Hubzilla 4.0: Zot6 is coming!

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 18:18:14 +0000

Mike Macgirvin wrote the following post Tue, 06 Nov 2018 23:05:21 +0000

BEGIN { Hubzilla 4.0 }
!Hubzilla Support Forum !Hubzilla Announcements

We're about to launch into a heavy construction phase of the Red project (which will directly impact the Hubzilla project). I'm sending this post to folks connected with the Hubzilla project as a heads up. What you will ultimately come to know as Hubzilla 4.0 is being worked on right now and involves hundreds of thousands of lines of changed code from the current Hubzilla releases.

What this means to you

If you have a site which is running the Hubzilla 'dev' code branch and you are not a developer or you are running a production hub on development code, STOP any automatic updates NOW. Do not update again until the next RC (release candidate). Stability will not return for another month or two. Things are going to break. I cannot stop integrating code to deal with broken stuff on your site. If you can't troubleshoot and fix it, you should not be running 'dev' code. We've had a relatively stable 'dev' code tree for a few years and many people have gotten complacent that any issues could be fixed easily and quickly - and this is about to change in a big way.

What's happening

Hubzilla's underlying protocol 'zot' is about to receive its largest update since 2012. The latest release is Zot6. This affects Hubzilla in literally thousands of ways. There are a number of current features and behaviours which have changed or are no longer available in Zot6.

Diaspora is completely incompatible with Zot6. We will do everything in our power to preserve connectivity to that network, even though at this time I don't have a solution for how exactly to accomplish this. Diaspora is incompatible with ActivityStreams and Zot6 is built on ActivityStreams. Don't fret. It's not going away. I'm somewhat confident that we'll find a compatibility solution in the next month or two, although it's very likely it won't be very efficient. Since Diaspora actually doesn't federate with anything (other projects federate with it), it will be on us to find a workable solution.
Mail. Zot6 does not support 'mail' as a separate messaging system. Private messages are sent as private messages, not as 'mail'. We will do our best to create an interface to display these separately from your normal stream. Some will be surprised at this decision since I have fought it vehemently for years, but the simple truth is that mail as an interface has always gotten the short end of the stick and always falls behind the social stream in innovation and features and upgrades. Zot6 privacy is respectable and very well tested.
Reshares. In Zot6 as in many other networks, reshares are single click activities (much the same as a 'Like'). In older zot implementations a reshare is an embed of another post into your own post and commentary is permitted. It isn't clear yet how to resolve this discrepancy. We will be favouring the popular implementation over the older Hubzilla implementation, but we haven't yet decided how or if to migrate existing content. This is where other developers might have a chance to show their stuff. It's not much different than the email choice to "forward inline" vs. "forward as attachment". It would be nice to offer a choice, but I won't sugar coat it - it would be a fair chunk of work.
Permissions. In Hubzilla we reworked the entire permission system a year or two ago to make it more extensible. That was a major improvement, but it wasn't quite enough. Zot6 has a newer permission system that is much more flexible. As of this moment, we could go either way - keep the old one or move everything to the new one. I'm tempted to move everything forward, but this could delay the completion of the zot6 integration by a few weeks. At this moment, I'm saving that decision until I see how the rest of the migration goes. If we lose a month dealing with Diaspora quirks, I probably won't be able to update the permissions and we'll have to put that off until a later release.
Object encoding. The way post meta-information is encoded on disk in Hubzilla (an older variant of ActivityStreams) isn't compatible with ActivityStreams-JSON-LD which zot6 uses. Several metadata field names are different. Migrating existing content could take months to code and test and will most certainly involve up to several days of downtime on large sites, so this will not happen. We'll continue to store this metadata in the current format and translate it to the new format on the fly when required.