Aral Balkan
#Medium – the proprietary, #SiliconValley equivalent of free and open #fediverse app #WriteFreely, by the #billionnaire co-founder of #Twitter – now has a #Mastodon server. It might be a good time to take a look at WriteFreely (https://writefreely.org/) and their hosted services Write.as (https://write.as/) and WriteFreely Host (https://writefreely.host/) and consider owning your own #blog on the fediverse instead of contributing to the walled gardens of the folks who bequeathed you Twitter. 65 comments
Paranoid Factoid
The WordPress ActivityPub plug-in allows for following via the network. But you can't embed text objects (like a blog post) in a Mastodon post, which should be possible. I don't know if WriteFreely allows for this. WriteFreely is still a toy. WordPress has decades of production service. And it's FOSS. Medium and Substack can go screw, however.
Szilvia
@ParanoidFactoid @zleap @aral 
Pixelcode 🇺🇦
@aral I'm not into the topic but perhaps Medium are planning to open up the platform? Like integrating ActivityPub? That would be an awesome move in my opinion. Even hosting their own Mastodon server is already a great signal!
robin
@pixelcode 
💙💛:~/eu/pl/priv$:idle:
@pixelcode @aral Integrating #Medium with #ActivityPub? That is, how ? Publishing an article from Medium on the #fediverse only for people there to see a #paywall as they try to read the whole thing ?
💙💛:~/eu/pl/priv$:idle:
@pixelcode @aral BTW there is an #alternative #frontend to the #medium (which bypasses the #paywall :-) ) : https://git.sr.ht/~edwardloveall/scribe/tree/main/docs/instances.md
Martin Kelly
@miklo yep and you can set privacy.redirect to rewrite all medium URLs to use it. Which I just did after fully 1/3 of my recommendations was from clickbait drivel I had already blocked https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect 
Willow "Wolveric" Catkin
@pixelcode Yep, there was a thread in response to a post by Mediums CEO, where he noted that they were looking into ActivityPub integration for Medium itself, 
PJ Coffey
The only non-invite only general server is rant.li about which there is no information. Being a mere greenbeard of the #Fedi rather than total novice, I would appreciate knowing more about the person who would be volunteering to host my content and mailing list which they "reserve the right to discontinue without notice at any time."
Martin Kelly
@Homebrewandhacking there are far, far more than that. https://the-federation.info/platform/40 or use the hosting service for $4/mo and have your own
PJ Coffey
@potatogunkelly I clicked the link and that's what I saw. As for "host your own", would it actually shock you to learn that not everyone on Mastodon is up to the technical challenges of running a server? I'm fine with paying for a service. I contribute towards running costs on my instance. So, maybe be less snotty and assume it's easy? Honestly? Makes you come across as patronising, smug and rather rude. I hope that wasn't your intention but that's my perception of you right now 
Dawid Rejowski
Blogs are text. The basic type of computer data. We have technologies like WWW hosts (Wordpress, WriteFreely and whole ActivityPub space), Gemini, IPFS, BitTorrent, Git, SFTP; rich formats like Markdown, office documents, PDFs; so many programs to write in those formats... Computers were created from the beggining to write, process and distribute text. Using bloated centralized web service for sharing formatted text is really saying something about our current "smart" devices and habits.
💙💛:~/eu/pl/priv$:idle:
@aral Not to mention the fact that millions of people who run blogs e.g. on #wordpress are just one click (#plugin inclusion) away from integration with #fediverse. 
jill :fediverse:
@aral totally off topic. But does someone know why I see this toot in my home feed via the Mastodon app but it won`t show on home on the web interface?
Werwolf :gnu:
@aral this is scary. Medium has been centralizing the previously decentralized blog ecosystem for years.
Jeannie McGeehan
@aral writing.exchange is a mastodon instance run by the founder of write.as and writefreely
Jeannie McGeehan
@rose_c I am not. This account is on social.lol and my micro.blog ActivityPub is at @jeannie@retrodivergent.com
Jeannie McGeehan
@rose_c social.lol is an instance for members of the omg.lol community. An account at https://omg.lol is required to have an account on the instance. An omg.lol account includes a profile page, forwarded email address, DNS management, status log, weblog, IRC, Discord, the social.lol Mastodon instance, and more to come for $20/yr. It is a good community. Not a lot of shenanigans. The local timeline is pretty benevolent.
