I originally created Friendica and then wrote what is now called Hubzilla after pretty much everybody on the web blocked Friendica's attempt at federating the social web. First Twitter, then Google, then Facebook, then Diaspora told us to bugger off and they didn't want us to federate with them. Then StatusNet "became" pump.io but was incompatible with StatusNet federation and we were told to bugger off again.

I thought it was kind of silly to have a project that "federated the entire social web" but was now blocked/prevented from doing so by everybody - including open source projects. Facebook was the killer - we had two-way API federation with them at one time. When that went away the original Friendica dream died; though a few folks stayed on with that project and managed to keep the project alive. But it's nothing compared to what it once was. I used to converse with Facebook and Twitter and Diaspora and GNU-Social friends and mailing lists all on the same webpage; while importing my favourite blogs into my stream via feeds. It was pretty awesome.

Anyway Hubzilla is based on distributed access control and nomadic identity and is probably more of a CMS and personal cloud server than a social network - though folks use it for all of those things. It represents five years of development post Friendica and does a lot of stuff that decentralised networks aren't "supposed" to be able to do. It's strong on privacy and permissions. And we learned a lot from the Friendica experience - all external protocols to other networks are now optional plugins and we don't rely on anybody in other networks for any core services or for our project identity. Once bitten twice shy.

I retired from open source a few months ago. I still help the Hubzilla folks a little bit but I'm doing my own thing now.