Exploring how Hubzilla could serve as the foundation for Communitarium-oriented online spaces—not as refuges, but as bases for collective action, collaboration, and meaningful community governance.
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Introduction
The Communitarium Project aims to cultivate online spaces that support genuine community-building, deliberation, and collective action. Existing social media platforms—even those of the decentralized Fediverse—largely facilitate fragmented and transient interactions rather than durable communal structures. This raises the question: Can a federated platform like Hubzilla serve as the foundation for what might be called "community media"—an alternative to the prevailing model of "social media"?
The Problem: Fragmentation and the Limits of the Fediverse
While the Fediverse represents a significant step toward decentralization, its current implementations remain largely tethered to the paradigms of corporate social media. Mastodon, for instance, mimics Twitter, fostering rapid, ephemeral exchanges rather than deep, structured deliberation. Platforms like Lemmy and Kbin reproduce the upvote/downvote mechanics of Reddit, reinforcing discursive tendencies toward virality rather than thoughtful engagement.
Furthermore, much of social media fosters a culture of relatively empty self-expression, often divorced from any larger communal sense of purpose. Posts and interactions are frequently optimized for visibility, reaction, and individualistic branding rather than for meaningful collaboration or shared projects. This dynamic is not accidental but carefully cultivated by commercially owned social media platforms and, more broadly, the larger realm of technofeudalist platforms. These systems are designed to position users as consumers rather than participants, shaping online behavior around passive engagement and extractive data models rather than fostering active collaboration and shared purpose.
The Communitarium Project requires something different: a platform that facilitates meaningful, persistent relationships among participants; enables rich, structured discussion; and supports long-term collaboration and knowledge accumulation. More importantly, it requires an environment where people do not merely sign up as users, but understand themselves as owners, maintainers, citizens, and governors of their digital spaces—participants in a truly collective effort to shape and sustain an online commons. These spaces are not intended as refuges from the world but as bases of support and supply for both ad hoc and ongoing efforts to engage with and challenge the current state of the world. This is where Hubzilla enters the conversation.
Hubzilla’s Unique Affordances
Hubzilla is often overlooked within the Fediverse due to its complexity, but it possesses key features that may make it well-suited as a tentpole platform for the Communitarium Project:
- Nomadic Identity: Unlike most Fediverse platforms, Hubzilla allows users to retain their identity, content, and permissions across different instances. This feature prevents the fragmentation that often results from server shutdowns or migrations, making it ideal for long-term community building.
- Zot Protocol and Federated Access Control: The Zot protocol, exclusive to Hubzilla and its derivatives, enables decentralized identity management and fine-grained access control. This makes it possible to establish differentiated spaces—public, semi-private, or entirely private—within a federated structure, allowing for a nuanced balance between open engagement and communal trust.
- Integrated Wiki, File Sharing, and Forums: Hubzilla is not just a microblogging platform; it includes wikis, cloud storage, events, and forums. This means that it can function as a knowledge repository, facilitating durable, collaborative efforts in ways that purely discussion-based platforms cannot.
- Decentralization Without Loss of Cohesion: Unlike the fragmented nature of many Fediverse interactions, where discussions frequently dissolve as threads become disconnected across different instances, Hubzilla’s architecture allows for persistent conversations that maintain their structure even across servers.
- Group-Oriented Functionality: Hubzilla supports "channels" that can function as individual users, groups, or even publication hubs. This aligns well with the Communitarium’s vision of fostering collective participation in shared projects, ensuring that online engagement is directed toward something substantive and enduring.
Challenges and Considerations
While Hubzilla offers compelling technical affordances, its adoption presents challenges:
- Learning Curve: Hubzilla is more complex than Mastodon or Lemmy, and its interface can be daunting for new users. The Communitarium Project would need to invest in user-friendly onboarding materials and guides to encourage adoption.
- Network Effect Limitations: Hubzilla is currently a niche platform within an already niche decentralized web. Overcoming this limitation would require intentional community-building and outreach.
- Customization and Scalability: Hubzilla is highly flexible, but this flexibility necessitates a level of administrative expertise to configure effectively. Would a curated Hubzilla-based instance with pre-configured settings best serve the Communitarium’s needs?
That said, these complexities are largely a result of the needs and interests of its current small user base. If Hubzilla were to attract a broader, more expansively motivated base of new users, designers, and developers, they could undertake the project of rendering it (or an offshoot of it) more accessible to those drawn to its potential for community formation and organizing. In doing so, Hubzilla could become a more powerful and intuitive platform for fostering true collaboration rather than the individualized, attention-driven engagement patterns encouraged by much of contemporary social media.
Additionally, given the way we envision Communitarium-oriented Hubzilla instances operating, each instance will necessarily need to be limited in size to ensure that members stand a good chance of knowing each other beyond superficial interactions. Registration will have to be a more selective and involved process, ensuring that applicants understand the responsibilities and commitments involved in membership. Participants will need to develop a firm understanding that anything they publish to the world bears the name (and therefore the reputation) of the community from which they have published it—and that they will be answerable to that community for their contributions. This emphasis on accountability and mutual stewardship is a crucial distinction from the often consequence-free nature of mainstream social media.
The Vision: From Social Media to Community Media
If the Communitarium Project seeks to build something more cohesive and deliberative than the fragmented, attention-driven interactions characteristic of social media, it must move toward what might be better termed community media. This requires platforms that facilitate meaningful participation, not merely engagement metrics; spaces that support collective knowledge production, not just fleeting discourse; and infrastructure that actively fosters collaboration rather than performance.
The shift from social media to community media necessitates a fundamental reorientation away from the consumerist model of online presence. Participants in community media are not passive audiences or content producers for an algorithmically driven attention economy but rather active co-creators of their online environments. This means reclaiming digital spaces as commons rather than commodified attention markets. Crucially, it also means embracing ownership, stewardship, and self-governance as essential responsibilities of participation—ensuring that online communities are shaped by those who inhabit them, rather than dictated by platform administrators or external market forces.
Hubzilla, with its combination of decentralized identity, federated permissions, and integrated tools for discussion and collaboration, presents a promising foundation for this vision. While it is not a turnkey solution, it offers the infrastructural affordances necessary to construct a truly participatory online commons.
Next Steps
To explore whether Hubzilla can serve as the backbone of the Communitarium, we might consider:
- Deploying a test instance: Setting up a prototype instance to assess its usability, customization potential, and suitability for structured deliberation.
- Developing user guides: Simplifying onboarding and best practices for community members unfamiliar with its architecture.
- Evaluating integration with other tools: Assessing how Hubzilla might interface with wikis, forums, and deliberative platforms needed to make the Communitarium functional.
Hubzilla’s potential as the backbone of a new kind of online community should not be dismissed lightly. If the goal is to transition from fragmented social media to robust community media—where interaction serves not just as self-expression but as a means of fostering genuine collaboration—it may well be the most fitting starting point.