this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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There are few things going around.
First thing I want to point out is that lemmy can kinda fill this niche (see the docs on this). Start a community and turn on "moderator posts only" (such that only the moderator(s) can post) and you've got a basic blog with post comments across the fediverse built in (for which you're the moderator). It will have RSS built in too, and a hefty character-limit per post of
50,000(last I checked) which is~10,000words per post, along with markdown formatting. And if you want complete control, you could run your own instance through a service like spacehost.Beyond that there are other more dedicated platforms.
There's writefreely: https://writefreely.org/
There's postfreely, which is a fork of writefreely: https://flamewar.social/c/postfreely (lemmy community)
Wordpress have an official plugin now for activitypub / federation (and it works, I've interacted with "blog posts" over on mastodon)
micro.blog might also count: https://micro.blog/
Newsletters may be supported by some of these. None have subscriptions AFAIK.
And just to express a sort of wishlist for future lemmy development ... where a developer might be interested in taking this specific idea on ... there's probably some low hanging fruit around making lemmy more a dedicated blogging platform.
Take the moderator-only community mechanism mentioned above and make this a more straight forward process. Probably work on the moderation tooling a bit to make it easier to control any dumpster fire comments situations. Maybe work on tagging (which is already something being worked on I think). Then there's theming, where people might want their personal community to appear a certain customised way.
And then, and this would be a big one maybe, add the ability to control who is able to subscribe (where private communties already seem to be on the roadmap for lemmy). Once you can control that, then integrating some third party subscriptions service would allow an author to try to collect subscriptions for their content ... and you have a federated substack substitute where the author could use their account/instance to also browser and comment on the wider fediverse too.
This seems tricky to enforce on a per-user basis since content federated to another instance for one user could easily be shared with another user on that instance without the original instance ever knowing about that.
It definitely does get tricky. In general, guarantees about control over the network get tricky, and it seems like a limitation of the fediverse for this sort of stuff.
Imposing limitations can maybe go far though. Keeping such users on a single instance or on a single platform could be helpful? I donβt knitter this space unfortunately. Maybe some cryptography would be necessary?
Thanks for the detailed reply! There seems to be really nice options out there. From what I gathered from the current replies here, writefreely and plume look like something in my mind more.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !postfreely@flamewar.social
While the Lemmy micro blog idea sounds genius, I just wanted to echo my appreciation for write freely.
It's great for blogging especially if you're a writer. For the short time I used it, only felt like a Fediverse versions of Ghost CMS. At the time it had a bit less formatting features but nothing you couldn't work around with photos.
It'd make a great blog endpoint as a supplement for a traditional website.
Oh for sure. Using lemmy is definitely a quick and dirty option that happens to illustrate the power that the reddit platform structure can have.
Interestingly, I suspect it wouldn't be too much work to expand on the features already in lemmy to turn it into a true blogging platform. Presuming that its promise of being lean in terms of required resources (written in rust and all of that), it might have something going for it.