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WriteFreely – An open source platform for building a writing space on the web

273 points by btdmaster 5y ago

monkeydust 5y ago
Been looking to start blogging, I feel it's making a slow comeback (along with RSS!) this looks great.
worldmerge 5y ago
This seems pretty cool. I've been interested in getting into blogging and moving away from WordPress. I checked out Jekyll and it's a pain to add media to a post so this looks like a great alternative. It would be nice if there was an online demo you could try out before setting it up.
- btdmaster 5y ago
  Check out one of the public instances: https://writefreely.org/instances https://writefreely.org/instances.
- mercacona 5y ago
  It’s the engine backing https://write.as https://write.as if you wanna try.
- thebaer 5y ago
  Besides everything else mentioned, you can create an account on our official demo instance here: https://pencil.writefree.ly/invite/NB8Ycb https://pencil.writefree.ly/invite/NB8Ycb
- BossingAround 5y ago
  Hugo offers pretty much every static site feature that writefreely does for free. Media on a page isn't an issue with Hugo websites.
  - yoz-y 5y ago
    One thing a bit annoying with Hugo is that somewhere down the line of updates they made breaking changes to templates. Now, since it’s written in go and all statically linked, I’ve just put the Linux and macOS binaries of the version that worked for me in my repo and never update. Good thing about a stagnant platform is that one can spend less time tinkering with it.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
What is the point of "medium" other than to hold your content hostage and force users to pay a subscription ? Writefreely instead is about sharing. A full 360 from medium.
thebaer 5y ago
Hi! I'm the lead developer of WriteFreely -- happy to answer any questions you have! For a little update on where the project is today: we just put out our last update [0] before v1.0, which we're aiming to release later this year. In 1.0, among other things, you'll find many features we've been piloting on our hosted service (Write.as), including newsletters, social media cross-posting, eBook export, etc. We're also experimenting with new, non-core features, like photo hosting [1] and comments [2]. Our core focus has always been on just writing, which is why many features (including ones afforded by ActivityPub) have been left out. So we're trying to see what's possible when we keep a clean, simple core with optional "rooms" of functionality around it. If you want to keep up with us, you should see more developments around this before the end of the year, too. [0] https://blog.writefreely.org/version-0-13 https://blog.writefreely.org/version-0-13 [1] https://snap.as https://snap.as [2] https://remark.as https://remark.as
- nickjj 5y ago
  Hi, If you ever wanted to hop on my podcast to talk about how you've built and deployed things let me know. We could chat about your tech stack, lessons learned, etc.. The podcast is at: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/ https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/ and if you want to become a guest there's a "become a guest" button on the right top to get the ball rolling. Currently inching up on 100 episodes.
  - thebaer 5y ago
    Sounds awesome! Would love to be a part of it. I'll reach out soon!
    - nickjj 5y ago
      Awesome, I'll keep an eye out for your submission. Side note: if anyone else happens to read this, you're welcome to submit your site / app too. The more the merrier!
keb_ 5y ago
I love Write.as, but one little nitpick that has always bothered me is the font loading flicker, like it takes a second on page load to load the custom font. Not sure if it's the browsers I'm using or uBlock but it always happens. Is there a way to disable the custom font?
- btdmaster 5y ago
  You can block remote fonts with uBO in its per-site menu, left of the disable JS button.
  - keb_ 5y ago
    Weird, but that setting seemed to not work. What did work was disabling JavaScript, which is a bit puzzling -- why is JS loading the fonts?
bovermyer 5y ago
Very happy to have contributed to this project. Of all the blog engines out there, it is by far my favorite.
zamalek 5y ago
I have been using it, and there's a liberating lack of bullshit. I love that there's no comments/spam/trolls. It took me like 15min to get it going on a droplet. What a fantastically simple project.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  Is there a good guide on how to do this step by step? I don’t mind learning and getting my hands dirty but I also fear things like getting security right.
  - zamalek 5y ago
    I did their production config instructions, but remember to disable the engine version header (some random tutorial [1]). I then used Cloudflare as a proxy, directly to the IP. You can get the IP certificate from CF. I am only paying for a droplet. [1]: https://seoneurons.com/hide-nginx-server-version-header/ https://seoneurons.com/hide-nginx-server-version-header/
- BossingAround 5y ago
  > It took me like 15min to get it going on a droplet Don't know much about writefreely in general, but static website hosting is free with Github Pages (or extremely cheap on something like S3). You mentioning a droplet sounds you're running a full VM to host a static site, which sounds too expensive if that's the only use case for the VM.
phantom_oracle 5y ago
How do you integrate this tool into an existing blog? I like the idea of ActivityPub followers but shifting all the contents over from an existing static site sounds like a wasteful exercise
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- pmlnr 5y ago
  Integrate your existing blog with https://fed.brid.gy/ https://fed.brid.gy/ instead.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eitland 5y ago
