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.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/429" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/429</a>.<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/x4e/Blog/blob/master/make.py" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/x4e/Blog/blob/master/make.py</a>
Hi! I'm the lead developer of WriteFreely -- happy to answer any questions you have!<p>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.<p>We're also experimenting with new, non-core features, like photo hosting [1] and comments [2]. Our core focus has always been on <i>just writing</i>, 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.<p>[0] <a href="https://blog.writefreely.org/version-0-13" rel="nofollow">https://blog.writefreely.org/version-0-13</a><p>[1] <a href="https://snap.as" rel="nofollow">https://snap.as</a><p>[2] <a href="https://remark.as" rel="nofollow">https://remark.as</a>
> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>IMO the actual problem is you want to interact with the people reading what you write.<p>Without a commenting system, the writing/publishing platform loses a lot of its potential value.<p>The other problem like other people mentioned is discovery.<p>Let's take YouTube for an example.<p>In theory you can make videos and publish them on your own self-hosted website.<p>But if you post the videos to youtube, you get a bigger chance of people finding out about you.<p>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.<p>The other problem is discontinuity between discovery mode and consumption mode.<p>On YouTube, when you find a video you like, you still see related or recommended videos on the side.<p>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.
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. <a href="https://github.com/dangom/writefreely.el" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dangom/writefreely.el</a>
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.
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?
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.<p>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].<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://write.as/blog/monetize-your-writing-with-micropayments" rel="nofollow">https://write.as/blog/monetize-your-writing-with-micropaymen...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27801870" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27801870</a>
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.
It's a really clean design, exactly how I would like to read content!<p>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?
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.<p>This is the <i>perfect</i> 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.<p>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.<p>Sadly I don't have the time (not design skills) to write one myself.
Naive question, not trying to lead somewhere.<p>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.<p>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.<p>(I know configure scripts still exist, but they are largely satisfied by OS providers for users like me)
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.
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.<p>Best of luck to this project!
Is it possible to import stuff from other blogs e.g move from WordPress to WriteFreely using a WordPress export?<p>And is it possible to export from WriteFreely should one want to migrate away from it?
How do you integrate this tool into an existing blog?<p>I like the idea of ActivityPub followers but shifting all the contents over from an existing static site sounds like a wasteful exercise
There’s also Ghost, which similarly has an open source offering and a paid hosting service:
<a href="https://ghost.org/about/" rel="nofollow">https://ghost.org/about/</a><p>Previous discussions:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864731" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864731</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17809447" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17809447</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21322712" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21322712</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228</a>
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.
So is the business model of their company to turn every random user into a content generator which pays them to give away content?<p>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.