Hi everyone! I wanted to know what people thought of WriteFreely and Plume and which one you would recommend for a personal blog. Also, if you can, could you suggest some instances? From looking, I often come across instances with strangely little on their about page, and can’t work out who administrates them. Thanks!
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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”. It is a common, informal name for a federation of social network servers whose main purpose is microblogging, the sharing of short, public messages.
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Plume seems to be not actively maintained. (edit: I stand corrected, development is just slow)
Writefreely doesn’t have comments, but otherwise it works fine.
There are those who think not having comments is a selling point. ;)
It is. Without user interaction, it’s very difficult to get readers to come back and read subsequent articles.
I’m not sure I follow.
People can subscribe to my WriteFreely articles on Mastodon and can comment to their heart’s content. And since I too subscribe to them, I can see the comments. I just don’t see the need to host them myself on my blog.
I meant to say that allowing comments is a selling point or promotional aspect because it keeps users engaged and give them a reason to come back. They have a reason to revisit the blog, see new posts, and comment on old posts. Having run a message board for over 20 years, I’ve observed that when people visit without posting something back, the quicker traffic dries up to almost nothing.
With WriteFreely (and presumably Plume) people can follow via ActivityPub and comment on platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, and other such locations. On top of that Mastodon, for example, can be used to spread the link bringing new eyes to the blog, as well as permitting comments to be spread around even outside the usual circles of the blog’s readers.
I really don’t see what hosting comments directly brings to the table.
Why not just use RSS then?
I’m not sure how RSS helps in publishing a blog?
Any blogging platform supports RSS. So you can subscribe to them just fine.
What federation brings to the table is the back-channel, i.e. comments. If you don’t want that, you don’t want federation IMHO.
You can federate just fine. I’ve followed and boosted WriteFreely articles on Mastodon.
Yes I know. But you can also just post a link on Mastodon to the blog (via an RSS bot for example). If there are no federated comments, it is functionally identical.
(Just to mention it:) writefreely only publishes articles via Activitypub but does not have a way to view replies on an article (yet?).
Yes, exactly. Personally, I think Plume does it the right way here.
Could they not simply disable them?
Why disable when you can use something that doesn’t have them in the first place? It would be like buying a car that periodically sends electric shocks to the hands on the steering wheel, but which you can disable. Why would I buy the car in the first place when I can get one that doesn’t periodically send shocks to my hands ever.
Because that’s the one where they don’t include the steering wheel at all. Or the engine block. The shocks and the other parts are inextricably linked.
Actually, Plume is working in a new release (v0.70).
Plume is still active, just slowed down on the release circles.
afaik the plume team recommends using writefreely since their development is somewhat stagnant. at least thats what i read and started using writefreely (which i don’t quite like because you need to pay to participate in the fediverse on write.as).
The main branch actually compiles and is active. All it means is that you’re not going to see branched-off releases with neatly written up changelogs very often.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I prefer Plume.
I’m leaning somewhat towards plume, just because I can find some nice instances for it. What are your reasons behind preferring it?
These are my reasons:
Nice! I made a plume account a couple days ago. I’ll probably host my own blog, but also post entries on Plume so that people can follow it on the fediverse :)
Glad to hear that! Good luck with the blog :)
I have a writefreely instance for myself and like it. I would like a static site generator much more, because I can edit and view my blog offline, but I like that writefreely uses Activitypub and I wanted to have that explicitly, so here we are.
It does it’s job though and is usable for me. I normally prepare articles in a markdown Editor offline and just copy them into the web editor.
Plume uses activitypub right?
Yep.
I tried to find an instance of WriteFreely that I could join. I had no luck in my efforts. I’m test driving Plume now. It seems pretty basic, so I may discontinue using it.