Been using it for a while. Refreshingly simple business model. They don't even hound you for an email address.
elyseum 5y ago
Interesting promise. Will give it a try. Does anybody known similar tools, written in a different language (no expertise on Go)?
- wakest 5y ago
  The other main ActivityPub blogging centric software is Plume https://joinplu.me https://joinplu.me, oh and there are some plugins for Wordpress
agnosticmantis 5y ago
This looks very beautiful. I wonder if it supports math typesetting (via latex) out of the box or if there are plug-ins for that.
- ta988 5y ago
  Yes there seem to be a MathJax support that you just have to enable according to what I see in the source and in the forums. It is apparently not in the documentation.
quaintdev 5y ago
> There are enough places on the web built to hog your attention; keep you scrolling and checking your feed, hoping for a new like or retweet. WriteFreely gives you the space to think for yourself again, free from alerts, feeds, and the distractions of classic social media. I think within a decade we all are going to come back to blog/personal sites and ditch social media. The easier we make people to set up self hosted blogs, faster will be the switch. I know general public does not give a shit about this but a man can hope.
- DerekBickerton 5y ago
  > ditch social media Personally I have made my addiction to social media work for me. I make full use of curated feeds, and make sure my feed has a good signal to noise ratio. The ADs are annoying, but I would rather trade my data for them. I can't afford $5.00 per month, and happily let ADs subsidize these companies (Twitter, Facebook etc).
  - _dibly 5y ago
    >I make full use of curated feeds, and make sure my feed has a good signal to noise ratio. The ADs are annoying, but I would rather trade my data for them. I just don't think that is a sustainable position with the way things are moving. If anything, this is the direction social media is moving away from. Feeds are increasingly curated by the user's browsing behaviors and and not their conscious decisions. Data is only becoming more valuable as more people make the choice to trade theirs away with no real thought about the long-term effects of colossal repositories of complex user data and very little regulation in place to restrict their use. Not to say that it isn't possible to make social media work for you. I just continue to wonder what the threshold is where users won't be comfortable leveraging their personal data for convenience.
- armchairhacker 5y ago
  The problem with personal sites is that they're hard to discover. Case in point: there are a lot of personal sites out there right now (and many more which existed but are now offline), that only a few people even know exist. We have platforms which make it easy to set up self-posted blogs, we just need a way to make them more discoverable. Which is what Twitter, Reddit, and especially Medium (which I imagine WriteFreely was inspired by) had in mind. This is something I said before: the reason existing platforms dominate the market is because they have the most users. Most people create blogs or any other kind of content because they want to be heard.
Popegaf 5y ago
Is it possible to import stuff from other blogs e.g move from WordPress to WriteFreely using a WordPress export? And is it possible to export from WriteFreely should one want to migrate away from it?
- thebaer 5y ago
  There isn't a direct way to import from WordPress so far, but there is an open API [0] you could use to move your blog. That's the tack we took for our Hugo import tool [1]: just taking posts from a previous blog, parsing out the metadata, and publishing via the API. For WordPress, you'd also just want to get the posts converted to Markdown for the best experience in WF. As for exporting your content, yes you can do that at any time. Everything is downloadable as JSON, CSV, or a zipped archive of plain text files. [0] https://developers.write.as/docs/api/ https://developers.write.as/docs/api/ [1] https://github.com/writefreely/hugo-importer https://github.com/writefreely/hugo-importer
RNCTX 5y ago
So is the business model of their company to turn every random user into a content generator which pays them to give away content? Because it seems that if the author can't be identified, the ownership of the content is implied to be the publisher of this codebase.
- ta988 5y ago
  From what I see, they charge you for hosting if you don't do it yourself. $4/mo for a blog. It seems that you can have themes and newsletters and other stuff that are not available in the free version. I'm still looking at what the self-hosted version can do.
  - ta988 5y ago
    It doesn't seem that the self-hosted version has any restrictions. And it doesn't seem hard to setup either. Optional mysql, reverse proxy or just give it the certificates and you're ready.
x4e 5y ago
I self-hosted a writefreely instance for a while but I found many features were proprietary and only available in the paid managed hosting (write.as). All features that I didn’t need that much and could workaround however it just made me feel quite dissatisfied with the project. People self hosting are not likely to be the same people who would pay for managed hosting so it makes no sense to lock features off for them. I forked the codebase and added stuff myself for a while because even after funnelling users to their commercial option they still do hardly any development, see how long this one line PR I made took to be merged: https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/429 https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/429. Now I just have a simple python script that makes everything I need in a blog [0] (markdown, resources, mathjax, atom feed and all completely static with no JS). There is no need to have complicated blog services, just compile static html. [0]: https://github.com/x4e/Blog/blob/master/make.py https://github.com/x4e/Blog/blob/master/make.py
