Of all the decentralized blog solutions, they seem the most promising. I wish them the best. I may return at some point. They are seriously cool.
But I just can't even. At least not right now. Why? I'm glad (nobody at all) asked!
Some of this may have been fixed. Some may not be an issue at all, for those with
more time to explore. But here's how I saw things, as a casual user.
It's a “click random stuff until you maybe get somewhere” design. And not all that well documented.
In fact, some things aren't documented at all. Syncing between hubs using one option syncs “a couple months of posts” last I checked. What does that mean? It's hardly reassuring when you want to know your content will be preserved.
Dokuwiki: an hour, maybe? Including a script to export my Hubzilla content.
Hubzilla: Hours. Multiple different tutorials needed. I had trouble making an account because of email issues.
I just can't trust something like that. With no one click setup, I can't feel comfortable that this is a solid product that I can reliability reinstall, in a guaranteed way, at any time. It's one of the reasons I avoid Arch!
Is not ideal. I don't feel like I could self host on a raspberry pi all that well.
It's not exactly easy to reskin. It's not clear without a deep dive how you make an app. It all feels very “enthusiasts only”.
It wasn't clear how to change the templates(such as for the randomly generated text at the top of this page!) without a lot of hassle.
Isn't *quite* P2P. It's still very much based on federated hubs and servers. It's not like there's an app you can download that still works when the internet goes down, a la Jami.
There are blog posts. There are articles. There are web pages. There are links between them. (At least when I was using it)Some contexts support relative links to some. Others do not, and you have to use absolute links, breaking the replication feature. It seemed that rendering did not work exactly the same between the various ways of publishing content.
Some applications are supported on some hubs, but not others.
There are too many ways of doing things, and no way to know what to use, till you try them all, and realized that none of them are a very good fit.
What I *wanted* was organized web pages, and for the main page to show recent pages, and DokuWiki makes that easy.
On Hubzilla, the easy option I found was to use blog posts on the stream, and categorize with tags. But then I ran into issues with the tags listing not being displayed how I wanted, and eventually, I just decided to move on rather than to put more time into configuring.
URLs for blog posts have big nasty identifiers. Of course, pages or articles might be different, but… Then you run into confusion with sync, relative links, and the like.
When you put it all together….. I decided I'd rather just use Dokuwiki. It works, it's trusted, it's themable, and there's no fuss. It doesn't discourage me from writing content by it's sheer number of clicks needed for the UI.
I certainly learned a lot. And one of the main things I learned was the value of “just works”. If there were a high performance, blockchain free, fully P2P blog platform that could be installed with one command and had an Android app, I'd be all for it, regardless of complexity.
But Hubzilla has a long way to go before it can replace facebook. Or
perhaps someday we will have a P2P product that works like Doku!
Until then, the KISS principle might have a place after all. A tiny one, because it's a bit overrated, but a place nonetheless.