Over time I’ve been on the lookout for social media for family to use. I haven’t really found anything suitable, key thing is that posting photos and videos needs to be user friendly. For example, Friendica all but requiring you to upload your video to YouTube and post the embedded video is just not gonna fly.

I’ve seen Zusam in the past, which looks like it could become something but I don’t think it’s ready for me to try to get extended family into. (It’s worth mentioning here that certain extended family have shown interest in using something like this)

Recently I’ve had a look around at some Enterprise social solutions, and have had a play with HumHub. It has a much more familiar look, things are separated into spaces that are similar to Facebook groups, and while media uploads aren’t perfect I think they will work well enough.

HumHub has modules, many of which cost a decent amount of money, because they target the enterprise market. However, the community version is open source and the base features and free modules seem to work well.

Does anyone have experience using it? Any warnings I should know about? Any similar software that does a better job?

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍English
    2·
    1 month ago

    I think largely we are aligned on what we are looking for in a platform. The private blog idea is interesting. I normally consider blogs as public, are there private blog platforms?

    Sure. If nothing else, you could proxy it through an authenticated endpoint, requiring people to log on to view it. But I don’t know the blogging software space very well - there are probably projects with built-in support for this. I’ve started looking around; I suspect the ideal platform isn’t so much a blogging platform, but it’s designed more around a blog design.

    If you come across one, please let me know! I’ll keep updating that CryptoPad document. I also started a spreadsheet, which is better suited to the data than a document table, but CryptoPad doesn’t have the ability to embed assets from other documents (other than images), so I’m just doing the table manually.

    On the other hand, projects die when the maintainers lose interest.

    Absolutely. Good projects attract multiple maintainers; there’s a bit of Darwinism there. When one project I used was archived, I offered to take over maintainership; the author didn’t want to hand it over to me, so I hard forked it and worked with distributions to replace the no-longer-maintained version with mine. It’s the OSS lifecycle, right? And the best thing about OSS - if the maintained loses interest, someone else can simply take over. And if no-one does, maybe it isn’t worth maintaining.

    I would like a platform that I know is going to stick around.

    This is so important! Especially for this purpose. Getting several people to join a platform and then put content on it introduces a lot of technical inertia. That’s why it’s important for me to reduce the odds of the project changing their terms of use; increasing costs; moving popular, free features to the “paid” column; and other shenanigans.

    On the other hand, something like Zusam, if the maintainer loses interest it will likely also die.

    See, I don’t believe this. It’s possible the project would die, but so often have popular projects lost their maintainers, and new people step in. They fork it, or have a peaceful transition of ownership, but the project carries on. Yes, some just disappear into obscurity, but the popular ones tend to keep going, sometimes under other names. X11 to XOrg; OpenOffice to LibreOffice; OwnCloud to NextCloud; so on and so forth. And increasingly, many projects add data migration paths from other projects, especially if they’re popular. Many ActivityPub servers can import Mastodon account data, for instance.

    I do have reservations about HumHub, but it’s the first platform I’ve seen that even comes close to being a familiar feel for users.

    It does look pretty close to ideal for what we’ve been discussing; I need to install it and try it out, because so far all other options have failed in some way. There’s another forest of options in the blogging style, so I’m still optimistic, but I may try HumHub anyway.

    I’m considering the other idea of using Dokuwiki as well, which I guess comes in as being more similar to your blogging idea.

    Yeah, that was an interesting avenue; I suspect the user client experience will be where that fails for me. It can’t require any technical expertise.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzOPEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      See, I don’t believe this. It’s possible the project would die, but so often have popular projects lost their maintainers, and new people step in. They fork it, or have a peaceful transition of ownership, but the project carries on.

      With Zusam, I don’t think it’s got that much of a following yet. I haven’t heard of anyone on a self-hosted forum actually using it. Plus current development is slow (last release almost a year ago), so I do think it would die if the dev abandoned it.

      Yeah, that was an interesting avenue; I suspect the user client experience will be where that fails for me. It can’t require any technical expertise.

      I’m thinking that most of the non-technical people would be reading only, so it might be ok.

      At this point I’m thinking of setting up a HumHub, a wiki (maybe Dokuwiki), and Zusam, and getting some of my most interested people in as a trial and see which one they prefer.

      None of these options have emoji reactions or gifycat integration, though.

        • Dave@lemmy.nzOPEnglish
          2·
          1 month ago

          For the wiki option, perhaps the wiki is just where the posts are made then you share the link in a chat app or something. Then the reactions could be in the chat app?

          Or for the HumHub or Zusam options, maybe you could add the reactions/gifycat integration. The platforms seem like they would work well with them if someone would just contribute that functionality.