[HN Gopher] WriteFreely - An open source platform for building a...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       WriteFreely - An open source platform for building a writing space
       on the web
        
       Author : btdmaster
       Score  : 219 points
       Date   : 2021-07-11 12:24 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (writefreely.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (writefreely.org)
        
       | hsn915 wrote:
       | I think writing on the internet is not a problem. It's easy to
       | build a blog from a static site generator. There are tons of them
       | these days.
       | 
       | IMO the actual problem is you want to interact with the people
       | reading what you write.
       | 
       | Without a commenting system, the writing/publishing platform
       | loses a lot of its potential value.
       | 
       | The other problem like other people mentioned is discovery.
       | 
       | Let's take YouTube for an example.
       | 
       | In theory you can make videos and publish them on your own self-
       | hosted website.
       | 
       | But if you post the videos to youtube, you get a bigger chance of
       | people finding out about you.
       | 
       | So, if you want to empower a distributed network of personal
       | websites, you also need a powerful "indexing" engine that
       | continuously fetches and catalogues all the new content being
       | published by all these people for easy discovery.
       | 
       | The other problem is discontinuity between discovery mode and
       | consumption mode.
       | 
       | On YouTube, when you find a video you like, you still see related
       | or recommended videos on the side.
       | 
       | If you have a video index that tries to work like YouTube but
       | redirects to different websites where videos are actually hosted,
       | you get this discontinuity where, once the user visits the actual
       | website where the content is hosted, they are no longer
       | discovering new things on the indexing service.
        
         | SalimoS wrote:
         | > So, if you want to empower a distributed network of personal
         | websites, you also need a powerful "indexing" engine that
         | continuously fetches and catalogues all the new content being
         | published by all these people for easy discovery
         | 
         | Isn't this just rss with extra steps ?
         | 
         | If I'm interested in content I will most likely subscribe to
         | his RSS feeds
        
         | alexwennerberg wrote:
         | > IMO the actual problem is you want to interact with the
         | people reading what you write.
         | 
         | What about email? I.e. put together a mailing list for your
         | blog and host the archives online?
        
       | x4e wrote:
       | I self-hosted a writefreely instance for a while but I found many
       | features were proprietary and only available in the paid managed
       | hosting (write.as). All features that I didn't need that much and
       | could workaround however it just made me feel quite dissatisfied
       | with the project.
       | 
       | People self hosting are not likely to be the same people who
       | would pay for managed hosting so it makes no sense to lock
       | features off for them.
       | 
       | I forked the codebase and added stuff myself for a while because
       | even after funnelling users to their commercial option they still
       | do hardly any development, see how long this one line PR I made
       | took to be merged:
       | https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/429.
       | 
       | Now I just have a simple python script that makes everything I
       | need in a blog [0] (markdown, resources, mathjax, atom feed and
       | all completely static with no JS). There is no need to have
       | complicated blog services, just compile static html.
       | 
       | [0]: https://github.com/x4e/Blog/blob/master/make.py
        
