Hey Lemmy - I’m trying to migrate my life as much as possible into open source tech and platforms. Fediverse networks like Mastodon and Pixelfed have provided good enough alternatives to their counterparts in Twitter and Instagram.
Is there such an equivalent for bloggers? I’m hoping to find a platform which is open source and supports self hosting but one that also provides a first-party instance that folks like me can make an account on and start publishing.
Effectively I’m looking for something that would provide a user experience similar to Medium or Substack but which wouldn’t lock me or the community into it. Something based on ActivityPub would be ideal.
Which runs this open-source software: https://writefreely.org/
Federates via ActivityPub.
Quick question, why not considering lemmy as your “blog” provider? If the “community” concept wouldn’t apply, perhaps creating your own “community” and becoming its “mod”, disabling posts from others except yours, wouldn’t that work? Lemmy already provide RSS feeds so others can follow/track your posts without any lemmy account, just like with any blog providing RSS/atom feeds, and you get “blog” feedback through lemmy, but the same applies to other blog providers, only the ones subscribed can provide feedback.
I was looking for an anonymous blogging mechanism with digital signature (not to identify the author but to verify its authenticity). Long story short, nothing out there seemed to really fit into what I was looking for, but among the suggestions lemmy was there as an option. You can avoid following anything, and looking into lemmy’s default from page, just use it to post and get feedback, forgetting about the social networks characteristics of lemmy, and make it work as your blog provider…
Not a bad suggestion but I’d consider that a pretty big compromise from what I’m looking for. Lemmy is designed as a content aggregator and I’d love a blog platform that makes it easy to post to Lemmy.
But I the what platforms like Medium and Substack do is they allow authors to build a following which allows the platform to build a community. I think Lemmy is just not what readers looking for publications to follow and really dive into the current are looking for.
What I’d like is something that you could put next to the homepage of Vox or the Associated Press, or ProPublica and feel like it looks just as much the part.
There’s writefreely, which might be what you’re looking for: https://writefreely.org/
There’s also Plume.
This is actually the closest to what I’m looking for. It is a bit more basic and stripped down than I’d like which is why I was asking for other options out there but it does offer the most basic functionality I’m asking for. Seems like there isn’t really support for images so that’s tough.
WordPress has an ActivityPub plugin. I suspect you already know about it.
Some months ago I read about something called “Ghost” which either already has or is planning to add ActivityPub integration.
Yes WordPress and Ghost would be great options if I wanted to host my own blog but I’m really looking for something I can just sign up for and start posting. Certainly something like that could be built on WordPress or Ghost but I’m not aware of any active instances that subject-agnostic platforms that are open to anyone to sign up and start reading, following, and posting content/authors.
Can’t you just go to WordPress.com, log in to their hosting, and install the plugin?
You don’t have to host your own WordPress
I self host ghost but they do offer a hosted version. It’s open source as well. They’re even working on activity pub integration!
A lot of folks recommending Ghost/WordPress I think are not understanding that a huge part of what I’m hoping to find is an active community of readers and writers that I may contribute to - I’m not looking to build a new destination site.
When you sign up on Medium.com you’re effectively given a free blog, but the real value they offer is that when you publish people who are on Medium.com who have never heard of you or your blog are recommended to read your articles. Every writer and reader on the platform is contributing to building a bigger network which makes it more valuable to everyone on it.
So two things
Activity pub is federation. So you’d be publishing to anywhere. Which as I said before, ghost is actively working on. They have a weekly mailer.
If your looking for an algorithm publishing centre, your going to find open source to be lacking. Generally speaking people who are looking for open source, don’t want the algorithmic feeding that your describing.
It doesn’t need to be algorithmic - like Lemmy and Mastodon and Pixelfed all let people follow, like, comment, up vote without algorithmically promoting content.
Again, ghost is actively working on this?
Is it going to be federated? I’m excited about this project.
I’d recommend you sign up for their mailer. I don’t have the link off hand but it shouldn’t be hard to find.
https://mov.im/ or another instance from https://join.movim.eu/
Runs the https://movim.eu/ open-source software.
Federates via XMPP.
Looks nice! XMPP is an interesting choice - wonder why they went with that.
Movim actually predates the creation of ActivityPub (and its precursor protocols) and back then XMPP was the popular choice, even Twitter experimented with running their service on an XMPP backend. But despite its age, Movim has kept up with the times quite well (as did XMPP in general).
Thank you that’s very interesting!
I usually write my pieces on Medium, so I will definitely be cross-publishing on some of these open-sourced platforms! Thanks Lemmy! Thanks OP for the question!
It’s not quite what you’re describing, but neocities probably has some blog templates you could use. I know there’s a webcomic artist who hosts their webcomic on neocities using a template
But it wouldn’t be a blogging specific platform, and I don’t expect there’d be any way to integrate with ActivityPub
Good luck in your search for the right platform!
What about WordPress? Do they still give free sites on WordPress.com?
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Hmm I was gonna suggest Mastodon. I always thought it allowed long-form writing similar to blog posts.
Someone else recommended Lemmy which like Mastodon would technically allow me to make text-based posts, but I think both fall very short of what a proper blogging platform would offer. I mean, I don’t think Mastodon even supports bold text.
Good articles have formatting, they have embedded images, they have citations, etc. A good publication has featured articles, they have topics and dropdown menus, they let you filter by author, etc.
What made Medium so great was that even though it was an open blogging platform, it made your work look so nice it felt like you got your writing featured in a real online publication like say the Huffington Post. Substack allows writers to build huge audiences and collect monthly subscriptions and make a blog that looks very personalized and legit.
Mastodon and Lemmy are more for sharing and aggregating content than managing original content.
Could use GitHub pages?
GitHub isn’t open source and I’m hoping for something that wouldn’t require git. Something your mom could make an account on and easily use would be ideal.
GitHub isn’t open source
This needs to be repeated for those in the back that still didn’t get the memo. You do not need to use Microsoft products, especially if your goal is free, open, and/or ethical software.
Personally most of my shit is still on GitHub but I’m thinking of migrating my future work to Codeberg which looks pretty nice, built on FOSS, and is community managed.
Codeberg also does have Pages.
Still uses Git, but yeah.
I’m hosting my blog (using Hugo) on codeberg. Here is a quick howto.
The easiest option to post online for free with zero coding skills is bearblog. I’ve used it before hosting my blog on codeberg. Bearblog let you publish and organize your blog using an insanely simple interface.There’s also the gemini option that’s worth considering. There are plenty of easy way to publish there. To cite a few: flounder, gemlog.blue, pollux.casa
Gemini has accessibility & bandwidth problem. HTML is a more accessible format & HTTP offers compression. Add that Gemtext has too few ‘elements’ for technical writing or even basic blogging & I don’t think it should be seriously considered for anything than a novel toy.
Not just community managed but operated as a non-profit. Codeberg won’t be scraping your deleted history to train their LLMs that they will sell back to you unlike Microsoft.
I am still convinced Git is overrated & overly complicated—and it is a shame all of the decent forges (even basic ones) are all built around Git.