- thebaer 5y ago
  Just curious, which features did you want that were proprietary at the time? The primary reasons for including certain features in Write.as but not in WriteFreely are when they're very early (it's easier to deploy and fix on a single hosted service), or when they involve a ton of external dependencies. My thinking on the latter is that I'd rather leave a feature out than leave admins with a poor experience, vendor lock-in, lacking documentation, etc. But maybe that's the wrong way to think about it. Either way, "locking features off" isn't a business strategy here, but just a matter of practicality as a very small open source project. As I mentioned elsewhere, we plan to bring things into parity for v1.0. And we very much welcome contributors -- even if it's just reviewing pull requests!
  - eitland 5y ago
    As you see below somewhere I say nice about you but I must also say there are some things I'd really want to see fixed soon: - make inclusion of photos, including from snap.as kind of usable (yes, I'm a paying customer) - fix statistics On the bright side I can now see who follows me, instead of just a number like it was for a long time.
potamic 5y ago
It's a really clean design, exactly how I would like to read content! I'm new to this federation idea, curious how blog pages work in this world. Is there something of an open protocol for publishing/consuming content so that I can use any provider or client I like, or how does it work?
- riffic 5y ago
  People with Mastodon accounts for instance can follow accounts on your WriteFreely instance. This is powered by the ActivityPub protocol, a W3C recommendation.
- Kye 5y ago
  Systems that federate over ActivityPub (AP) produce JSON blobs that other systems choose how to present. For example: an AP blog might show a blog post and comments like a traditional blog, while Mastodon could show the same data as a toot and replies to it.
dangom 5y ago
Shameless plug: back in the day I put together an Emacs package to push org-files directly to an writefreely instance. Literally 0 friction to start a blog. https://github.com/dangom/writefreely.el https://github.com/dangom/writefreely.el
- wut42 5y ago
  Nice, thanks! But I wouldn't say "0 friction" as you need to know emacs, org-mode, how to manage a server, and install WriteFreely :)
  - dangom 5y ago
    Haha, sure. But you don't need to install writefreely, you can publish anonymously to write.as, the "canonical" writefreely instance.
captn3m0 5y ago
Does WriteFreely now support hosting multiple sites on a single instance?
- wakest 5y ago
  yes
  - captn3m0 5y ago
    Just took a look at the docs, looks neat!
Jnr 5y ago
I really enjoy Wordpress for writing freely. Ever since Docker-compose, automatic updates and Gutenberg editor became available, I haven’t even needed to look at alternatives.
- wakest 5y ago
  you can also use wordpress with the fediverse too, there is a good plugin that lets you syndicate your posts out and let the rest of the fediverse follow/comment/etc from where they already are
hsn915 5y ago
I think writing on the internet is not a problem. It's easy to build a blog from a static site generator. There are tons of them these days. IMO the actual problem is you want to interact with the people reading what you write. Without a commenting system, the writing/publishing platform loses a lot of its potential value. The other problem like other people mentioned is discovery. Let's take YouTube for an example. In theory you can make videos and publish them on your own self-hosted website. But if you post the videos to youtube, you get a bigger chance of people finding out about you. So, if you want to empower a distributed network of personal websites, you also need a powerful "indexing" engine that continuously fetches and catalogues all the new content being published by all these people for easy discovery. The other problem is discontinuity between discovery mode and consumption mode. On YouTube, when you find a video you like, you still see related or recommended videos on the side. If you have a video index that tries to work like YouTube but redirects to different websites where videos are actually hosted, you get this discontinuity where, once the user visits the actual website where the content is hosted, they are no longer discovering new things on the indexing service.
- alexwennerberg 5y ago
  > IMO the actual problem is you want to interact with the people reading what you write. What about email? I.e. put together a mailing list for your blog and host the archives online?
  - hsn915 5y ago
    People don't like mailing lists for conversations. email subscription is useful - but not as a discussion board.
    - alexwennerberg 5y ago
      I agree, but I think this is largely because the tooling and ecosystem around it isn’t great.
- SalimoS 5y ago
  > So, if you want to empower a distributed network of personal websites, you also need a powerful "indexing" engine that continuously fetches and catalogues all the new content being published by all these people for easy discovery Isn’t this just rss with extra steps ? If I’m interested in content I will most likely subscribe to his RSS feeds
digitalsushi 5y ago
Naive question, not trying to lead somewhere. Back in the day we'd do a ./configure && make install on some server and we'd be up and running to kick the tires. It's been a long time since I have done this - my career went off in other directions - and so I am curious if web app authors are providing automatic serverless deploy plans that are just as easy to run as that ./configure experience from much earlier. (I know configure scripts still exist, but they are largely satisfied by OS providers for users like me)
jedberg 5y ago