         | donmcronald wrote:
         | I really dislike how open source has evolved over the last
         | decade. A lot of open source isn't much more than a feature
         | anemic demo and IMO is only there so companies can generate
         | sales leads. Getting good quality bug reports or contributions
         | from the "community" members (aka suckers) are a bonus.
         | 
         | I don't contribute to projects that have stripped down, almost
         | unusable versions for their open source variant and that's most
         | of them. Years ago I saw someone on HN say something like
         | "charge for features or scale, not both." Personally I think
         | that should be "charge for scale, not features."
         | 
         | I like the way Drone.io has done their licensing so far, even
         | after being bought by Harness. Before, it was something like
         | "do what you want if you have less than $1 million in revenue."
         | Now, with Harness.io it appears they've settled on charging for
         | scale. When I looked at their pricing a couple days ago it says
         | the "free" (open source) version is limited to 1 server. I'm
         | not sure how that works (or how they enforce it), but the main
         | thing IMO is they don't appear to limit features. I can
         | actually use it without reading their feature tiers like it's
         | an API that changes every time the marketing department waffles
         | on the pricing.
         | 
         | I think the current models for pricing SaaS suck and Harness is
         | closer to a model that makes sense. For me, the reality is that
         | I only want 2 tiers; free where I self host and SaaS where I
         | pay someone to do it. The problem is they always want to charge
         | enterprises more per user which makes sense since it's harder
         | to scale and support to the level needed.
         | 
         | IMO, just have 2 tiers; free, self-hosted with full features
         | and community support and paid, but with a different pricing
         | model that's based on user count and support. For example, give
         | the first user for free with community support. You always keep
         | the price for lower tier users. Give the next 4 users for a low
         | cost with email support. Give the next 20 ish users for a mid-
         | tier cost with phone support. Make the remaining users the
         | price you actually want with priority support.
         | 
         | That brings the cost average down for small users and makes it
         | much more attractive to adopt a product. The pricing curve
         | looks more like a camels hump (assuming you negotiate if you're
         | huge) instead of a staircase (like GitLab) where you hit
         | pricing cliffs that are tough to swallow.
        
         | thebaer wrote:
         | Just curious, which features did you want that were proprietary
         | at the time?
         | 
         | The primary reasons for including certain features in Write.as
         | but not in WriteFreely are when they're very early (it's easier
         | to deploy and fix on a single hosted service), or when they
         | involve a ton of external dependencies. My thinking on the
         | latter is that I'd rather leave a feature out than leave admins
         | with a poor experience, vendor lock-in, lacking documentation,
         | etc. But maybe that's the wrong way to think about it.
         | 
         | Either way, "locking features off" isn't a business strategy
         | here, but just a matter of practicality as a very small open
         | source project. As I mentioned elsewhere, we plan to bring
         | things into parity for v1.0. And we very much welcome
         | contributors -- even if it's just reviewing pull requests!
        
           | x4e wrote:
           | It was a while ago but the ones I remember were email
           | subscriptions, custom javascript, and custom instance support
           | in the iOS app.
           | 
           | Thank You for clarifying the reasoning. That does make more
           | sense and makes it more justified. I still think it would be
           | better to at least have the write.as fork be open source even
           | if you can't ensure stability/any sort of support.
        
           | eitland wrote:
           | As you see below somewhere I say nice about you but I must
           | also say there are some things I'd really want to see fixed
           | soon:
           | 
           | - make inclusion of photos, including from snap.as kind of
           | usable (yes, I'm a paying customer)
           | 
           | - fix statistics
           | 
           | On the bright side I can now see who follows me, instead of
           | just a number like it was for a long time.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | worldmerge wrote:
       | This seems pretty cool. I've been interested in getting into
       | blogging and moving away from WordPress. I checked out Jekyll and
       | it's a pain to add media to a post so this looks like a great
       | alternative. It would be nice if there was an online demo you
       | could try out before setting it up.
        
         | BossingAround wrote:
         | Hugo offers pretty much every static site feature that
         | writefreely does for free. Media on a page isn't an issue with
         | Hugo websites.
        
           | yoz-y wrote:
           | One thing a bit annoying with Hugo is that somewhere down the
           | line of updates they made breaking changes to templates.
           | 
           | Now, since it's written in go and all statically linked, I've
           | just put the Linux and macOS binaries of the version that
           | worked for me in my repo and never update.
           | 
           | Good thing about a stagnant platform is that one can spend
           | less time tinkering with it.
        
         | btdmaster wrote:
         | Check out one of the public instances:
         | https://writefreely.org/instances.
        
         | mercacona wrote:
         | It's the engine backing https://write.as if you wanna try.
        
