Show HN: WriteFreely – minimalist, federated blogging platform

To explain a little more behind this project: this started out as a simple, privacy-focused blogging platform called Write.as.<p>We&#x27;ve been running a Mastodon instance for a while and keeping up with the fediverse, so over the summer as it got much easier to implement, we added support for ActivityPub (the protocol behind Mastodon, PixelFed, Funkwhale, etc.) The fediverse has a strong FOSS culture, so after releasing AP support, I got to work on opening up the source for Write.as, and this is that final result.<p>Write.as has existed for 4 years, so the application code is very stable. But right now I&#x27;m getting the code to a place that works great in any configuration, installs easily, etc.

Sounds nice, but from a technical point of view... Why does it require a MySQL server?<p>I mean, yes, in general, MySQL has a higher performance than let&#x27;s say SQLite, but for most users, a properly handled SQLite file should deliver enough performance and the setup would be a lot easier and the overhead for small blogs would be much less.<p>But hey, it is still a young project and the general concept is looking great :-)

Have you done any research into how likely it is that a visitor from your demographic understands what &quot;federated&quot; means in this context? I ask because it&#x27;s part of the tagline, so if you don&#x27;t understand a key word in the product description you&#x27;re probably less likely to show interest in it.

I like this idea, and I&#x27;m eagerly waiting for this to catch on. Following up from this, I have 2 questions that keep me from entering the ecosystem:<p>- I don&#x27;t want to host complicated platforms, all I need is a statically generated blog. ActivityPub could be the way to let people comment on my posts without forfeiting the staticness. Is there any static blog system that integrates with ActivityPub?<p>- Are there any native desktop clients supporting ActivityPub (micro)blogging? I&#x27;ve set up a Mastodon account, and the only way I interact with it is posting via a command-line tool. It&#x27;s write-only for me because I can&#x27;t be hassled to use the browser, and it would be nice to change that.

Very cool to see more action in the ActivityPub space – one of the nice aspects of the federated model is that more users of the protocol have a function of accumulative user bases, not directly competing with one another.<p>So in the future when Plume (a W3C sponsored ActivityPub blogging platform) eventually launches, there&#x27;s no reason for WriteFreely and&#x2F;or Plume readers to really worry about which platform a given author uses!

Here&#x27;s an arch package, let me know (on the AUR, not here) if you notice anything wrong: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aur.archlinux.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;writefreely&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aur.archlinux.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;writefreely&#x2F;</a>

I like that there aren&#x27;t any &quot;likes&quot; or &quot;claps&quot; in WriteFreely. These always feel like argumentum ad populum mechanisms, designed to give a false sense of legitimacy to the content.

What does federated mean is this context?<p>(from a non-native English speaker)

Super awesome! I love the combo of actual open source + option of paid hosting (so those who wants can sponsor development AND avoid the hassle of running their own instance.)<p>(AGPL still scares me, but for a anything that doesn&#x27;t need API access it should be OK I guess?)

I&#x27;ve been looking for something to fill the void left by WordPress and Ghost in the self-hosted blog engine space.<p>This feels like it could do the job. I&#x27;ll look at it a little closer and see if it has good answers to my remaining questions.

I think the main problem to be solved for your audience is &quot;discoverability&quot;.<p>How (well) does this project solve it?

Write.as looks like a great platform. Just started exploring it. Would be great if there was a free plan for open source organizations and authors, so we could make use of the Snap.as service as well. That&#x27;d be enough to get me off of Medium.

This is probably exactly what I&#x27;ve been looking for as a blogging platform.<p>Definitely giving this a go.

The markup is documented at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guides.write.as&#x2F;writing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guides.write.as&#x2F;writing&#x2F;</a><p>That page was a bit hard to find.

I&#x27;ve been on the lookout for a lightweight blog engine for a while. This looks really nice!<p>Some suggestions for you:<p>- You might want to include a direct link to your sample editing experience from the page linked to above. I found it on your Github.<p>- I think it&#x27;s really important to support &quot;import image from clipboard&quot; - much like what Twitter does, for example. This is huge for usability, especially for folks who don&#x27;t want to &#x2F; don&#x27;t understand how to embed images into blog posts.

I just realized that you are the creator of the extension &quot;Make Medium Readable Again&quot; and would like to thank you so much for doing just that!

I set up a [docker image for writefreely](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.koehn.com&#x2F;docker&#x2F;writefreely" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.koehn.com&#x2F;docker&#x2F;writefreely</a>) and I love the clean and minimal-yet-everything-I-want UI. Any chance you&#x27;ll open source snap.as so I can self-host my images?

This is really neat! Will it be possible to use mastodon clients to post to the blog? That would be really awesome.

So is there somewhere I can see what exactly I&#x27;d be buying? $1 a month is well within my &quot;definitely worth convenience&quot; margin for migrating my static blog off Github pages, but I can&#x27;t tell what I&#x27;d actually be buying &#x2F; what the final product would look like?

This looks awesome!<p>Does anybody know if there&#x27;s something similar written in node or python? I&#x27;d love to build a similar project, but I&#x27;m confused by ActivityPub, and having some source code I can understand as an example would be really helpful.

ActivityPub is nice, but I would also like to see support for RSS and&#x2F;or Atom. Is that coming?<p>More generally, linking to a feature list might be useful. I can read the source, but not everyone can.

Is there an easy way to write Latex (e.g. with MathJax or Katex)? That is for me the most wanted feature of Medium (my intuition is they won&#x27;t be adding it any time soon).

Do you support microformats? I much prefer static content to ActivityPub, and honestly a lot of AP sites are less accessible than ones with RSS or micro formats.<p>The indie web approach to blogging (h-feed, webmentions, etc.) seems so much better than ActivityPub because it’s static content, web friendly, control of user identity, etc.

This totally confuses me.<p>So I am supposed to either sign up for $10 per month or trust somebody from the internet and run their executable on my machine?<p>Is there <i>anybody</i> here on HN that sees this as viable ways to get into blogging?<p>We <i>totally</i> need more and better ways to communicate online. But I just cannot see how this has any chance to take off.