Update 2024-08-24
TL;DR Zot protocol was abandoned a few years ago, and the surviving Zot projects now use a modified version of AP, extended by a group of FEPs using work by Zot creator Mike MacGirvin. This project will be retained for historical purposes, but it unlikely to be updated further.
The Zot protocol was primarily the work of federated social network pioneer and serial founder Mike MacGirvin. Who was behind a number of fediverse-related software projects, under a number of names, including MistPark, Friendica, Red Matrix, Hubzilla, Osada, Zap, the-nameless-project-known-as-"streams", and most recently Forte. Most of these began as a fork of their predecessor, allowing Mike to reprioritise and aggressively refactor the code. While leaving any community of code contributors and server admins that might have formed around the previous project to continue in their own direction.
The protocol work that became known as Zot became more well-known among the OStatus and Diaspora branches of fediverse around the time of the ActivityPub standardisation process at W3C. Especially after both Friendica and Hubzilla implemented OStatus and reverse-engineered the Diaspora protocol, which began the process of merging what had been two federated social networks; "the fediverse" using OStatus and "the federation" using Diaspora. But Mike was unhappy with the final ActivityPub spec, so he continued his work on Zot-based apps. Initially forking Hubzilla into two projects, one Zot only (Zap) and one supporting AP too (Osada).
Then, some time after declaring AP unusable and abandoning work on Osada, he abandoned Zap as well. Forking it into a repo called streams, which did support AP, and which he said was nameless and without a license. When the FEP process was set up to standardise extentions and variations of vanilla ActivityPub for different purposes, he started describing Zot behaviours as FEPs, so they could be used in AP apps too. This seems to have been so successful that he's now abandoned the-nameless-project-known-as-"streams", and forked it into a new project described as an AP app. To riff on Fight Club; in death, a member of Project Zot has a name; its name is Forte.
RIP.
References:
https://wedistribute.org/2017/10/got-zot-mike-macgirvin-on-building-your-own-apps-and-protocols/
✔ == added to live website at fediverse.party
🎉 == projects that have successfully federated with this protocol
✒️ == newly added to this page (added, not altered. Only @light to remove please)
Note: Tools with open protocol issue (not yet implemented), not fully open sourced code, no documentation at all, or alpha state with development inactive for several months, are not added for now.
List of projects that have or are committed to a Zot implementation
Note: most of these projects include both a back-end and a web client, but this list also includes projects that are only a back-end. Projects that are only a web app, for use with an existing back-end, will go on the client watchlist.
-
🎉 ✔ Hubzilla
-
🎉 ✔ Zap
Dead Projects
- 🎉 Osada - creator has abandoned it. Not completely out of the question a community might form to continue maintenance as has happened with creators previous projects (Friendica, Hubzilla)