         | thebaer wrote:
         | Besides everything else mentioned, you can create an account on
         | our official demo instance here:
         | https://pencil.writefree.ly/invite/NB8Ycb
        
       | digitalsushi wrote:
       | Naive question, not trying to lead somewhere.
       | 
       | Back in the day we'd do a ./configure && make install on some
       | server and we'd be up and running to kick the tires.
       | 
       | It's been a long time since I have done this - my career went off
       | in other directions - and so I am curious if web app authors are
       | providing automatic serverless deploy plans that are just as easy
       | to run as that ./configure experience from much earlier.
       | 
       | (I know configure scripts still exist, but they are largely
       | satisfied by OS providers for users like me)
        
       | eitland wrote:
       | Been using it for a while.
       | 
       | Refreshingly simple business model. They don't even hound you for
       | an email address.
        
       | potamic wrote:
       | It's a really clean design, exactly how I would like to read
       | content!
       | 
       | I'm new to this federation idea, curious how blog pages work in
       | this world. Is there something of an open protocol for
       | publishing/consuming content so that I can use any provider or
       | client I like, or how does it work?
        
         | riffic wrote:
         | People with Mastodon accounts for instance can follow accounts
         | on your WriteFreely instance.
         | 
         | This is powered by the ActivityPub protocol, a W3C
         | recommendation.
        
         | Kye wrote:
         | Systems that federate over ActivityPub (AP) produce JSON blobs
         | that other systems choose how to present. For example: an AP
         | blog might show a blog post and comments like a traditional
         | blog, while Mastodon could show the same data as a toot and
         | replies to it.
        
       | elyseum wrote:
       | Interesting promise. Will give it a try. Does anybody known
       | similar tools, written in a different language (no expertise on
       | Go)?
        
         | wakest wrote:
         | The other main ActivityPub blogging centric software is Plume
         | https://joinplu.me, oh and there are some plugins for Wordpress
        
       | dangom wrote:
       | Shameless plug: back in the day I put together an Emacs package
       | to push org-files directly to an writefreely instance. Literally
       | 0 friction to start a blog.
       | https://github.com/dangom/writefreely.el
        
         | wut42 wrote:
         | Nice, thanks! But I wouldn't say "0 friction" as you need to
         | know emacs, org-mode, how to manage a server, and install
         | WriteFreely :)
        
           | dangom wrote:
           | Haha, sure. But you don't need to install writefreely, you
           | can publish anonymously to write.as, the "canonical"
           | writefreely instance.
        
       | agnosticmantis wrote:
       | This looks very beautiful. I wonder if it supports math
       | typesetting (via latex) out of the box or if there are plug-ins
       | for that.
        
         | ta988 wrote:
         | Yes there seem to be a MathJax support that you just have to
         | enable according to what I see in the source and in the forums.
         | It is apparently not in the documentation.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | jedberg wrote:
       | Almost every self hosted blogging platform I've seen requires you
       | to have a server to run it on 24/7, and I don't get it.
       | 
       | This is the _perfect_ use case for FaaS -- a personal site that
       | maybe gets a few thousand hits a month, and maybe has that one
       | post that goes viral and gets 100,000 hits in a day.
       | 
       | I love all the features and the nice aesthetic of all these
       | things, but it seems silly to pay even $5/mo for a 24/7 server
       | when I can host it for free on AWS Lambda if the software had
       | been written that way. Not to mention it would make it more
       | accessible to non-tech folks if you can just give them a button
       | to click that sets up a Cloudformation for them or something.
       | 
       | Sadly I don't have the time (not design skills) to write one
       | myself.
        
         | cpach wrote:
         | Very interesting idea.
         | 
         | If you or anyone else feel like expanding upon that idea and do
         | a "back-of-the-napkin" diagram or something, it would be very
         | interesting to see that!
         | 
         | (I started dipping my toes into FaaS[0] literally yesterday, so
         | I must admit I can't yet imagine how one would actually host a
         | blogging service in such an environment.)
         | 
         | [0] _Function as a service_
        
           | jedberg wrote:
           | It's pretty straightforward actually. What does a blog do?
           | 
           | - Show content to users
           | 
           | - Allow the admin to update content
           | 
           | So you'd really just need three functions and some storage:
           | 
           | - A function that takes a request for content and shows a web
           | page
           | 
           | - A function that authenticates the admin and shows them an
           | admin page
           | 
           | - A function that takes their admin update request and writes
           | to storage.
           | 
           | The storage could be S3, of if you want to get fancy you
           | could use DynamoDB so that you can do things like tags and
           | have blog pages that show each tag (or just regenerate them
           | and put them on S3 every time you make a update with a new
           | tag).
        
