I am looking for a fediverse solution for a blog and I tried it with writefreely, but it has some disadvantages I can’t live with.
The most important one is, that it should be possible to communicate with people within the fediverse. People should be able to comment on every article with a fediverse account, like it is already possible between Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube and others. But comments aren’t a thing with writefreely and this is sad.
After using Lemmy for a few days I just thought if it is possible to use it as a blog and ask on lemmys github if it is possible to restrict a group so only one person could post new articles, but all others can comment. And the answer is yes!
But would it be possible to use it as a blog?
Imagine I would have a group called “utopify.org - Research & Development” and would post current progress about a blog series and you can only comment on it. Would it be possible and would it be something you want to see on Lemmy or would this just be an abuse of the software.
If all of this is just a no-go, are there other ways in the fediverse to have a blog article, which can be shared on the fediverse and be commented on?
You could solve this with the same approach as lemmyBB. In other words, program a new frontend for Lemmy instead of the default lemmy-ui, and use it to render your site. It would connect to the Lemmy backend to fetch data, and then render it as HTML. This could be written in any language/framework you like, and display a real blog-like layout. This would allow you to set “Only moderators can post to this community” as default when a new community is created, and use different sort orders by default.
I didn’t do front end for a very long time and stuff changed a lot, because I looked at lemmyBB and I have no idea what handlebars or cargos are, I might heard of Rust, but never used it. But at least CSS is still a thing…
Can you recommend a language or framework, which could be even interesting for employers (don’t want to learn too exotic stuff) and it would be useful to work with this technology every day, so I will be faster to make something in my spare time.
I would be very interested in learning new stuff to make a new front end for Lemmy. I really like Lemmy so far :)
Not sure, but Rust is probably not a good idea in your case because it has a quite steep learning curve. You could just make a post in asklemmy or /c/programming to ask for suggestions.
I would love to see a Blog front end for Lemmy.
You could. The better question is if you should.
Who is your target audience? Would a microblogging platform like Pleroma or Mastodon be more appropriate? They’re pretty popular.
I am testing Mastodon for a few weeks, now, and I have to say it’s much better to link to a blog and then ask a question and create a poll about it. Many people will react to it. But talking about a topic, using all 500 chars, doesn’t work at all. People don’t want to read a lot there, they just want to quickly get out their opinion on a head line, a picture or a question.
Lemmy seems more like for people who are interested in specific topics and a topic can be found fast, because those are groups (instead of searching through hashtags and even then not all posts have something todo with that tag). On Lemmy a link is shown and the people read the article and start discussions about it. I really want to involve people who are interested in those topics. This is what I am looking for.
I might keep posting the link on Mastodon just to get reactions, but atm I think Lemmy might be better.
Yeah, I hesitated to mention Mastodon and Pleroma as I don’t know the policies on character limits (I suspect it can change per site???)
Link aggregators (like Lemmy and reddit) are weird in that they’re literally invented for the purpose of linking to other sites, like you suggested you would do on Mastodon, but it’s become normal in the past 10 years to make text posts and start uploading media directly on the site. It’s an interesting shift. I guess that’s why I wasn’t sure to recommend it for blogging: you totally can and have a connected community available, it just feels like an unintended purpose. But it seems like it would work, I say go for it.
If that would be possible, how would you moderate comments, seeing how random things can get? Federating with only approved finstances (federated instance)? What if you keep your blog, then push every post you make there to your solo-community on a finstance? You can engineer your comment section on the blog to pint here or fetch the comments content from fediverse to your blog…
If that would be possible, how would you moderate comments, seeing how random things can get?
I don’t know what you mean? If I am the admin of an instance or the moderator of a group, I could delete comments or is this just not possible?
Federating with only approved finstances (federated instance)?
Why doing this? Wouldn’t it be enough to block the illegal instances and those who are explicitly against your topics?
