Quo vadis Hubzilla?
I got interested in the Hubzilla project at the end of last year. I was fascinated by its advertised possibilities enabling the creation of "complete" websites for families, social groups, organizations, etc. This is how I imagined it then, full of optimism. I was looking for something like this in connection with my ideas.
Since Hubzilla did not have a Polish translation, I first decided to translate both GUI and the documentation and here I ran into my first problems. The method adopted in the Hubzilla Project, which consists in translating gettext (.po) files on the Transifex website, is not good because it prevents the current checking of translations in the context of a running GUI. Fortunately, another solution was possible.
I built a prototype hub in a local development environment and used the good old way of translating with Poedit. It allowed me not only to efficiently translate GUI and documentation, but also to experiment with Hubzill's code.
After the initial translation of the GUI and documentation, I implemented the experimental hub "hub.hubzilla.pl", later changed to "h1.hubzilla.pl". Thanks to this, I was able to refine the Polish translation. Today it can be considered complete but also good (I think).
Unfortunately, this work made me aware of many problems related to the operation of Hubzilla and the fact that this project still requires a lot of work to be considered good and to I can sleep well as an administrator. My enthusiasm was gone. Here are some insights
- Lots of mistakes. As of today, there are 266 open issues in the framagit.org/hubzilla/core repository and 32 in the framagit.org/hubzilla/addons repository;
- The Hubzilla code is largely derived from its predecessors (Mistypark, Frendica, Redmatrix) and needs modernizations and bug fixes.
- A small programming team (5 people), far too small in relation to the development needs, which bodes poorly.
- According to the idea of @mike (Mike Macgirvin), Hubzilla should be an extension of the Zap project, which has undergone (is undergoing) a modernization metamorphosis. In my opinion, this is the only way that can ensure real success. And I am very interested in the success of Hubzilla.
If the Hubzilla project will be develop as a fork from its old predecessors (same to Frendica) it will not be successful (and idea is great.) Am I right?