         | indigodaddy wrote:
         | I don't think there is any significant technical challenges to
         | running this on lambda. You'd just need some sort of workflow
         | to update the lambda image with each blog update. A big
         | downside to hosting on AWS though is if your site gets HN'ed,
         | you could have a hefty bill on your hands.
        
           | jedberg wrote:
           | That's unlikely. Using Cloudfront you'd only pay 8 cents per
           | GB (once you get past the 50GB of free data tier). Or you
           | can put Cloudflare in front of it and pay nothing.
        
             | indigodaddy wrote:
             | So I'm not that familiar with using CDNs. So Cloudflare
             | would actually serve 100% of the workload for a static
             | site? That's where you leave everything default for a
             | domain in Cloudflare's UI right? Usually I uncheck the "use
             | cloudflare" or whatever they call it, essentially just
             | having Cloudflare do the DNS only.
        
               | jedberg wrote:
               | Not 100% but petty close. For a mostly static website
               | like a blog it could easily serve 95%+ of the traffic.
               | 
               | And yes, it's where you leave it checked to use
               | Cloudflare for your traffic.
        
               | indigodaddy wrote:
               | Thanks for the response and info!
        
           | cpach wrote:
           | Couldn't the risk of hefty bills be lowered by using
           | CloudFront as a caching layer?
        
       | Jnr wrote:
       | I really enjoy Wordpress for writing freely. Ever since Docker-
       | compose, automatic updates and Gutenberg editor became available,
       | I haven't even needed to look at alternatives.
        
         | wakest wrote:
         | you can also use wordpress with the fediverse too, there is a
         | good plugin that lets you syndicate your posts out and let the
         | rest of the fediverse follow/comment/etc from where they
         | already are
        
       | bovermyer wrote:
       | Very happy to have contributed to this project. Of all the blog
       | engines out there, it is by far my favorite.
        
       | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
       | What is the point of "medium" other than to hold your content
       | hostage and force users to pay a subscription ? Writefreely
       | instead is about sharing. A full 360 from medium.
        
       | quaintdev wrote:
       | > There are enough places on the web built to hog your attention;
       | keep you scrolling and checking your feed, hoping for a new like
       | or retweet. WriteFreely gives you the space to think for yourself
       | again, free from alerts, feeds, and the distractions of classic
       | social media.
       | 
       | I think within a decade we all are going to come back to
       | blog/personal sites and ditch social media. The easier we make
       | people to set up self hosted blogs, faster will be the switch. I
       | know general public does not give a shit about this but a man can
       | hope.
        
         | daptaq wrote:
         | Who is we?
        
           | hairofadog wrote:
           | Me and quaintdev!
        
             | ta988 wrote:
             | And me!
        
               | AmroGab wrote:
               | And me.
        
               | the_rectifier wrote:
               | ...and my axe!
               | 
               | Sorry.
        
             | daptaq wrote:
             | Ok, but what about those stuck behind in the walled gardens
             | and currated feeds?
        
         | DerekBickerton wrote:
         | > ditch social media
         | 
         | Personally I have made my addiction to social media work for
         | me. I make full use of curated feeds, and make sure my feed has
         | a good signal to noise ratio. The ADs are annoying, but I would
         | rather trade my data for them. I can't afford $5.00 per month,
         | and happily let ADs subsidize these companies (Twitter,
         | Facebook etc).
        
