Can anyone tell me what is the benefit of using #Zap, #Osada, #Misty, #Redmatrix, or (new) #Roadhouse (or other parts of the ZOTlabs-suite) instead of Hubzilla - other than reduced complexity?
Reduced complexity leads to user interfaces and user experiences that are less complicated and have fewer bugs/issues and are much more easily maintained and extended.
We've removed a lot of legacy code and features which non-technical human beings couldn't quite grasp conceptually. The entire user interface has been revamped and refined. The entire storage system has been revamped and refined. The protocol drivers have all been enhanced and refined. Performance has been improved. Any feature that didn't work reliably and intuitively was either fixed or scrapped. The directory services were tossed out and each node provides its own directory now, reducing the number of SEO accounts in the directory dramatically and providing better and more consistent service. Security and online safety have been huge development efforts which resulted in a number of new features that don't exist in Hubzilla. ActivityPub is fully supported in core (including file/media permissions) and has been tested against a large number of different implementations. Sharing stuff is simple - you can drag a number of completely different types of things to a post and drop them and share them. You also don't have to worry about typing codes to format your posts and you don't have to declare a format to use. Just type. Text, html, markdown, bbcode. We don't care. In Hubzilla, you can add the markdown addon but there are lots of compatibility bugs and sometimes it mangles everything.
Mastodon and pleroma folks continuously complain that we tag people using their display name rather than their user name. This is a distraction from the more important issues of federation across different protocols like privacy and nomadic identity. There are important reasons for using the display name in mentions in a nomadic landscape, but they still complain, so now we rewrite mentions in both directions to match what people on these different networks expect and let you personally choose what tag style you prefer. But if you leave it alone, the tags are at least consistent no matter what platform they originated from.
This work has been going on for the better part of 3 years and I'm a reasonably prolific developer so we're ultimately talking about roughly 50% of the codebase that has been modified in some way from Hubzilla.
So these projects are as different to Hubzilla as Pixelfed is to Mastodon. They just "look" the same at first glance.
Never judge a book by its cover.
As far as which one to use, that's up to you. Zap is the root of this tree and development starts there. Redmatrix is Zot-only by default. All the others are fully integrated into the ActivityPub side of the fediverse and a bit like "Debian stable" in the sense that they usually don't get updated until we're comfortable with the latest changes in Zap or there's a security patch. Then these are pushed out. Roadhouse is the start of something new and different, but development will probably be a wee bit slower going forward. I'm retired now and fixing the planet and saving lives is a priority over fixing social media and listening to people whinge and attack me 24/7/365 for doing something I once enjoyed and sharing it with the world.
Why so many choices? Fuck brands and marketing. That's how the world got into this mess. You can fork any of these and call it Spitball or TiddlyFunk if you want. But at least if you fork one of these, they're actively developed and still function and have the latest performance and security patches. That wasn't the case for earlier forks of Redmatrix and Osada and the exact reason why these old project names are now still being supported and carried forward to the current generation.
Why pick up and try to continue with a long dead fork when you can have one that still works and gets security updates?