What if you keep your blog, then push every post you make there to your solo-community on a finstance? You can engineer your comment section on the blog to pint here or fetch the comments content from fediverse to your blog…
I am trying to be as green as possible. Having a blog on one server and the comments on another sounds like an inefficient way of using resources. Why not just put the articles where the comments are?
With Mastodon I had the same idea, that I will publish an article, post a link with short description on Mastodon and then use the Mastodon post as the comment section, then edit the blog article and put the link to Mastodon on the end of the article with a simple text link like “Comment section”.
But even this idea felt a bit odd and more unprofessional.
Lemmy looks like a really good solution to this atm.
If you’re looking for efficiency, nothing beats a static website.
I don’t know what you mean? If I am the admin of an instance or the moderator of a group, I could delete comments or is this just not possible? Some of the darkest side of the internet can rear its head and the gap between their posting and your deletion can be catastrophic.
Why doing this? Wouldn’t it be enough to block the illegal instances and those who are explicitly against your topics? You depend on the effectivness of admin rules of those other instances. Using an allow list or a block list has significant implication on spam.
please go ahead and test it, happy to help with testing if you ping me. It is a great idea which I also contemplated quite a lot.
To be honest, I think whichever approach you take is unlikely to have a significant effect on how much energy your website uses overall.
For example, servers in datacentres are very powerful and are able to run more than one thing at once. So if you were hosting your own Lemmy/Mastodon instance, there’d be no reason why you couldn’t also host a standalone website on that same server. The difference in energy usage would be negligible.
In contrast, you could argue that Lemmy is less efficient than a straightforward static website because the content of your blog posts will inevitably end up being federated to many other instances. That means multiple copies of your blog will be transferred between multiple servers and stored on multiple hard drives, etc. Whereas a static website lives in one place and doesn’t end up using so many resources.
At the end of the day, whichever you choose will likely have very little impact. So I wouldn’t worry too much about your blog’s green credentials.
I’m saying this as somebody who is pro protecting the environment, but also pro prioritising our efforts in the places they’ll have greatest impact. You’ll probably have a bigger impact by walking to the store instead of driving.
I’m saying this as somebody who is pro protecting the environment, but also pro prioritising our efforts in the places they’ll have greatest impact. You’ll probably have a bigger impact by walking to the store instead of driving.
Whataboutism isn’t really helpful, because you can believe me, that I have already optimized every other field in my life and people even call me extreme.
I really want to put the focus on this specific topic.
But you might be somehow right, that IF a server is already used for an energy consuming tool (like a fediverse tool [Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, FireFish, etc.]), the energy consumption is pretty low in comparison of the fediverse tool, if there is a static website running on the same server. What IF there isn’t this energy consuming tool?
Actually, I am really worried that this could be used as an excuse and the rebound effect takes effect, using a lot of tools on the same server.
I just read these 2 blog posts recently where they are using ActivityPub for comments:
https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastodon/
https://fietkau.blog/2023/another_blog_resurrection_fediverse_new_comment_system
Interesting, I had a similar idea to just link to a Mastodon/Lemmy thread in the blog article, saying “Here is the comment section!”, because I want to keep a static website.
on my pelican generated website I have the rss feed of my mastodon account. I have a script that downloads & converts the rss and then pelican runs and regenerated and includes that on my site. Something similar might work with your idea for comments.
Can you show me the link, I am curious on how this look like?
https://mastodon.sdf.org/@saba/110470671030115751 here’s a mastodon post I made about it and on my site you can see my feed on the bottom of the page: https://chven.us/profiles/sam.html
Looks really nice!
If you decide to try the rss-to-html.py, let me know if you want some help or to see what I changed. I don’t know python well, but I did change a few things in it to get it to work right for me and to include the photos. Or if you come across anything else that does similar, I’d like to have a look at it.
Thanks a lot.
I will only link to a fediverse post in the end of a blog article like “Here is the official comment section”, because I want to keep my blog as static as possible.