           | _dibly wrote:
           | >I make full use of curated feeds, and make sure my feed has
           | a good signal to noise ratio. The ADs are annoying, but I
           | would rather trade my data for them.
           | 
           | I just don't think that is a sustainable position with the
           | way things are moving. If anything, this is the direction
           | social media is moving away from. Feeds are increasingly
           | curated by the user's browsing behaviors and and not their
           | conscious decisions. Data is only becoming more valuable as
           | more people make the choice to trade theirs away with no real
           | thought about the long-term effects of colossal repositories
           | of complex user data and very little regulation in place to
           | restrict their use.
           | 
           | Not to say that it isn't possible to make social media work
           | for you. I just continue to wonder what the threshold is
           | where users won't be comfortable leveraging their personal
           | data for convenience.
        
         | armchairhacker wrote:
         | The problem with personal sites is that they're hard to
         | discover. Case in point: there are a lot of personal sites out
         | there right now (and many more which existed but are now
         | offline), that only a few people even know exist.
         | 
         | We have platforms which make it easy to set up self-posted
         | blogs, we just need a way to make them more discoverable. Which
         | is what Twitter, Reddit, and _especially_ Medium (which I
         | imagine WriteFreely was inspired by) had in mind.
         | 
         | This is something I said before: the reason existing platforms
         | dominate the market is because they have the most users. Most
         | people create blogs or any other kind of content because they
         | want to be heard.
        
           | manuelmoreale wrote:
           | > The problem with personal sites is that they're hard to
           | discover.
           | 
           | I completely agree with you. Discovery still seems to be the
           | hardest problem to solve.
           | 
           | I, as a blog owner, I decided that the best way to contribute
           | solve this problem comes in two ways:
           | 
           | 1) By linking more to external sites and talk about websites
           | I like and push for more networking to take place rather than
           | only linking internally to generate more traffic
           | 
           | 2) I created https://theforest.link/ as a way to bring back
           | some of the fun in the way we explore the web.
           | 
           | These two won't obviously solve the problem altogether but I
           | think if more people try their best to spread the word about
           | content worth consuming we can solve the discovery issue
           | without inventing a separate discovery platform.
           | 
           | Also, we should bring back blogrolls
        
             | indigodaddy wrote:
             | Hey your site is really cool! How/where/in what fashion did
             | you compile your random list of sites?
        
               | manuelmoreale wrote:
               | It's just a curated list of all sorts of random links,
               | stored on airtable.
               | 
               | The site is as low tech as it gets. I was just trying to
               | make something fun and help people discover interesting
               | sites.
               | 
               | It's mostly personal sites/blogs and some indie
               | publication.
        
           | reaperducer wrote:
           | _The problem with personal sites is that they 're hard to
           | discover._
           | 
           | I think the problem with the web as it is now is that it's
           | too _easy_ to discover sites. Which is why more and more
           | (though not enough) people distrust the large search
           | providers.
           | 
           | Nothing the tech companies have invented carries the weight
           | of word-of-mouth and personal recommendations. You've
           | probably seen it in your own browsing.
           | 
           | Search for something - Open 30 tabs from the search results
           | and look at each one for a fraction of a second.
           | 
           | See a link described on HN - Open one tab and give it a fair
           | shot.
           | 
           | It would be nice to see the return of niche search engines.
           | Want to know something about architecture? Visit
           | architecturesearch.example and when you search for
           | "skyscraper" you get information about tall buildings, and
           | not bad action films and ads for high-heeled shoes.
        
             | armchairhacker wrote:
             | > I think the problem with the web as it is now is that
             | it's too easy to discover sites. Both are the same problem:
             | it's hard to find good sites among the massive amount of
             | clickbait, SEO optimization, and generally low-quality
             | sites. It's a hard problem too. There are a million users
             | who all want blogs, and a million bloggers who all want
             | viewers. The reality is, if you or I were to start a blog
             | it would probably only be interesting to a few people. So
             | your goal is to get said blog to the right few people,
             | while getting a different blog to a different right few
             | people, etc. a million times.
             | 
             | A niche search engine is a good solution, for niche content
             | you already know about. For discovering new niche content
             | you'd need a really good algorithm (perhaps based on
             | similar niches) or some other system.
        
