From what I understand, Mastodon is to Twitter as WriteFreely is to WordPress.com/Medium/Blogger/etc. Fediverse-aware, open-source, with a flagship SaaS hosted instance available at https://write.as. If microblogging hadn't fried my brain and I was interested in spinning up a longform blog, this is the software I would choose.
WordPress.com is also based on open-source software (WordPress) and can connect to the Fediverse via Activitypub [1]. Similar to WriteFreely, there's even a WordPress.com desktop app [2]. That said, I understand the allure of a simple, minimal, distraction-free writing and reading experience.
Both are FOSS and self-hostable. I assumed it was implied "a lot of people" meant "a lot of people [who self-host]", especially when the post is linking to the server software not the SaaS write.as.
As to why people would prefer Go over PHP...I think there's plenty of reasons to be found on HN's search :)
It’s all aesthetic experiences. Some people care, so it matters.
I know what you’re getting at and the world you want to live in. Listen, why do people care if some story they read was written by a bot, for example? The people reading Reddit’s top creative writing venues (AITA comes to mind) clearly don’t know and don’t care. But many people do care. It’s arbitrary. It’s just aesthetic. Nobody needs this stuff, nobody needs Fediverse or ActivityPub.
at some point the ActivityPub protocol with its open interoperability will develop a sort of critical mass with the mainstream and everyone will need it. So you may be correct now, "nobody needs Fediverse or ActivityPub" but in some near or distant future your claim will need adjustment.
Would also note it works pretty well for microblogging -- here's an example (with some custom styling)[0]. Small posts with a single paragraph also get federated out as `Note`s instead of `Article`s, which makes them show up on Mastodon pretty nicely.
That seemed to diminish in emphasis a few years ago, stopped accepting accounts that didn't give you a credit card end of 2021, and some year recently (last year? I forget…) seemed as though the warrant canary missed a couple updates. (It's up to date now, with an assertion of no warrants ever.)
Are the anonymous speech principles of write.as still as important as when it was launched? Or did the business model for that just not work?
There aren't a lot of options in this class (which I love seeing make it):
And… that's about it? While these other two talk about "no trackers", and mataroa emphasizes ethical (and non-SEO!) speech, only write.as seems to have had had the emphasis around importance of anonymity.
I used WriteFreely for a while. I loved its simplicity. It attracted a fascinating set of writers too.
But the price kept going up, updates were slow, and I think the project lacks some focus. I switched to OMG.LOL. I want a blog that is pretty constrained and forces me to make decisions. And keeps things pretty cheap.
I tried WriteFreely (and some of their other stuff) a year or so ago, but found it to be a little too limited for what I was trying to achieve with my personal sites (as a layman/non-web-dev). Ended up using https://Blot.im/ very happily, with my photosite being the personal example I've put the most time into: https://ristrettoshots.com/
Edit pages mostly in regular markdown (+ a few simple Blot-specific tags), drop some images into a Dropbox folder, done. Site built. :)
I tried WriteFreely, I really tried. I even wrote a bi-directional synchronizer for it, so you can write locally in Obsidian and sync posts to Write.as: https://github.com/Cyberax/writeas-sync
But I gave up on it. Sorry. It's not a viable project.
It's backed by a one-man team, and so the support is unresponsive. The API is bad, and they impose ridiculously low rate limits. Like, less than 0.1 request per second. I understand the need to protect against bots, but hey, Cloudflare exists, and I'm paying for a subscription.
I then tried to self-host it. There is no official Docker support, but I cobbled it up. It works ok-ish, but the open source version is NOT the same as the one running on Write.as! For example, there is no support for drag&drop image uploads.
I then looked at the source code, and it's just a mess. There is no layering, the view makes direct requests to the database, and there is very little customization potential. For example, you can't even insert a script reference at the bottom of the page, without patching the source code.
To an extent, yes. In my case, I've done a lot of WordPress consulting over the past 10 years and I'm grandfathered into a very inexpensive shared hosting plan from Site5 that gives me WHM access and the ability to create as many sites as I want.
Works fine for static sites. Works fine for anything PHP. PHP versions are kept up to date.
But the cost of an additional site is effectively cost-free, so I'm hosting several small sites for small organizations and individuals.