Almost every self hosted blogging platform I've seen requires you to have a server to run it on 24/7, and I don't get it. This is the perfect use case for FaaS -- a personal site that maybe gets a few thousand hits a month, and maybe has that one post that goes viral and gets 100,000 hits in a day. I love all the features and the nice aesthetic of all these things, but it seems silly to pay even $5/mo for a 24/7 server when I can host it for free on AWS Lambda if the software had been written that way. Not to mention it would make it more accessible to non-tech folks if you can just give them a button to click that sets up a Cloudformation for them or something. Sadly I don't have the time (not design skills) to write one myself.
- cpach 5y ago
  Very interesting idea. If you or anyone else feel like expanding upon that idea and do a ”back-of-the-napkin” diagram or something, it would be very interesting to see that! (I started dipping my toes into FaaS[0] literally yesterday, so I must admit I can’t yet imagine how one would actually host a blogging service in such an environment.) [0] Function as a service
  - jedberg 5y ago
    It's pretty straightforward actually. What does a blog do? - Show content to users - Allow the admin to update content So you'd really just need three functions and some storage: - A function that takes a request for content and shows a web page - A function that authenticates the admin and shows them an admin page - A function that takes their admin update request and writes to storage. The storage could be S3, of if you want to get fancy you could use DynamoDB so that you can do things like tags and have blog pages that show each tag (or just regenerate them and put them on S3 every time you make a update with a new tag).
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  I don't think there is any significant technical challenges to running this on lambda. You'd just need some sort of workflow to update the lambda image with each blog update. A big downside to hosting on AWS though is if your site gets HN'ed, you could have a hefty bill on your hands.
throwawayswede 5y ago
Don't bother with any of this crap. Self-host your shit.
- shopkins 5y ago
  This is literally a way to "self-host your shit."
  - throwawayswede 5y ago
    Did you even bother to read other comments before getting triggered? > I self-hosted a writefreely instance for a while but I found many features were proprietary and only available in the paid managed hosting (write.as). All features that I didn’t need that much and could workaround however it just made me feel quite dissatisfied with the project.
throwawaysea 5y ago
There’s also Ghost, which similarly has an open source offering and a paid hosting service: https://ghost.org/about/ https://ghost.org/about/ Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17809447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17809447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21322712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21322712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228
imwillofficial 5y ago
My obligatory “I signed up for write freely to support the project. Forgot my password and couldn’t get it reset (it was a manual process). After a few months I tried to cancel. Developer completely unresponsive for a year, I kept getting charged each month. My bank quizzically refunded some fees, but not others. Love the idea, but developer responsiveness needs work if I can’t even reset my password or cancel service. Best of luck to this project!
- thebaer 5y ago
  Hey, really sorry this happened to you, we obviously dropped the ball there. If this still needs to be resolved, can you email me again: matt [at] write.as with your username, or a receipt number, etc. so we can get that squared away? Happy to issue refunds for those months when you weren't able to access your account.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    It’s all settled now, my bank eventually closed (Simple Bank) and I stopped getting charged. I appreciate the follow up!
conor_f 5y ago
I've recently been focusing on self hosting what I can, and while looking for a simple straightforward, federated blogging platform I came across this and Plume as options. After a lot of effort trying to install Plume, I tried Writefreely and had just as many issues. I persevered and made a PR or two to try minorly improve the self hosting setup with my limited skills but it was a heavy amount of work compared to many other self hosted platforms. I never managed to get federation working (which I presume is down to a misconfiguration on my part), images not being hostable seems like a bizarre feature to leave out as they are present on almost all blogs, and most recently I really dislike the thought process behind the micropayments from their blog about six months ago [0]. I would also echo what x4e said in their comment [1]. I stand corrected on any of these issues as I am very inexperienced with self hosting and it was about a year ago and projects do change, but from my experience, Writefreely wasn't what it said on the tin. [0]: https://write.as/blog/monetize-your-writing-with-micropayments https://write.as/blog/monetize-your-writing-with-micropaymen... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27801870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27801870
- thebaer 5y ago
  I appreciate the feedback. Our setup does require some basic sysadmin knowledge... But did you try installing from source or one of our binaries [0]? What kind of federation issues did you run into? We're always happy to help with installation and configuration issues on our forum, by the way [1]. And out of curiosity, what didn't you like about our thought process on micropayments? [0] https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/releases https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/releases [1] https://discuss.write.as/c/writefreely/15 https://discuss.write.as/c/writefreely/15

