right you will find the button ‘Custom channel role configuration’. If you click on it, a warning dialogue will appear, drawing your attention to the risks of incorrect configuration. If you confirm that you want to edit the rights, the settings dialogue for the user-defined role rights opens.

Profiles

Hubzilla has unlimited profiles. You can use different profiles to show different ‘sides of yourself’ to different target groups. This is not the same as having different channels. Different channels allow for completely different information. You can have a channel for yourself, a channel for your sports team, a channel for your website or something else. A profile allows for fine-grained ‘’sides‘’ of each channel. Different profiles could be compared to different business cards of a person. Depending on the purpose, different information is given on each business card. For example, your standard public profile could read: ‘Hi, I'm Fred and I like to laugh’. You can show your close friends a profile that says ‘and I also like to throw dwarfs’.

You always have a profile that is referred to as your ‘standard’ or ‘public’ profile. This profile is always accessible to the general public and cannot be hidden (there may be rare exceptions on privately run or unaffiliated sites). You can and should limit the information you make available in your public profile. If you want your friends to be able to find you, it is helpful if you include the following information in your public profile...

• Your real name or at least a nickname that everyone knows
• A photo of you
• Your location on earth, at least at country level.

If you also want to meet people who share general interests with you, please take a moment to add some ‘keywords’ to your profile. For example, ‘music, linux, photography’ or something similar. You can add as many keywords as you like.

Select ‘Edit profiles’ from the menu on your Hubzilla site. You can edit an existing profile, change the profile photo, add things to a profile or create a new profile. You can also create a ‘clone’ of an existing profile if you only want to change a few things but don't want to re-enter all the information. To do this, click on the profile you want to clone and select ‘Clone this profile’.

In the list of your profiles, you can also select the contacts who can see a particular profile. Simply click on ‘Edit visibility’ next to the profile in question (only available for profiles that are not your default profile) and then click on specific connections to add them to or remove them from the group of people who can see this profile.

Once a profile has been selected, the person viewing your profile will see the private profile you have assigned. If the person is not authenticated, they will see your public profile. There is a setting that allows you to publish your profile in a directory and ensure that it can be found by others. You can change this setting on the ‘Settings’ page.

If you do not want others to find you without telling them your channel address, you can leave your profile unpublished.

Settings

Hubzilla allows a wide range of settings for behaviour, appearance, features, channels, etc. You can access most settings via the main menu, where you will find the Settings menu item.

Various categories of settings are provided:

• Account settings
• Channel settings
• Privacy settings
• Display settings
• Manage locations - if clones of your channel exist

If you are in the stream view, you will see a small cogwheel (⚙) next to the main menu, which you can use to access the

• stream settings

There are also hidden settings

• Additional functions

which you cannot access via the menu or an icon.

Connecting with channels

Connections in Hubzilla can have many different meanings. A connection is more precisely defined as a set of permissions that you have granted to another person. In traditional social networks, all connections are given the same permissions or at most two levels (friends and ‘followers’). In Hubzilla, a separate set of permissions can be set/customised depending on the situation and the relationship you have with the other channel. You can allow someone to see your posts, but not your photos. You can also deny them permission to comment on your posts or send private messages to you. But let's make it simple: you want to be friends with someone you know from social networks. How do you do that?

You can view the directory. The directory is available on all Hubzilla sites, so if you search from your own site, you'll get results from across the network. You can search by name, interest, location and keyword. If you already know someone's ‘handle’, you can contact them directly. A handle looks just like an email address (e.g. bob@example.com) but refers to a person in the open social network. In order to establish a connection, a compatible network protocol must be used. By default, this software supports the Nomad protocol, but other protocols can be provided via plugins/add-ons. For more information on connecting to channels on other networks, see below.

How to connect to other Hubzilla channels:

Visit the desired channel's profile by clicking on their photo in the directory, stream or comments and it will open their channel homepage in the channel viewer. On the left side of the screen you will normally see a link labelled ‘Connect’. Click on it and you're done. Depending on the settings of the channel you want to connect to, you may have to wait for the channel to approve your connection, but no further action is required on your part. Once you have initiated the connection, you will be redirected to the connection editor. Here you can assign specific authorisations for this channel if you want to make changes.

You can also create a connection to any channel by going to the ‘Connections’ page of your website or directory and entering the ‘Handle’ in the ‘Add new connection’ field. Use this method if someone tells you their handle and you want to connect to them. The process is the same as when connecting via the ‘Connect’ button - you will then be redirected to the connection editor to set the authorisations.

This is how you establish a connection to channels in other networks:

The process for connecting to ‘channels’ on other networks (such as GNU Social, Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma and Diaspora) is similar - enter their ‘handle’ in the ‘+Add’ field on the ‘Connections’ page. However, before you do this, please visit the App Management in the app menu and make sure that the appropriate protocol (Diaspora, GNU-Social/OStatus or ActivityPub) is deployed in your hub and enabled for your channel. These networks/protocols do not support account migration and location independence. So if you change location or clone your channel elsewhere, communication with these connections may fail. For this reason, these protocols are not enabled by default, but only with your consent. Enabling these protocols is an important decision between communicating with friends on these networks and account resilience in case your server goes down.

Some communication networks offer more than one protocol. For example, you can connect to someone who uses both the ‘ostatus’ and ‘activitypub’ protocols for communication. In general, the ‘activitypub’ protocol provides a better experience than the ‘ostatus’ protocol, but Hubzilla often chooses the first protocol it detects, and that may not be what you want. You can connect to someone using a specific protocol by putting the protocol name in square brackets before their ‘handle’. For example

[activitypub]https://foo.bar/foobar

[ostatus]foobar@foo.bar

[diaspora]foobar@foo.bar[zot]foobar@foo.bar

[feed]https://foo.bar/foobar

How to connect to RSS feeds:

Your hub administrator can allow you to connect to RSS feeds. The procedure for connecting to an RSS feed is the same, except that you enter (or paste) the URL of the feed into the ‘Add new connection’ field. The options may be restricted by your hub administrator because connections to feeds can sometimes cause high system loads.