If your
primary use case is social networking with fediverse integration that is usable by a non-technical audience, your best choice at this time is Zap. It is
currently the root project upon which several other projects are derived.
Osada and Mistpark are identical to Zap with the exception of branding, and they are updated less frequently than Zap so they tend to be more stable. If brands and products are important to you, you've probably come to the wrong place. Our brands are fluid. They can appear out of nowhere and can morph into something totally different. Each one of these is able to leave the nest and fly on their own. Whether or not this happens and what that actually means is up to the people who choose to use them.
In a nutshell, we support and encourage forks and provide pre-made forks with which you can do whatever you desire. Your participation in this development community is on your own terms, just as your participation in the fediverse community is on your own terms when using this software. However... you should at least be aware that I have this same ability to set my own terms for participation in this development community. While I do try to be helpful, I have my own agenda and I'm not here to serve anybody.
Roadhouse is experimental. Use at your own risk. Someday all development will push forward and Roadhouse will be the root project for another generation of fediverse servers. But not today.
Redmatrix is "Nomad only" and ActivityPub is disabled by default. As such its primary use case is to support private communities which have no desire to interact with the rest of the fediverse. We sometimes call this the Fediverse Underground or #
FU.
The major difference between any of these projects and Hubzilla is dramatically reduced complexity, and a lack of content management features. You would probably choose Hubzilla if you are more interested in privacy enhanced publishing than social networking and having full control of the underlying permissions system. While this is very powerful, it's a bit like traditional Unix - we don't prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot and mixing incompatible settings and protocols. As such it probably isn't something you would want to explain to your mother or non-technical people, unless you actually used the content management functionality to configure it for your audience and lock or hide most of the settings.
And because this comes up frequently - there are no plans to implement Diaspora confederation in the Zap family of servers. That protocol is completely incompatible with what we're doing and where we're going.