           | mstngl wrote:
           | But here you have at least the AtivityPub integration. This
           | allows users at instances of the Fediverse to subscribe and
           | share your contents in a quite native way.
           | 
           | The Micropub / Microsub standard follows a similar, even more
           | granular approach (where content types note and article are
           | existent explicitly).
           | 
           | Of course, those alternative network standards are not
           | attracting the broad majority of users yet but this is not a
           | technical problem.
        
             | jhfxcvki wrote:
             | ActivityPub just pushes the discovery problem to the
             | homeserver administrator, who must find -- via word of
             | mouth -- other Fedi relays to federated with, or the
             | homeserver is a silo.
             | 
             | No part of this discovery step is automated or aided by the
             | software.
             | 
             | Personally I think it's a big oversight in the ActivityPub
             | protocol.. but then again, ActivityPub is more oversights
             | than it is features.
        
               | kevincox wrote:
               | I don't think that is the main benefit. I think it is the
               | ability to "reshare" a post and have your followers see
               | it. So you can follow your "friends" and learn about new
               | blogs from there. There is no reason that this couldn't
               | be done on regular blogs, but it isn't common.
        
             | tedunangst wrote:
             | AP has Note and Article object types.
        
       | captn3m0 wrote:
       | Does WriteFreely now support hosting multiple sites on a single
       | instance?
        
         | wakest wrote:
         | yes
        
           | captn3m0 wrote:
           | Just took a look at the docs, looks neat!
        
       | zamalek wrote:
       | I have been using it, and there's a liberating lack of bullshit.
       | I love that there's no comments/spam/trolls. It took me like
       | 15min to get it going on a droplet. What a fantastically simple
       | project.
        
         | throwawaysea wrote:
         | Is there a good guide on how to do this step by step? I don't
         | mind learning and getting my hands dirty but I also fear things
         | like getting security right.
        
           | zamalek wrote:
           | I did their production config instructions, but remember to
           | disable the engine version header (some random tutorial [1]).
           | 
           | I then used Cloudflare as a proxy, directly to the IP. You
           | can get the IP certificate from CF.
           | 
           | I am only paying for a droplet.
           | 
           | [1]: https://seoneurons.com/hide-nginx-server-version-header/
        
         | BossingAround wrote:
         | > It took me like 15min to get it going on a droplet
         | 
         | Don't know much about writefreely in general, but static
         | website hosting is free with Github Pages (or extremely cheap
         | on something like S3).
         | 
         | You mentioning a droplet sounds you're running a full VM to
         | host a static site, which sounds too expensive if that's the
         | only use case for the VM.
        
       | throwawayswede wrote:
       | Don't bother with any of this crap.
       | 
       | Self-host your shit.
        
       | Popegaf wrote:
       | Is it possible to import stuff from other blogs e.g move from
       | WordPress to WriteFreely using a WordPress export?
       | 
       | And is it possible to export from WriteFreely should one want to
       | migrate away from it?
        
         | thebaer wrote:
         | There isn't a direct way to import from WordPress so far, but
         | there is an open API [0] you could use to move your blog.
         | That's the tack we took for our Hugo import tool [1]: just
         | taking posts from a previous blog, parsing out the metadata,
         | and publishing via the API. For WordPress, you'd also just want
         | to get the posts converted to Markdown for the best experience
         | in WF.
         | 
         | As for exporting your content, yes you can do that at any time.
         | Everything is downloadable as JSON, CSV, or a zipped archive of
         | plain text files.
         | 
         | [0] https://developers.write.as/docs/api/
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/writefreely/hugo-importer
        
