Establish a public/private social network within your organization by using an open-source social network platform. Let’s tour HumHub to see what it offers.
Overview
In the recent past, we published some interesting content on open-source social media platforms. We discussed the need for a self-hosted social network for your business and also explored the top 5 open-source social network alternatives for any organization. In this blog post, we have selected HumHub with which you can establish an internal/external social media site for your team/organization. Currently, business and educational organizations are flexible enough to conduct remote collaboration sessions. So, they opt for a space that is shared where they can communicate with anyone without wasting time and resources. In addition, communication and collaboration can be established without taking considering time and space.
Therefore, we are going to review HumHub, and for this purpose, we will be navigating the online version of this open-source social network platform. Its online running instance provides all the features and user interfaces where users can have a comprehensive experience. So, let’s start this tutorial and find out how HumHub can fulfill our business requirements.
The following points will be covered in this article:
- Why should you opt for HumHub?
- Getting started with HumHub
- Social tools at HumHub – Open-Source Social Media Platform
- HumHub marketplace
Why should you opt for HumHub?
Well, there are many open-source options available but HumHub is the one that stands out due to its rich usage and features stack. This self-hosted social network is easy to set up on local or cloud servers. It requires simple requirements to install this open sources software such as Apache Webserver 2.4, Nginx with PHP-fpm, and PHP. As far as the documentation is concerned, it offers comprehensive documentation regarding development, deployment, and usage.
This open-source social network platform is written in PHP hence, there is a huge developers community. The most interesting thing about HumHub is that you can customize this open-source software as per your needs.
Getting started with HumHub
The free version of HumHub offers 5 users and 500MB of storage. However, you may start creating your own instance by following this link. You will be asked to submit some information such as your email address and more as shown in the image below:
After inserting the network name, the wizard will be completed. Now, you may add the required information for the admin account where you can manage the network as an admin. It is shown in the image below:
Social tools at HumHub – Open-Source Social Media Platform
In this section, we will go through some exciting features offered by HumHub. This could be a prolific social network alternative if you are using some other social networking platforms for your organization.
Once you have set up the network, an intuitive dashboard will appear as shown in the image below:
So, as you can see there is a drop-down menu on the top right corner of the screen where you can find the user settings and administration module. In addition, cloud hosting is also available where you can customize your HumHub instance and can map your own domain name to it. On the top navbar, you create public/private spaces and define the method to invite people into your network. You can define the joining policy such as “only by invite”, “invite and request”, and “everyone can enter”.
Moreover, the dashboard of this open-source social media platform is highly logical and user-friendly. It shows you the activity log panel on the right side of the user interface. Above all, the center space is where you post the stuff, and people like or comment on the posts. In fact, in the comment section, you can upload media files too. Another cool option is that you can invite people in the network to participate in the discussions. The UI contains rich filter options and a global search feature with which you can search various data entities. Moreover, you can customize the dashboard element.
HumHub marketplace
The marketplace of this self-hosted social network is quite rich as you can find modules & themes. Some of them are free of cost and some of them are paid. Further, you may find modules belonging to various categories such as collaboration, administration, integrations, communication, and more. So, you may visit this link to find out more about the marketplace of HumHub.
The user interface provides details of all the plugins available as you may see in the image below.
Likewise, you may explore HumHub further to know the other features.
Conclusion
This is the end of this blog post. In this guide, we have gone through the running instance of an open-source social media platform. We also have explored its dashboard and other modules. In addition, this open-source social network platform is highly extensible and offers integrations with third-party applications. There are other relevant articles enlisted in the “See Also” section that may help you in finding the best social network alternative for your organization.
Finally, containerize.com is writing blog posts on further open-source products and topics. Therefore, please stay in touch with Social Network Platforms category for regular updates. Moreover, you can follow us on our social media accounts Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Ask a question
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FAQs
Is there an open-source social media platform?
HumHub is an enterprise-level social media platform that may provide you the best public/private social network for your business/educational organization.
What is an open social network?
Follow this link to know about a self-hosted social network.