After about half a year since the previous major release, a new version of the platform for building decentralized social networks Hubzilla 7.0 has been published. The project provides a communication server that integrates 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; the MySQL DBMS and its forks, as well as PostgreSQL, are supported as a data store.
Hubzilla has a single authentication system to operate as a social network, forums, discussion groups, wikis, article publishing systems and websites. Federated interaction is based on Zot's own protocol, which implements the WebMTA concept for transferring content over the WWW in decentralized networks and provides a number of unique features, in particular, transparent end-to-end "Nomadic Identity" authentication within the Zot network, as well as a clone function to provide completely identical points login and user data sets on various network nodes. Exchange with other Fediverse networks is supported using the 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.
Among the main innovations, it should be noted a completely redesigned access rights system, which is one of the key features of Hubzilla. The refactoring made it possible to simplify the workflow and at the same time provide greater flexibility with a more convenient organization of interaction.
- Channel roles have been simplified. There are now 4 options to choose from: "public", "private", "community forum" and "custom". By default, the channel is created as "private".
- Individual permissions for contacts have been deprecated in favor of roles, which are now a requirement when adding each contact.
- Contact roles have one default preset, which is determined by the channel role. Custom contact roles can be created as desired. Any contact role can be set as the default for new connections in the Contact Roles app.
- Privacy settings moved to a separate settings module. The visibility settings for online status and entries on the guide and offer pages have been moved to the profile.
- Advanced configurations are available in privacy settings if the custom channel role is selected. They received an initial warning, and some entries that could be misunderstood received hints.
- Privacy groups can be managed from the Privacy Groups app, if installed. The default privacy group settings for new content and the default privacy group for new contacts have also been moved there.
- Guest access has been redesigned to allow new guests to be added to privacy groups. Quick access links to private resources have been added to the dropdown list for convenience.
Other significant change changes:
- Improved user interface for changing profile photo.
- Improved display of polls.
- Fixed a bug with polls for channels - forums.
- Improved performance when deleting a contact.
- Removed deprecated private messaging extension. Instead, including for exchange with Diaspora, the standard mechanism of direct messages is used.
- Support and improvements for the Socialauth extension.
- Various bug fixes.
Most of the work was done by the main developer Mario Vavti with the support of the NGI Zero open source funding.
Source: opennet.ru