That's quite expensive, though not the typical price you'd pay from someplace like Digitalocean. I imagine this is from a host in your local country? Those tend to be more expensive if you're not in a common datacenter region.
I happily pay some money for not maintaining another server/service in my private time. 10€/month for a managed server with ssh, Postgres, MySQL, mail, and backups is worth it for me: https://uberspace.de/en/ (not affiliated, just a happy customer)
Shared PHP hosting is a managed service, a VPS is not. Not everyone has the skill set to bridge the gap, and it’s not really economical to hire to fill the gap to support a single site (but it is to support hundreds of sites in a shared hosting environment).
> Shared PHP hosting is a managed service, a VPS is not. Not everyone has the skill set to bridge the gap
It has always been very peculiar. You either had very stripped off permissions of what you could do: FTP comes to mind first, and then you still need to understand how Unix permissions work, and then you wish you had SSH; or you get SSH with some stripped off permissions, and then you do need to have the skills to use the Unix system inside; or you find that the underlying PHP/webserver has 6-month-old zero days and someone keeps owning all tenants all the time, but the sysadmins are prima donnas on power trip who know better.
And you are still in a firmly DIY area most of the time, with enough footgun to do you harm.
Oh, and if you want a custom domain, welcome to the special hell.
Maybe I had bad experiences 15 years ago, but in my opinion, they should be called "mismanaged services".
Been using shared hosting for 20 years. It's easily easier than VPS.
Not sure what you mean by stripped off permissions. Yes, I'm not root, but most VPS providers don't give me root access either (at least not for cheap).
SFTP has always worked, and continues to do so.
Of course you need to understand UNIX permissions. You also need to understand what a directory is, what a file is, etc. It's not asking too much.
I've tried 3 different providers, and they all had SSH access. I've not heard of one that doesn't.
The only problems I had with PHP servers is that the admins are doing their job and removing old vulnerable versions. Which is a pain for me but it's why I pay them. The whole point of shared hosting is they're taking care of the zero day exploits for me.
Custom domains? Not sure what you mean. Every provider I looked at it made it painless to use.
Having a simple LAMP stack is dead simple to use (yes, as long as you know basic UNIX). VPS: I suddenly need to set up the web server, and manage DOS attacks, etc? And keep track of all the security vulnerabilities and keep upgrading? I don't want to deal with that pain. With shared hosting, I need to "fix" things less than once a year. My web apps happily work without my needing to log in.
With a VPS, I have to pay more only so that I have to do more work? No thanks.
I've not yet gotten VPS, but when I last hunted around, it was common for root access only at a much higher paid tier. Definitely did not see any for $5/mo. If you know of one, let me know!
the industry is also mostly dead. non technical users now use sites like Wix with a builder. Technical ones get a VPS or cloud solution and probably don't want LAMP anyway
The only non technical people using shared hosting now are people who paid to have a site built for their small business twenty years ago and don't need to update anything, so they just keep paying the bills
The whole industry has been on life support for a long time. just look at all the brands Endurance has bought up. That hasn't happened because all of those hosts were making a ton of money
Tens of millions of people want to host a WordPress site and very few of them want to deal with setting up a database, editing config files, securing a server. Most of them have no idea what that stuff means.
That's why companies like WPEngine exist. This doesn't have much to do with the software; non-technical users could use a WPEngine like service for WriteFreely, if someone ran that service
There are 26 million software developers in the world [1]. Maybe 10 times as many people who understand some programming. There are over 8 billion people in the world.
I use this in my homelab for drafting long form thoughts. It's nice since it feels more ephemeral than making a page in a wiki or making a page that gets rendered and hosted statically.
I used to run Ghost for this, but at some point the pervasive push to use Ghost's paid features for an internally hosted blog irked me enough to rip it out.
As long as they're hosted somewhere on the internet, you can add images with regular Markdown. Built-in support for photo management is in the pipeline though!
No, currently - Snap.as ( https://snap.as/ ) doesn't seem to be open-source and is only available (as a service) if you have a paid Write.as account ( https://write.as/pricing ).
I see now that the Bearblog landing page lists "free themes". I'm having trouble, though, making sense of the "no stylesheets" selling point(?) at the top of the page, especially given what you are now saying.