273 points by btdmaster 5y ago

Been looking to start blogging, I feel it's making a slow comeback (along with RSS!) this looks great.

This seems pretty cool. I've been interested in getting into blogging and moving away from WordPress. I checked out Jekyll and it's a pain to add media to a post so this looks like a great alternative. It would be nice if there was an online demo you could try out before setting it up.

btdmaster 5y ago
Check out one of the public instances: https://writefreely.org/instances https://writefreely.org/instances.
mercacona 5y ago
It’s the engine backing https://write.as https://write.as if you wanna try.
thebaer 5y ago
Besides everything else mentioned, you can create an account on our official demo instance here: https://pencil.writefree.ly/invite/NB8Ycb https://pencil.writefree.ly/invite/NB8Ycb
BossingAround 5y ago
Hugo offers pretty much every static site feature that writefreely does for free. Media on a page isn't an issue with Hugo websites.
- yoz-y 5y ago
  One thing a bit annoying with Hugo is that somewhere down the line of updates they made breaking changes to templates. Now, since it’s written in go and all statically linked, I’ve just put the Linux and macOS binaries of the version that worked for me in my repo and never update. Good thing about a stagnant platform is that one can spend less time tinkering with it.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

What is the point of "medium" other than to hold your content hostage and force users to pay a subscription ? Writefreely instead is about sharing. A full 360 from medium.

thebaer 5y ago

Hi! I'm the lead developer of WriteFreely -- happy to answer any questions you have! For a little update on where the project is today: we just put out our last update [0] before v1.0, which we're aiming to release later this year. In 1.0, among other things, you'll find many features we've been piloting on our hosted service (Write.as), including newsletters, social media cross-posting, eBook export, etc. We're also experimenting with new, non-core features, like photo hosting [1] and comments [2]. Our core focus has always been on just writing, which is why many features (including ones afforded by ActivityPub) have been left out. So we're trying to see what's possible when we keep a clean, simple core with optional "rooms" of functionality around it. If you want to keep up with us, you should see more developments around this before the end of the year, too. [0] https://blog.writefreely.org/version-0-13 https://blog.writefreely.org/version-0-13 [1] https://snap.as https://snap.as [2] https://remark.as https://remark.as

nickjj 5y ago
Hi, If you ever wanted to hop on my podcast to talk about how you've built and deployed things let me know. We could chat about your tech stack, lessons learned, etc.. The podcast is at: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/ https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/ and if you want to become a guest there's a "become a guest" button on the right top to get the ball rolling. Currently inching up on 100 episodes.
- thebaer 5y ago
  Sounds awesome! Would love to be a part of it. I'll reach out soon!
  - nickjj 5y ago
    Awesome, I'll keep an eye out for your submission. Side note: if anyone else happens to read this, you're welcome to submit your site / app too. The more the merrier!

keb_ 5y ago

I love Write.as, but one little nitpick that has always bothered me is the font loading flicker, like it takes a second on page load to load the custom font. Not sure if it's the browsers I'm using or uBlock but it always happens. Is there a way to disable the custom font?

btdmaster 5y ago
You can block remote fonts with uBO in its per-site menu, left of the disable JS button.
- keb_ 5y ago
  Weird, but that setting seemed to not work. What did work was disabling JavaScript, which is a bit puzzling -- why is JS loading the fonts?

bovermyer 5y ago

Very happy to have contributed to this project. Of all the blog engines out there, it is by far my favorite.

zamalek 5y ago

I have been using it, and there's a liberating lack of bullshit. I love that there's no comments/spam/trolls. It took me like 15min to get it going on a droplet. What a fantastically simple project.

throwawaysea 5y ago
Is there a good guide on how to do this step by step? I don’t mind learning and getting my hands dirty but I also fear things like getting security right.
- zamalek 5y ago
  I did their production config instructions, but remember to disable the engine version header (some random tutorial [1]). I then used Cloudflare as a proxy, directly to the IP. You can get the IP certificate from CF. I am only paying for a droplet. [1]: https://seoneurons.com/hide-nginx-server-version-header/ https://seoneurons.com/hide-nginx-server-version-header/
BossingAround 5y ago
> It took me like 15min to get it going on a droplet Don't know much about writefreely in general, but static website hosting is free with Github Pages (or extremely cheap on something like S3). You mentioning a droplet sounds you're running a full VM to host a static site, which sounds too expensive if that's the only use case for the VM.

phantom_oracle 5y ago

How do you integrate this tool into an existing blog? I like the idea of ActivityPub followers but shifting all the contents over from an existing static site sounds like a wasteful exercise

