What are channels on Hubzilla and (streams)?: Difference between revisions

Most {{Internal Link |target=What is the Fediverse? |link-name=Fediverse}} {{Internal Link |target=What are Fediverse projects? |link-name=projects}} only offer one identity per user account.

{{Internal Link |target=What is Hubzilla? |link-name=Hubzilla}} and its latest successor commonly referred to as {{Internal Link |target=What is (streams)? |link-name=(streams)}} go further than this: An account can contain one or multiple independent ''channels''. Each one of these channels can be compared to one {{Internal Link |target=What is Friendica? |link-name=Friendica}} account with variable roles and access permission settings.

Another ''channel'', in contrast, is actually another fully separate identity, much like having another account on e.g. {{Internal Link |target=What is Mastodon? |link-name=Mastodon}}. Other users can't tell which channels belong to the same account because the account underneath the channels doesn't identify itself anywhere, only the channels do. Thus, it is not necessary to have multiple accounts on the same server to maintain multiple separate online identities.

The multiple-channels-per-account model has another advantage: It greatly facilitated the introduction of {{Internal Link |target=What is nomadic identity? |link-name=nomadic identity}}. A channel basically puts your identity into a "container". What nomadic identity does is copy the whole container with everything in it, posts, settings, connections, files etc., to another account on another server. The clone can optionally be automatically kept in sync with the original, i.e. whatever happens on the original is automatically mirrored to the clone and vice versa. At the same time, the clone keeps the ID of the original. It would be a lot more difficult to pry certain data directly from one account, copy it directly to another account, keep it in sync and keep the copied data on the second account assigned to the ID of the first account.