You could… but it’s singly not setup for that. There are blog softwares out there that support activitypub-- I have no experience with it, but microblog.pub was nativity designed as an activitypub blog. There’s also a WordPress plugin that’s basically official (maintained by the company that owns WordPress.com) and has known good integration to at least mastodon, so I would assume it works well with lemmy, peertube, etc, since AFAICT, mastodon is the most opinionated of them when it comes to activitypub conformance.
microblog.pub
Ooof, the design of this website is pretty terrible. I couldn’t figure out where a post starts and where it ends or what is even part of a blog post or other stuff on the website?
And in general it really looks polluted and invites people to pollute. Not really something I was looking for. But thank you for mentioning it :)
Lemmy has a 10k character limit per post, something to keep in mind.
ohhhhh… 10k characters are not much and I have some articles with around 20k characters. But the good thing is, blog articles can be split very good. So I could do part 1 and part 2 of a topic.
Yep! Just pointing it out as I wrote some 12k characters yesterday and had to trim.
Can you show me the blog article, I am just curious how it will look like if it’s trimmed.
So it’s just a post on our instance, but it was written like a blog article. https://beehaw.org/post/107014
It’s really nice! I like it.
It can be read without distractions. Not much going on on the left or right and the comment section of Lemmy is in order and clean.
I would say it can be used as a blog pretty well or do you miss something, which other blog systems have?
A bit less ability to format than I’m used to (although I suppose if you’re hosting the instance you can format it however you want, to an extent), but I agree it can work fairly well
Which format abilities do you miss? I really like it that it supports Markdown so you can format text while writing, without even move your hand to your mouse.
I’ve wanted to make a mini-blog myself, seems like mastodon has a word limit that becomes a problem, so I looked into pleroma, and most pleroma instances have a 5000 character limit, which can be used for a blog-like page and has all the interactivity related features you desire, since its supposed to be like mastodon.
some mastodon servers have a higher character limit!
Ayy!
Can you show me your Pleroma blog? After I saw a few Pleroma sites I just found it weird and inconvenient and then I read about the war about Alex Gleason (creator of the Pleroma fronted soapbox) and the Pleroma community, which I found really absurd. That’s why I went to Mastodon first.
I dont have a pleroma blog, I’m just saying that it does have a higher character limit, a much higher limit that may suit the needs for a mini blog. And its federated so mastodon users can also follow your account.
oh, ok, so you stick with Mastodon and didn’t do a mini-blog at another place?
I didnt say that… All I said was that I was just recently looking for something exactly like you wanted and found that pleroma does that. That’s all I said dude
oh, okay, thanks a lot.
- kujaw ( @kujaw@lemmy.ml ) 1•2 years ago
Maybe try Hubzilla.
Hubzilla?
Hubzilla
I tried to figure out what this is, but it was really hard. Okay on this page it was somehow explained in a good way.
But it feels really strange, because just looking for an instance (here or here) made me uncomfortable, because most of them just start with a login/register mask (example 1, example 2, example 3). Figuring out how to actually see content is inconvenient. You have to click on the small icon in the top right and choose “directories” (why?) and even this didn’t work in the beginning and I was just confused on how to actually read content.
Couldn’t they find a more complex way to provide content?
After I found an instance with actual content I felt even more inconvenient. Everything looks very clumsy, like a very old website. It’s hard to just read the head lines, because it shows a lot of every blog article, which makes it really hard to figure out what the blog is about. And I somehow can’t focus on one topic, I can only see all articles and may only expand the one I want to read more, but I couldn’t figure out how to open one article in one page and how do I even share a blog article if I can’t copy a direct link to it? Okay, there is a button “link to source” hidden in the options. But why so complex and why making the life of the user so hard?
