Hubzilla has an interesting opportunity right now.

hosh

caos

@billstatler @scott I have just discovered a video series whose creator @anubis2814
presents the functions of #Friendica very nicely and also compares it with #Facebook: peertube.stream/w/p/4K4MWYXMEY…

I don't know Facebook from my own experience, but when I see the interface and the range of functions, I can imagine that you can also spend a bit of time getting to know the functions on Facebook. And then you can't customise anything visually for yourself and have to differentiate between the bloatware and the relevant functions.
You also have to spend a bit of time familiarising yourself with Friendica and even more so with Hubzilla.

With #Hubzilla, the control of who can see what is certainly much more differentiated than with Friendica. Friendica has public groups (forums), private groups, circles and direct messages.
I had tested a bit: the public forum also federates very well with other software (tested with Mastodon and Sharkey), with the private forum it probably only works properly within Friendica.

Scott M. Stolz

@Bill Statler The problem is navigation. It is hard to find stuff. My sites will have modified navigation that is tailored for new people coming from Facebook and other platforms. Hopefully some of my ideas can be added to Redbasic.

Jupiter Rowland

@Bill Statler Grab your iPhone, load an app named "Hubzilla" from the App Store. Open it, enter name, enter password, there you go. Native mobile UI that looks almost exactly like the official Facebook app.

That's user-friendly.

Scott M. Stolz

@Jupiter Rowland Not having a native mobile app is a major disadvantage.

I am talking to some people about getting one built, but such an endeavor would cost thousands of dollars in development costs.

Too bad we don't have anyone who can maintain the existing F-Droid version. I wonder if it could be converted to work with Google Play. At least that would put us in one of the major app stores. Possibly two if we also submit it to the Amazon app store.

caos

@jupiter_rowland @billstatler How do you think most Facebook users use it? Do most of them use it exclusively via the app in the mouse cinema

or (also) in the browser or on desktop/ laptop?

Scott M. Stolz

@caos Back when I was on Facebook, I used both a lot. The fact that I could switch back and forth was an attractive feature. It meant that Facebook was always there.

We do have a Progressive Web App (PWA). It's just not listed on Google or Apple or Amazon.

Scott M. Stolz

@caos Back when I was on Facebook, I used both a lot. The fact that I could switch back and forth was an attractive feature. It meant that Facebook was always there.

We do have a Progressive Web App (PWA). It's just not listed on Google or Apple or Amazon.

Bill Statler

Novel idea.

I asked.

Bill Statler

Scott M. Stolz wrote:

We do have a Progressive Web App (PWA). It's just not listed on Google or Apple or Amazon.

Okay, here's a thought. Can PWA installation be made more obvious? It shows up somewhere in the browser menu, but it's different for different browsers and different operating systems. The description isn't obvious (for example, I'm looking at Firefox on Android, and it just says "Add to Home screen").

Is it possible to create a single icon for a Hubzilla (or streams) homepage that just says "Install as an app", and always works on every browser and OS?

hosh

I use the PWA quite successfully. Does it cost a lot, or is it difficult, to produce an electron app? - I have no idea. If I remember rightly (which is questionable after so many years ), part of the success of the FB is that it is able to check your address book to find other contacts that are on FB, and, in the case of Hubzilla this would be zero.

Scott M. Stolz

Supposedly you can get a PWA listed in Google Play and the Apple Store. But it requires jumping through a lot of hoops.

Bill Statler

And I think it would have to be a PWA for a single instance, not for Hubzilla in general.

Marshall Sutherland

If you tried to make a Hubzilla app that rummaged around in your contacts, you might have an insurrection on your hands among the old guard since privacy is considered a key feature.

hosh

Indeed. Someone just created a mock permission request form for IOS

hosh

Hubzilla needs a bit more than a fancy app in order to be " user-friendly" and succeed (though that's one thing that could help). And the "success" of large companies like facebook is partly owing to repugnant behaviour like betraying the needs of its users. We can't beat them at their own game. We can only try to emulate things that aren't harmful, like making the on-boarding process simple, the user experience as pleasant as possible, the discovery process good (in a forum post The sad state of the Hubzilla general Directory was mentioned). And also to give people an easy path to taking advantage to those areas that are unique to hubzilla, like cloud storage, wiki creation, long-form blogging, web sites, etc.

hosh

@Scott M. Stolz

An open source Facebook alternative can success without doing shady stuff.

I'm rooting for you, believe me (even if email is the communications app that everyone loves to hate)

Jupiter Rowland

@hosh Well, if we do want a native mobile app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, something that phone users can install without ever launching a browser, we may have to cut something from it. I don't think the app necessarily has to cover everything. Most settings, yes. Hubzilla's own apps, yes.

But how many people who are always only on a phone and never on a desktop computer, and who depend hard on a native phone app and would never touch a browser, would want to build a webpage on Hubzilla? Or maintain a wiki? How many bloggers are there who only ever use a phone, and who use native apps for everything, including blogging?

A native Hubzilla app wouldn't have to support webpages, it wouldn't have to support wikis, and it probably wouldn't have to support articles and cards either.

Something else a native Hubzilla app could leave out are visual settings, including the PDL editor. They wouldn't have any influence on the app, and you couldn't see and check what they do anyway.

? Offline

Absolutely agree with [email protected] . I'm old enough to remember the acronym KISS . Good advice for any code writer or programmer. Keep It Simple Stupid.....I've a whole list of these from 'back in the day'!

hosh

I personally would use such an app only for checking / writing to network stream - I use the other features only from the desktop. Even the existing PWA doesn't have access to everything (such as admin options).