       | thebaer wrote:
       | Hi! I'm the lead developer of WriteFreely -- happy to answer any
       | questions you have!
       | 
       | For a little update on where the project is today: we just put
       | out our last update [0] before v1.0, which we're aiming to
       | release later this year. In 1.0, among other things, you'll find
       | many features we've been piloting on our hosted service
       | (Write.as), including newsletters, social media cross-posting,
       | eBook export, etc.
       | 
       | We're also experimenting with new, non-core features, like photo
       | hosting [1] and comments [2]. Our core focus has always been on
       | _just writing_ , which is why many features (including ones
       | afforded by ActivityPub) have been left out. So we're trying to
       | see what's possible when we keep a clean, simple core with
       | optional "rooms" of functionality around it. If you want to keep
       | up with us, you should see more developments around this before
       | the end of the year, too.
       | 
       | [0] https://blog.writefreely.org/version-0-13
       | 
       | [1] https://snap.as
       | 
       | [2] https://remark.as
        
         | nickjj wrote:
         | Hi,
         | 
         | If you ever wanted to hop on my podcast to talk about how
         | you've built and deployed things let me know. We could chat
         | about your tech stack, lessons learned, etc.. The podcast is
         | at: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/ and if you want to
         | become a guest there's a "become a guest" button on the right
         | top to get the ball rolling.
         | 
         | Currently inching up on 100 episodes.
        
           | thebaer wrote:
           | Sounds awesome! Would love to be a part of it. I'll reach out
           | soon!
        
             | nickjj wrote:
             | Awesome, I'll keep an eye out for your submission.
             | 
             | Side note: if anyone else happens to read this, you're
             | welcome to submit your site / app too. The more the
             | merrier!
        
       | imwillofficial wrote:
       | My obligatory "I signed up for write freely to support the
       | project. Forgot my password and couldn't get it reset (it was a
       | manual process). After a few months I tried to cancel. Developer
       | completely unresponsive for a year, I kept getting charged each
       | month. My bank quizzically refunded some fees, but not others.
       | Love the idea, but developer responsiveness needs work if I can't
       | even reset my password or cancel service.
       | 
       | Best of luck to this project!
        
       | phantom_oracle wrote:
       | How do you integrate this tool into an existing blog?
       | 
       | I like the idea of ActivityPub followers but shifting all the
       | contents over from an existing static site sounds like a wasteful
       | exercise
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | pmlnr wrote:
         | Integrate your existing blog with https://fed.brid.gy/ instead.
        
       | keb_ wrote:
       | I love Write.as, but one little nitpick that has always bothered
       | me is the font loading flicker, like it takes a second on page
       | load to load the custom font. Not sure if it's the browsers I'm
       | using or uBlock but it always happens. Is there a way to disable
       | the custom font?
        
         | btdmaster wrote:
         | You can block remote fonts with uBO in its per-site menu, left
         | of the disable JS button.
        
           | keb_ wrote:
           | Weird, but that setting seemed to not work. What _did_ work
           | was disabling JavaScript, which is a bit puzzling -- why is
           | JS loading the fonts?
        
       | monkeydust wrote:
       | Been looking to start blogging, I feel it's making a slow
       | comeback (along with RSS!) this looks great.
        
       | RNCTX wrote:
       | So is the business model of their company to turn every random
       | user into a content generator which pays them to give away
       | content?
       | 
       | Because it seems that if the author can't be identified, the
       | ownership of the content is implied to be the publisher of this
       | codebase.
        
         | ta988 wrote:
         | From what I see, they charge you for hosting if you don't do it
         | yourself. $4/mo for a blog. It seems that you can have themes
         | and newsletters and other stuff that are not available in the
         | free version. I'm still looking at what the self-hosted version
         | can do.
        
           | ta988 wrote:
           | It doesn't seem that the self-hosted version has any
           | restrictions. And it doesn't seem hard to setup either.
           | Optional mysql, reverse proxy or just give it the
           | certificates and you're ready.
        
       | throwawaysea wrote:
       | There's also Ghost, which similarly has an open source offering
       | and a paid hosting service: https://ghost.org/about/
       | 
       | Previous discussions:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864731
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17809447
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21322712
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17082228
        
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       (page generated 2021-07-11 23:00 UTC)