Rose C.
@jeannie@social.lol @jeannie@retrodivergent.com Looking for a good, non-hierarchical, extremely active and boisterous Mastodon instance to recommend for a friend. He has been in "Facebook jail" intermittently, and might be looking for another good, general purpose. social space. I'm not interested in instances with primarily adult content, or instances which are all about scheming to make money (crypto speculation, etc). There was so much of that on Telegram that I basically stopped using the service.
Martin Kelly
@aral the “algorithm” on medium is so stupid and broken that I just made the decision to end paid support and if I need anything there read it through a proxy. Just half my feed filled with drivel I have *already blocked* 
Sven Slootweg
Szilvia
@joepie91 @aral
Sven Slootweg
Niclas Hedhman
Forgive my ignorance; What is the benefit of WriteFreely vs any other wiki/wp/django instance that I may host myself?
Aral Balkan
@niclas It implements ActivityPub so folks can follow your posts from here. (There is also at least one plugin for Wordpress that adds ActivityPub support too.)
Martin Kelly
@niclas @aral it’s a good question: from my reading of it I think their proposition is it’s simplified, and publishing to it is made eaiser by the various app based front ends, and it’s designed to allow a group of writers to collaborate. It seems to be more specialised and focussed than WP but also more limited. Happy to be corrected by a more informed writer. 
Darnell Clayton :verified:
@niclas @aral #WordPress embrace of the #Fediverse is limited, even with the #ActivityPub plugin installed. You can broadcast but you can not “@” mention people. #WriteFreely however can “@” mention people, & fully supports the Fediverse. I use both (as well as #MicroBlog too), but WriteFreely is a better Fediverse option. 
Stefan
@aral generally would be a good Time to think about owning a Blog and not just have One registered somewhere. 😏 But I doubt that many People are willing to think about the implications of owning a Blog compared to just have One on a Plattform somewhere...🙄 Only be able to just think about the difference of #owning and #renting might be to much of a headache for many...
midnightstarr
@aral I am wondering how I can write on writefreely.org. I thought you needed to join an #instance to do that. I have to figure out how much it'll cost to own your own #blog on the #fediverse . 
Erik Uden :verified:
Strong agree! Would be awesome if Medium would allow their users to switch instances like the Fedi allows you to!
Ryuno-Ki
@aral I hope I can have a conversation with them this year to learn about the motivation and whether a change would be possible.
Aral Balkan
Ryuno-Ki
@aral But I had prior contact with @dajb . Well, I will move the conversation over to participate (as DM) I think. 
Doug Belshaw
@RyunoKi @aral @epilepticrabbit Yo, happy to have this conversation in the open. We have a number of clients using Medium to whose publications we submit posts. We use WordPress for our main site and https://learnwith.weareopen.coop but we've learned over the last seven years to be tech vegetarians rather than tech vegans. So, while we acknowledge problems with Medium, and have considered moving away from it, we're unlikely to be doing so any time soon.
Doug Belshaw
@RyunoKi @aral @epilepticrabbit Yeah, I do that personally, but what is good for individuals isn't always good for organisations. I appreciate your concern (and challenge) though! Another example would be our attempts to move from Google Workspace to Nextcloud last year. We tried at length to create useful workflows that wouldn't get in the way of our existing client work. But, despite helpful people showing us things, it just didn't fit.
Dallin
@aral I have had my own write.as blog for a couple years now. I love the minimalist approach to writing and reading. I also appreciate that both me and my readers aren't being exploited for financial gain, and that my writings are truly mine. We need to bring back blogging for the sake of blogging, not for financial gain. 
Karen E. Lund 💙💛
@aral I've had an account at Medium since before Mastodon existed. It has its good sides, but it goes through drastic changes too often. When it was new it was super easy: signed up with my Twitter account and started writing. Then they went to more paywalled articles. I haven't posted there in a long time. I looked at #WriteFreely and its ilk and I'm still curious, but for now I'll stick with my trusty WordPress blog that I've had since 2010. |
Gregory's Server
@aral
I use writefeely on my blog, works great, I have a post coming uo on how to embed posts in to the blog but edit the width and or height.
Thanks for the clarity on this btw, i thought the software was WriteAs.
It also seems pretty lightweight, so just works on a wider range of systems.