I just don’t understand it :(
I really dont know much about it, but I use it for a wiki. Hubzilla seems a powerful machine, but apparentlycan be complex and cumbersome?. For me it was really easy to install through softaculous in my shared hosting. It has some neat concepts and architecture though
I am really annoyed that it isn’t user friendly at all and I would say that’s why not many people would like to use it to read blog articles. It’s just too cumbersome.
Could be. I dont know. For me this far its been easy but havent used it much.
if it is possible to restrict a group so only one person could post new articles
IIRC there’s a setting when creating a community for only mods to be able to post.
comments aren’t a thing with writefreely
What do you mean? You can look up any profile in the form of
@blogname@writefreelyinstance.domainfrom apps like Mastodon, Friendica, etc…, see all posts, and comment regularly.
Is the fact that there’s no link or embed of the comment section at the bottom of the WriteFreely page that is bothering you, or am I not understanding?
On a side note: if you are really choosing how to build a blog (like it seems you are), and are not taking the first free managed hosting provider you come across…
I would think twice before using any server software instead of keeping your site static. Having a server software that’s more complex than simply serving static files will do more harm than good in the long run: more security flaws, you have to always keep the thing updated, higher resource usage, and hard to make your content survive the test of time (backing these things up is hard and when you do, you have a database file, not some plaintext ones)Please try to comment this blog article with any account (Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, etc). It will not be possible that I - as an author - can see those comments anywhere.
But maybe you’re right and those comments do exist, but I just don’t see them, because they just don’t appear under the blog article. But if they exist somewhere, can you tell me where they are and how to build them in to show them?
if you are really choosing how to build a blog (like it seems you are), and are not taking the first free managed hosting provider you come across…
I have values! The next best free hosting is just a no-go, because they are not free at all.
more security flaws, you have to always keep the thing updated
An update script as a cron job will solve this problem.
and hard to make your content survive the test of time (backing these things up is hard and when you do, you have a database file, not some plaintext ones)
Every root or v-server comes with a backup system, which works pretty good. The only thing what could get lost are some posts/comments, which were written between the last backup and now and breaking stuff is pretty rare too. I’ve never broke something on a server, except of a testing server, where I did Linux stuff and wrote a script, which accidentally deleted important stuff (but backup restored it within a few minutes).
You are absolutely right, that stuff can break and I just can’t upload my static website if something goes wrong. But currently I have a static website and it is pretty hard to reach out to people. I tried to post it on Mastodon, but it’s not the same. Interaction on Lemmy works much better and here are more deep and constructive discussions.
And the goal of my blog is to reach out to humans, to help them define and reach their goals and have a mindful way of thinking. The only utopify.org community is on Habitica, it has thousands of people, but no clue of them outside of Habitica. I could change it pretty fast.
Yeah. I would personally recommend using a website that you own, and then linking to in on Lemmy, but it is entirely possible to use Lemmy as a blog.
What if I own the Lemmy instance?
I am still undecided about what the solution will be.
On the one hand a clean minimalistic and static blog is really good to read and on the other side, on Lemmy a discussion will start really fast and as an author of those “embedded blog articles on lemmy”, I can see discussions and can even react to them.
The only problem might be the design, which we already discussed here with nutomic.
There might be much more advantages to have a blog inside Lemmy, if it’s optimized for long reading…
I think, lemmy has good basics for such a blog.
Maybe someone will write a blog-specific frontend for lrmmy, as @nutomic (i think) adapted phpBBs design-frontend for lemmy to demonstrate how to build classical webforums with lemmy.
Funny coincident: nutomic even wrote something about it here in this thread.
There was a guy on GitHub that added a Lemmy comment section to his blog hosted on his website. So it’s already an accepted although niche usecase.
I feel like a single user instance of Pleroma would be more appropriate (and easier to host) but even though the character limit can be increased the remote limit of other instances might reduce your visibility, I am not sure.
Because Pleroma is pretty similar to Mastodon, I don’t think it will be good, because both use a time line and important stuff could go to the void if it was posted to the wrong time or it just goes down between a lot of content.