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pmlnr 5y ago
Integrate your existing blog with https://fed.brid.gy/ https://fed.brid.gy/ instead.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

eitland 5y ago

Been using it for a while. Refreshingly simple business model. They don't even hound you for an email address.

elyseum 5y ago

Interesting promise. Will give it a try. Does anybody known similar tools, written in a different language (no expertise on Go)?

wakest 5y ago
The other main ActivityPub blogging centric software is Plume https://joinplu.me https://joinplu.me, oh and there are some plugins for Wordpress

agnosticmantis 5y ago

This looks very beautiful. I wonder if it supports math typesetting (via latex) out of the box or if there are plug-ins for that.

ta988 5y ago
Yes there seem to be a MathJax support that you just have to enable according to what I see in the source and in the forums. It is apparently not in the documentation.

quaintdev 5y ago

> There are enough places on the web built to hog your attention; keep you scrolling and checking your feed, hoping for a new like or retweet. WriteFreely gives you the space to think for yourself again, free from alerts, feeds, and the distractions of classic social media. I think within a decade we all are going to come back to blog/personal sites and ditch social media. The easier we make people to set up self hosted blogs, faster will be the switch. I know general public does not give a shit about this but a man can hope.

DerekBickerton 5y ago
> ditch social media Personally I have made my addiction to social media work for me. I make full use of curated feeds, and make sure my feed has a good signal to noise ratio. The ADs are annoying, but I would rather trade my data for them. I can't afford $5.00 per month, and happily let ADs subsidize these companies (Twitter, Facebook etc).
- _dibly 5y ago
  >I make full use of curated feeds, and make sure my feed has a good signal to noise ratio. The ADs are annoying, but I would rather trade my data for them. I just don't think that is a sustainable position with the way things are moving. If anything, this is the direction social media is moving away from. Feeds are increasingly curated by the user's browsing behaviors and and not their conscious decisions. Data is only becoming more valuable as more people make the choice to trade theirs away with no real thought about the long-term effects of colossal repositories of complex user data and very little regulation in place to restrict their use. Not to say that it isn't possible to make social media work for you. I just continue to wonder what the threshold is where users won't be comfortable leveraging their personal data for convenience.
armchairhacker 5y ago
The problem with personal sites is that they're hard to discover. Case in point: there are a lot of personal sites out there right now (and many more which existed but are now offline), that only a few people even know exist. We have platforms which make it easy to set up self-posted blogs, we just need a way to make them more discoverable. Which is what Twitter, Reddit, and especially Medium (which I imagine WriteFreely was inspired by) had in mind. This is something I said before: the reason existing platforms dominate the market is because they have the most users. Most people create blogs or any other kind of content because they want to be heard.

Popegaf 5y ago

Is it possible to import stuff from other blogs e.g move from WordPress to WriteFreely using a WordPress export? And is it possible to export from WriteFreely should one want to migrate away from it?

thebaer 5y ago
There isn't a direct way to import from WordPress so far, but there is an open API [0] you could use to move your blog. That's the tack we took for our Hugo import tool [1]: just taking posts from a previous blog, parsing out the metadata, and publishing via the API. For WordPress, you'd also just want to get the posts converted to Markdown for the best experience in WF. As for exporting your content, yes you can do that at any time. Everything is downloadable as JSON, CSV, or a zipped archive of plain text files. [0] https://developers.write.as/docs/api/ https://developers.write.as/docs/api/ [1] https://github.com/writefreely/hugo-importer https://github.com/writefreely/hugo-importer

RNCTX 5y ago

So is the business model of their company to turn every random user into a content generator which pays them to give away content? Because it seems that if the author can't be identified, the ownership of the content is implied to be the publisher of this codebase.

ta988 5y ago
From what I see, they charge you for hosting if you don't do it yourself. $4/mo for a blog. It seems that you can have themes and newsletters and other stuff that are not available in the free version. I'm still looking at what the self-hosted version can do.
- ta988 5y ago
  It doesn't seem that the self-hosted version has any restrictions. And it doesn't seem hard to setup either. Optional mysql, reverse proxy or just give it the certificates and you're ready.

