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Fediverse blogging options

I’m thinking of starting a blog to document a new project, having not blogged at all in probably about ten years at this point.

Was hoping someone who has already researched this stuff might be able to save me some time and give a tldr of the Fediverse-friendly platform options and their various pros and cons?

I know obviously WordPress has ActivityPub now, but am not sure exactly how well it works or how integrated it really is. Then there’s something called WriteFreely? Any others? Which do you prefer and why?

Really appreciate any pointers on this, and if this thread doesn’t turn up anything useful I promise to come back and do my own writeup after finding out the answers by myself.

Cheers!

sj_zero ,

WordPress is an option, so is writefreely, but so is just using a normal activitypub compatible platform and just increase your maximum character limit.

One thing with wordpress, make sure that you test it. I had one plug-in installed, and it claimed to be federating okay, but then I subscribed to my own feed and there was just nothing.

wiki_me ,

I have used friendica for a while, It’s pretty good has not character limit and RSS support, what turned me off is that it kept logging me off and i had to keep reenter the username and password (but maybe that was an instance specific problem or is already fixed).

PrimalHero ,
@PrimalHero@kbin.social avatar

Never happened to me. I am using the Nerdica instance.

Olap ,

Considered a gemini blog?

thegiddystitcher OP ,
@thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee avatar

Never heard of it and a search is just turning up crypto stuff, which is presumably not what you mean. Any chance of a link?

sj_zero ,

Gemini seems to be lighter version of HTTP and HTML for creating lightweight pages to view. I've seen some examples in the past.

Olap ,

github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini

It’s a bit different, and good for it

thegiddystitcher OP ,
@thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee avatar

Thanks! Swear I tried to find it, but there are apparently lots of things called Gemini out there 😅

kionite231 ,

Why not use prose.sh ? It doesn’t have AP though.

RegalPotoo ,
@RegalPotoo@lemmy.world avatar

That is pants-on-head insane and I love it

kalkulat ,
@kalkulat@lemmy.world avatar

Since I joined Lemmy a couple months back, one of the ideas I saw mentioned by the Lemmy people for blogging is this: start a Community and make yourself the only poster. You can invite people to be co-posters.

Yes, it has the limits of Lemmy posting. No making your own HTML or fancy backgrounds. But so far as -text- is concerned, the sky’s the limit.

thegiddystitcher OP ,
@thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee avatar

I thought about this, but without hosting my own instance it could be kind of annoying to export and backup.

Also considered a dedicated Mastodon account somewhere with a decent character limit, but I’m not sure what form their content export takes and whether it would be usable as a backup, more research needed there.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Die4Ever ,
@Die4Ever@programming.dev avatar

For backup and export, Lemmy does support RSS

thegiddystitcher OP ,
@thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee avatar

Fair point!

kalkulat ,
@kalkulat@lemmy.world avatar

could be kind of annoying to export and backup.

True that. Altho, if I were doing a blog, it’d be from stuff I wrote and then posted. (As for comments, how many are worth saving? Present company excepted of course.)

I thought about it too, but I really like HTML and CSS, and prefer a place I can use them. (I’d get interested if I could put anything I want inside a styled <div>…</div>, but sadly few places accomodate that. What they’re worried about I’m uncertain. I’m HOPING that such sites will arise in the Fediverse.)

Crul , (edited )

I’ve been hearing a lot about micro.blog recently. I haven’t tried it, or blogged in a long time.

AFAIK it supports ActivityPub.

I also found a post in one micro.blog with a few of alternatives:
TL;DR: Tumblr / Ghost / Blot / Mastodon / Write.as / Jekyll
book.micro.blog/alternative-platforms/
EDIT: Manton Reece is the founder and lead developer of micro.blog

thegiddystitcher OP ,
@thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee avatar

Thanks! Checking it out now

theJWPHTER88 ,
@theJWPHTER88@kbin.social avatar

I also have tried this rather minimalist jotting site called thoughts.page a while back. Moreso a personal repository of rambling, quick thoughts than one alike Tumblr or Cohost, yet it's generally seamless, most of the time.

isaac ,

@Crul @thegiddystitcher neat, I never realized that micro.blog could federate itself in addition to crossposting to mastodon.

mote ,

deleted_by_author

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    KinNectar ,
    @KinNectar@kbin.run avatar

    @mote Pretty cool. Out of curiosity do M.Bin or Lemmy have access to Plume posts?

    It's unfortunate that Plume is on pause from active development.
    @thegiddystitcher

    thegiddystitcher OP ,
    @thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee avatar

    Brilliant first link thank you, will take some time to go through that list for sure.

    I’d heard of Plume but there’s a notice on the project homepage saying they’re no longer in active development and to consider other options instead. Understandable, but definitely a shame.

    (also, yes absolutely, making sure I can export and transfer is a big priority for me too!)

    TheHolyChecksum ,

    I kinda like the markdown format paired with something like gitbook

    russjr08 ,
    @russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net avatar

    I myself haven’t done any major blogging in a while (Last year I started one and just used Hugo as a static-site-generator so no ActivityPub integration, but also ended up not really posting much), but from what I’ve always heard about WordPress the major “selling” point would be its vast ecosystem of plugins and themes.

    But that ecosystem is a double-edged sword, because there is tons of malware for WordPress that comes in the form of plugins (I know WP itself used to be exploited a lot in the past, not sure what its reputation on its own codebase is these days).

    I’ve not ever seen WriteFreely before, but I doubt its ecosystem is anywhere the size of WP. Whether that’s a roadblocker is of course only a decision you can make.

    I’m sorry that I didn’t have much more to offer as an answer, but hopefully it’s something at least!

    thegiddystitcher OP ,
    @thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee avatar

    No worries, appreciate the reply! I actually used to work as a WP developer so am fine setting that up if it ends up being the best option. But it’s been a while, so I just have no idea if it is.

    One thing I’ve turned up so far is that WriteFreely doesn’t seem to have any kind of commenting, so that’s a big downside for a blog.

    Hoping these aren’t the only two possibilities!

    DmMacniel ,

    the one thing that could hinder adoption of writeFreely for blogging is the lack of interactivity. Sure you can share via activitypub your posts but that was all you can do with it.

    ares35 ,
    @ares35@kbin.social avatar

    wordpress, and especially its plugins, is definitely still exploited, and targeted--heavily. mod_security works overtime here just from attempts to get at exploits in them. i don't even have a wordpress install, but that doesn't stop the tries--about half of all 'visitors' to my http servers are bots looking for one to exploit.

    if you're gonna wordpress, using them (their service, at wordpress.com) as your host is the best option, i think. let them deal with maintaining the server, software, security and stuff.

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