I think originally it tried to be a Facebook alternative, but over time it developed into a personal cloud space of sorts. I would agree with the comparison to Nextcloud as of 5 years ago, but these days they pivoted into the enterprise space and isn't that nice for home users any longer.
Does Hubzilla have CardDAV and CalDAV support? I'm using NextCloud for calendar and contacts primarily, would be interesting to try Hubzilla as a replacement if it's feasible.
Sorry to bother you again, I was starting to look into Hubzilla and my brain started hurting, because I can't understand how you federate contacts, calendar and file hosting. That said, I started looking into the contacts and calendar thing and this came up
Hubzilla and Nextcloud both offer features for managing contacts and calendars, but they cater to different needs:
Hubzilla focuses on social networking and doesn't have built-in calendar or contact management features. However, some Hubzilla servers offer integrations with third-party calendar and contact apps.
Nextcloud excels at personal cloud storage, including contacts and calendars. You can store your contact information and calendar events on your own server, giving you complete control and privacy over your data.
Hubzilla and Nextcloud both offer features for managing contacts and calendars, but they cater to different needs:
Hubzilla focuses on social networking and doesnβt have built-in calendar or contact management features. However, some Hubzilla servers offer integrations with third-party calendar and contact apps.
Nextcloud excels at personal cloud storage, including contacts and calendars. You can store your contact information and calendar events on your own server, giving you complete control and privacy over your data.
NO
Hubzilla has a build calendar and has a contact management, also a personal cloud storage and gives you complete control and privacy over your data.
Well, for various reasons I stopped hosting my own Hubzilla instance some years ago, but back then it absolutely had CalDAV and CardDAV. The problem was mainly that this wasn't well exposed in the Hubzilla web-interface, other than an event calendar. But with Thunderbird and DAVx5 etc. you could connect to it and manage it just fine. The WebDAV file storage part worked fine in the web-interface as well.
Edit: these parts are not federated though AFAIK (contrary to Nextcloud which does have some kind of file-sharing federation).
It's true that Hubzilla has access permissions for files on your WebDAV folder, and those access permissions sort of federate to other Zot protocol using sites (but not the wider Fediverse), but Nextcloud also has its own inter-Nextcloud federation where you can access files on other Nextcloud instances right inside your Nextcloud.