x4e 5y ago

I self-hosted a writefreely instance for a while but I found many features were proprietary and only available in the paid managed hosting (write.as). All features that I didn’t need that much and could workaround however it just made me feel quite dissatisfied with the project. People self hosting are not likely to be the same people who would pay for managed hosting so it makes no sense to lock features off for them. I forked the codebase and added stuff myself for a while because even after funnelling users to their commercial option they still do hardly any development, see how long this one line PR I made took to be merged: https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/429 https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/429. Now I just have a simple python script that makes everything I need in a blog [0] (markdown, resources, mathjax, atom feed and all completely static with no JS). There is no need to have complicated blog services, just compile static html. [0]: https://github.com/x4e/Blog/blob/master/make.py https://github.com/x4e/Blog/blob/master/make.py

thebaer 5y ago
Just curious, which features did you want that were proprietary at the time? The primary reasons for including certain features in Write.as but not in WriteFreely are when they're very early (it's easier to deploy and fix on a single hosted service), or when they involve a ton of external dependencies. My thinking on the latter is that I'd rather leave a feature out than leave admins with a poor experience, vendor lock-in, lacking documentation, etc. But maybe that's the wrong way to think about it. Either way, "locking features off" isn't a business strategy here, but just a matter of practicality as a very small open source project. As I mentioned elsewhere, we plan to bring things into parity for v1.0. And we very much welcome contributors -- even if it's just reviewing pull requests!
- eitland 5y ago
  As you see below somewhere I say nice about you but I must also say there are some things I'd really want to see fixed soon: - make inclusion of photos, including from snap.as kind of usable (yes, I'm a paying customer) - fix statistics On the bright side I can now see who follows me, instead of just a number like it was for a long time.

potamic 5y ago

It's a really clean design, exactly how I would like to read content! I'm new to this federation idea, curious how blog pages work in this world. Is there something of an open protocol for publishing/consuming content so that I can use any provider or client I like, or how does it work?

riffic 5y ago
People with Mastodon accounts for instance can follow accounts on your WriteFreely instance. This is powered by the ActivityPub protocol, a W3C recommendation.
Kye 5y ago
Systems that federate over ActivityPub (AP) produce JSON blobs that other systems choose how to present. For example: an AP blog might show a blog post and comments like a traditional blog, while Mastodon could show the same data as a toot and replies to it.

dangom 5y ago

Shameless plug: back in the day I put together an Emacs package to push org-files directly to an writefreely instance. Literally 0 friction to start a blog. https://github.com/dangom/writefreely.el https://github.com/dangom/writefreely.el

wut42 5y ago
Nice, thanks! But I wouldn't say "0 friction" as you need to know emacs, org-mode, how to manage a server, and install WriteFreely :)
- dangom 5y ago
  Haha, sure. But you don't need to install writefreely, you can publish anonymously to write.as, the "canonical" writefreely instance.

captn3m0 5y ago

Does WriteFreely now support hosting multiple sites on a single instance?

wakest 5y ago
yes
- captn3m0 5y ago
  Just took a look at the docs, looks neat!

Jnr 5y ago

I really enjoy Wordpress for writing freely. Ever since Docker-compose, automatic updates and Gutenberg editor became available, I haven’t even needed to look at alternatives.

wakest 5y ago
you can also use wordpress with the fediverse too, there is a good plugin that lets you syndicate your posts out and let the rest of the fediverse follow/comment/etc from where they already are

hsn915 5y ago

I think writing on the internet is not a problem. It's easy to build a blog from a static site generator. There are tons of them these days. IMO the actual problem is you want to interact with the people reading what you write. Without a commenting system, the writing/publishing platform loses a lot of its potential value. The other problem like other people mentioned is discovery. Let's take YouTube for an example. In theory you can make videos and publish them on your own self-hosted website. But if you post the videos to youtube, you get a bigger chance of people finding out about you. So, if you want to empower a distributed network of personal websites, you also need a powerful "indexing" engine that continuously fetches and catalogues all the new content being published by all these people for easy discovery. The other problem is discontinuity between discovery mode and consumption mode. On YouTube, when you find a video you like, you still see related or recommended videos on the side. If you have a video index that tries to work like YouTube but redirects to different websites where videos are actually hosted, you get this discontinuity where, once the user visits the actual website where the content is hosted, they are no longer discovering new things on the indexing service.

alexwennerberg 5y ago
> IMO the actual problem is you want to interact with the people reading what you write. What about email? I.e. put together a mailing list for your blog and host the archives online?
- hsn915 5y ago
  People don't like mailing lists for conversations. email subscription is useful - but not as a discussion board.
  - alexwennerberg 5y ago
    I agree, but I think this is largely because the tooling and ecosystem around it isn’t great.
SalimoS 5y ago
> So, if you want to empower a distributed network of personal websites, you also need a powerful "indexing" engine that continuously fetches and catalogues all the new content being published by all these people for easy discovery Isn’t this just rss with extra steps ? If I’m interested in content I will most likely subscribe to his RSS feeds

digitalsushi 5y ago

Naive question, not trying to lead somewhere. Back in the day we'd do a ./configure && make install on some server and we'd be up and running to kick the tires. It's been a long time since I have done this - my career went off in other directions - and so I am curious if web app authors are providing automatic serverless deploy plans that are just as easy to run as that ./configure experience from much earlier. (I know configure scripts still exist, but they are largely satisfied by OS providers for users like me)

