{"type":"rich","html":"
\"Join<\/a>Join Hubzilla<\/a> wrote the following post <\/a>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:18:33 +0200<\/span><\/span><\/div>
Since 2012 "Hubzilla, formerly Redmatrix, formerly red": Groups (forums) and tools for collaborative organisation<\/strong>

Since 2012 "Hubzilla, formerly Redmatrix, formerly red": Groups (forums) and tools for collaborative organisation<\/h1>
Published on 28 July 2026

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Ever since its first release in July 2012, the focus has been on community tools with social features.<\/strong>

Hubzilla<\/a> was never meant to be just another feed vying for your attention. It has always been: Hubzilla for communities<\/strong>. A tool for groups that need to organise themselves collectively, rather than just posting to each other. Always available: groups and topics, events, shared organisational profiles, embeddable, federated comments, customisable designs and governance tools<\/strong>. It was provided as a ready-to-use space with everything you need, which can then be redesigned block by block: add what's missing, swap out or fork what almost fits, and disable what you don't need.

Why the community comes first<\/h2>
When Hubzilla -- then still known as 'red' -- was released in July 2012, it offered a fully-fledged, locally managed, federated social media app in which users themselves controlled their feeds, their permissions and the circle of people they could reach.

But the social network was only a small part of a much more extensive system. Although open-source tools for decision-making, organising events or mutual support have been around for years, they struggle because they're located away from the places where people like to interact. If, instead, these same tools are integrated into a social space -- alongside the people you already follow, your groups and your feeds -- they gain precisely the everyday appeal that holds communities together on the major platforms. And these relationships belong to you: every tool shares them, and they accompany you across the open web.

Fourteen years of real communities have confirmed this. Nobody came to Hubzilla asking for a better microblog. They came because they wanted to give their community a home. A magazine whose readers wanted to discuss things with one another, not just the articles. A mental health network that needed spaces where people could speak safely. A town that wanted its events, announcements and discussions in one place that was managed locally. In every case, the stream was the least interesting part of the solution.

Streams are geared towards individuals: good for small talk and discovery, but the wrong format for organisation. If specific<\/em> people are to see something, react to it and follow it up, you need a group: with membership, with rules, with a calendar and a way to make decisions together.

The community has always been at the heart of the project<\/strong>.

Key community features<\/h2>
These features have always been available: ready to use and already in use within real communities, with groups having always been connected across instances. Please regard this as an invitation to other communities to customise these building blocks to suit their specific needs. Would you like to give it a go first? Groups and all the other features listed below are available on every instance (hub).

Groups (forums) and topics (categories)<\/h3>
On Hubzilla, groups, known as forums<\/strong>, are spaces where communities, organisations and teams can define their own membership, permissions and rules. As they are based on our flexible permissions system, a forum can take any form: you can run a public forum, a space for announcements only, a private space accessible by invitation only, or a forum visible only to a specific group. You can change your mind at any time later on as the forum evolves.

In addition, within the groups there are topics, known as categories<\/strong>, which prevent conversations from getting lost in an undifferentiated stream. You can follow a forum or<\/em> filter by a single category, so that updates appear in your stream without you having to visit every forum page to check if there's anything new.

Community rules<\/h3>
Every space needs shared expectations. Both servers and individual groups can set their own community rules<\/strong> so that newcomers know what sort of space they're entering, and moderators can rely on specific guidelines rather than having to make decisions from scratch.

Decision-making<\/h3>
Making decisions together is a standout feature. Hubzilla offers decision-making tools ranging from quick polls to comprehensive surveys, allowing groups to use the simplest process best suited to each decision:

  1. Single or multiple choice:<\/strong> familiar polls where participants simply select one or more options.
  2. Proposal and consensus<\/strong>: for decisions that need to be discussed before a vote, based on sociocratic practices: gather proposals, discuss and amend them, incorporate objections, and then move forward.<\/ol>

    Events<\/h3>
    Communities thrive on get-togethers. Hubzilla includes events with calendar views so you can see what's coming up.

