Hubzilla 5.0 Released

It has been a wild and fun development cycle with many challenges. Here is a brief summary of the most notable changes:

Zot6 Protocol
Zot6 has been implemented as the primary messaging protocol in Hubzilla. Most work in this development cycle has gone into this project. What you will notice is that the network field in your connections list will turn from zot to zot6 as soon as your contacts’ hubs will be upgraded.

Direct messages
Direct messages are messages that are addressed to one or more single connections. They are accessible from your network stream. A direct messages filter has been added to the stream filters widget for quick access. The Mail app has been deprecated in favor of direct messages.

Mail app moved to addons
There is no concept of private mail in the zot6 protocol. If you require access to your legacy mail, you will need to ask your hub admin to install the mail addon. This will allow you to install the legacy Mail app.

Forums
The way we interact with forums has changed. To post to a  forum you can now simply select a forum from the ACL selector.

Polls
Hubzilla now has support for polls with multiple options. This feature is compatible with activitypub polls and is available directly from the post editor. The vote feature has been deprecated in favor of polls.

Notifications
Notifications have been rewritten to implement server sent events. It is required to install the SSE addon to receive real time notifications. Also some useful new features were added.

Due to the upgrade to the zot6 protocol there are some drawbacks

• Sourced RSS feeds will not federate via zot6 unless the option « Resend posts with this channel as author » is selected. The authors are not valid actors.
• Anonymous comments will not federate via zot6. The authors are not valid actors.
• Community tagging has been disabled. It will be re-enabled when it is agreed upon how to implement it for compatibility with other projects.
• The chess addon has been moved to addons-unsupported until it will be ported to the ActivityStreams2 data format.
• Channel clones at hubs which are at Hubzilla version < 4.7.4 will be disconnected until the clone hubs will be updated.

For a more detailed changelog please have a look here.

A big THANK YOU! to all contributors and everybody who is supporting Hubzilla. Special thanks to @Funds privacy tech/open search which is supporting my work for Hubzilla.

How to upgrade?

• create a backup
• execute util/udall from the terminal
• make sure all DB updates (especially 1236) have been successfully applied
• execute php util/z6convert.php dry-run from the terminal for a dry run (no data will be modified with this option)
• execute php util/z6convert.php from the terminal (this will take a while…)