jedberg 5y ago

Almost every self hosted blogging platform I've seen requires you to have a server to run it on 24/7, and I don't get it. This is the perfect use case for FaaS -- a personal site that maybe gets a few thousand hits a month, and maybe has that one post that goes viral and gets 100,000 hits in a day. I love all the features and the nice aesthetic of all these things, but it seems silly to pay even $5/mo for a 24/7 server when I can host it for free on AWS Lambda if the software had been written that way. Not to mention it would make it more accessible to non-tech folks if you can just give them a button to click that sets up a Cloudformation for them or something. Sadly I don't have the time (not design skills) to write one myself.

cpach 5y ago
Very interesting idea. If you or anyone else feel like expanding upon that idea and do a ”back-of-the-napkin” diagram or something, it would be very interesting to see that! (I started dipping my toes into FaaS[0] literally yesterday, so I must admit I can’t yet imagine how one would actually host a blogging service in such an environment.) [0] Function as a service
- jedberg 5y ago
  It's pretty straightforward actually. What does a blog do? - Show content to users - Allow the admin to update content So you'd really just need three functions and some storage: - A function that takes a request for content and shows a web page - A function that authenticates the admin and shows them an admin page - A function that takes their admin update request and writes to storage. The storage could be S3, of if you want to get fancy you could use DynamoDB so that you can do things like tags and have blog pages that show each tag (or just regenerate them and put them on S3 every time you make a update with a new tag).
indigodaddy 5y ago
I don't think there is any significant technical challenges to running this on lambda. You'd just need some sort of workflow to update the lambda image with each blog update. A big downside to hosting on AWS though is if your site gets HN'ed, you could have a hefty bill on your hands.

throwawayswede 5y ago

Don't bother with any of this crap. Self-host your shit.

shopkins 5y ago
This is literally a way to "self-host your shit."
- throwawayswede 5y ago
  Did you even bother to read other comments before getting triggered? > I self-hosted a writefreely instance for a while but I found many features were proprietary and only available in the paid managed hosting (write.as). All features that I didn’t need that much and could workaround however it just made me feel quite dissatisfied with the project.

throwawaysea 5y ago

There’s also Ghost, which similarly has an open source offering and a paid hosting service: https://ghost.org/about/ https://ghost.org/about/ Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17809447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17809447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21322712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21322712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228

imwillofficial 5y ago

My obligatory “I signed up for write freely to support the project. Forgot my password and couldn’t get it reset (it was a manual process). After a few months I tried to cancel. Developer completely unresponsive for a year, I kept getting charged each month. My bank quizzically refunded some fees, but not others. Love the idea, but developer responsiveness needs work if I can’t even reset my password or cancel service. Best of luck to this project!

thebaer 5y ago
Hey, really sorry this happened to you, we obviously dropped the ball there. If this still needs to be resolved, can you email me again: matt [at] write.as with your username, or a receipt number, etc. so we can get that squared away? Happy to issue refunds for those months when you weren't able to access your account.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  It’s all settled now, my bank eventually closed (Simple Bank) and I stopped getting charged. I appreciate the follow up!

conor_f 5y ago

I've recently been focusing on self hosting what I can, and while looking for a simple straightforward, federated blogging platform I came across this and Plume as options. After a lot of effort trying to install Plume, I tried Writefreely and had just as many issues. I persevered and made a PR or two to try minorly improve the self hosting setup with my limited skills but it was a heavy amount of work compared to many other self hosted platforms. I never managed to get federation working (which I presume is down to a misconfiguration on my part), images not being hostable seems like a bizarre feature to leave out as they are present on almost all blogs, and most recently I really dislike the thought process behind the micropayments from their blog about six months ago [0]. I would also echo what x4e said in their comment [1]. I stand corrected on any of these issues as I am very inexperienced with self hosting and it was about a year ago and projects do change, but from my experience, Writefreely wasn't what it said on the tin. [0]: https://write.as/blog/monetize-your-writing-with-micropayments https://write.as/blog/monetize-your-writing-with-micropaymen... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27801870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27801870

thebaer 5y ago
I appreciate the feedback. Our setup does require some basic sysadmin knowledge... But did you try installing from source or one of our binaries [0]? What kind of federation issues did you run into? We're always happy to help with installation and configuration issues on our forum, by the way [1]. And out of curiosity, what didn't you like about our thought process on micropayments? [0] https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/releases https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/releases [1] https://discuss.write.as/c/writefreely/15 https://discuss.write.as/c/writefreely/15