@danieldekay

I am currently digging deeper into fediverse applications for the tangoverse as described before. It was a great occasion to reset my virtual server and configure it using yunohost, which allows for much more easy management and operations, I hope, than my old setup.

Currently in the test bed are the social network apps Friendica, Hubzilla and Streams, as well as the event apps Mobilizon and Gancio.

Event Apps

Hosting both with Yunohost is a one click installation. But I failed to log in to any of them at firts. Browser cache resets and fiddling with user accounts solved that.

Both apps allow for easy sharing of events, but I found both lacking for tango, especially when we are thinking of event platforms for a community, or even the larger global tango community. Maybe in the future they will allow for more detailed forms, or maybe I haven’t found out how to best deal with them.

There is also the Event Bridge for ActivityPub, a wordpress pluging that supports 10+ event plugins for WordPress and makes them fediverse ready. Theoretically. I am testing this already on RNT with mixed results. ActivityPub seems to work, but I can’t get events to be usable reproducibly.

However, I think this would be the future for tangoverse events:

• Anyone can host their event portal with WordPress using one of many events plugins. The bridge would then make them available.
• Existing WordPress sites like TMD that don’t use a supported event plugin could be made to work with custom code. Most of the work has been done already, in the Bridge.
• We could also host a simple event sharing site on e.g. events.tangoverse.org so that any tangoverse user could share their events there.
  • We could even have a multisite network with one “good enough” plugin, and then offer local event sites for communities, like milan.events.tangoverse.org — just an idea. This would re-use existing technical setups while offering decentrlization of the content/user logic.

Social Networking Apps

Right now I have three test servers running Friendica, Hubzilla and Streams.

My focus is mostly on understanding how to setup profiles, pages and groups, and also how these three apps interact with each other, and with Mastodon.

Why Mastodon all of a sudden? The number of mobile apps available for Mastodon is very high, and the number for the other three is almost 0, but their web apps are not that bad. Still, the user experience is better for some people on native apps and not on web apps.

• What sets these three apart from Mastodon is: they have a very advanced permission system, and a way to create different profiles/sub-accounts/channels to reflect different use cases, like what we have on Facebook with Pages, or multiple accounts for DJs or Teachers, who don’t want their personal profile to be used for the tango business part.

• Each of these also has groups, usually implemented as a special kind of account or channel.

Accounts, profiles, channels? These are new terms, and each platform uses them differently, as well.

Here is my current understanding (which may change, and I will update the list)

Term	Friendica	Hubzilla	Streams
Account	One user account can have multiple sub-accounts.	One user account can have multiple channels	see Hubzilla
Channel	Channels bundle incoming content for you, e.g. based on a search or hashtag or list.	Each channel is an outgoing profile and can be a group or page, or …	see Hubzilla, but a slightly friendlier way of setting it up
Multiple Profiles		You can have different profile pages that you show to different contacts or contact lists.

Details

Friendica

Every account can be delegated to someone else, who can then use that account. This can easily create something like sub-accounts, and each account is a different use case: group, page, or “dj profile”. You can fine-tune the privacy settings for each account from public (“anyone, even the anonymous internet) to very restricted (“family only”). Accounts can also auto-follow anyone who follows them, or require confirmation of following, and much much more.

Channels on Friendica are like incoming filters. You can create them to group content you want to read by many ways. Here’s two screenshot for some ideas:

Hubzilla

In Hubzilla every user has one account, and there are no sub-accounts, or delegated accounts.

Instead, Hubzilla uses channels for this feature. Channels have different settings, especially on their privacy and permissions. With this Channels can be used to realize different use cases: they can be groups or pages, and can be also topic-based channels where you group what you post by the channel.

Streams

Streams follows the same logic as Hubzilla, but has streamlined the permissions setup dialogue a bit.