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    Hubzilla is built from the ground up to be modular, and this modularity isn't limited to our own extensions: rather than succumbing to the 'Not Invented Here' syndrome, we integrate with specialised tools from across the ecosystem, so that events can be published and discovered across apps, rather than being confined to a single app. Hubzilla's event calendars can be subscribed to via other calendar apps.

    Organisational profiles<\/h3>
    A community rarely consists of just one person. You can now create a shared organisational profile<\/strong> (a magazine, a collective, a working group, a moderation team) that is jointly managed by multiple accounts. From the outside, it looks like any other profile: It publishes posts, you can follow it, and it's networked as an organisation. Behind the scenes, people can come and go without anyone having to share a password.

    Shared cloud including Collabora<\/h3>
    It's often necessary to share documents and files within a community. Hubzilla provides you with a fully-fledged, integrated cloud for this purpose. Collabora Online can be integrated for convenient document editing.

    And because not every file needs to be accessible to everyone, the permissions system applies here too.

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    Knowledge management with the wiki<\/h3>
    It is often useful to make information, documentation or instructions available to the community. Hubzilla offers a classic wiki for this purpose, which of course also allows collaborative editing.

    Announcements<\/h3>
    If something needs to reach all members (e.g. a voting proposal, an update to the code of conduct, a call to action), administrators and moderators can publish an announcement that appears in every member's notifications and as a push notification, rather than hoping it will turn up in the feed.

    It looks like your community, not like a off-the-shelf product or someone else's platform<\/h3>
    Hubzilla offers various designs, and you can create your own by customising colours, fonts and layout without having to write any code. And it goes beyond a simple design: your domain, your name, your header banner, your typography -- the entire site feels like your own, with nothing from us standing between you and your members. Even commercial community platforms-as-a-service rarely go this far.

    \"hubzilla03.png\"<\/a>

    For example, when readers of the Hubzilla Association visit     hubzilla.org<\/a>, they see the Association's site from start to finish, with no signs of another platform visible in the background. This was such an important factor that it was a key reason for choosing Hubzilla: a community space should feel like their<\/em> own space, not like a precarious corner of a platform over which they have no control.

    Two-way single sign-on<\/h3>
    Hubzilla supports SSO with OpenID and OAuth2 both as a client and<\/em> as a provider: members can log in using an existing account, or Hubzilla itself can act as an identity provider to log them into other apps. That's one less hurdle to joining and one less password to manage.

    Fast and reliable<\/h3>
    Hubzilla has always been fast and reliable, and the core developers are constantly working to optimise it further. A Hubzilla hub can even be run on a Raspberry Pi!

    What's next?<\/h2>
    Hubzilla is, as always, undergoing continuous development. Hubzilla v. 11.4RC2 is currently in the public testing phase.

    Give it a go<\/h2>
    Hubzilla is free software under the MIT licence, with no investors, no adverts and no advertising model to be activated at a later date. You can     install an instance<\/a> or sign up to a public hub<\/a>.

    This work relies on the support of the community. If you want it to continue, you can     support the project<\/a>.

    You can find us here:     https:\/\/hubzilla.org<\/a>.

    FAQ<\/h2>

    Why don't you run a public flagship instance?<\/h3>
    Because we want an ecosystem: Hosting, governance, moderation and revenue distributed across many co-operatives and communities, each of which is accountable to its own members -- rather than the standard 'winner-takes-all' model, where the software developers become landlords for everyone, their flagship instance dictates the roadmap, moderates the network by default and collects hosting fees from everyone.

    Disclaimer<\/h2>
    Any similarities to living or deceased persons, or to old or brand-new Fediverse projects and published texts, are totally, completely coincidental and, quite honestly, not intended! \ud83d\ude09

    Hubzilla -- Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel!<\/h2><\/div><\/div>
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