Was hoping someone who has already researched this stuff might be able to save me some time and give a tldr of the Fediverse-friendly platform options and their various pros and cons?

I know obviously WordPress has ActivityPub now, but am not sure exactly how well it works or how integrated it really is. Then there's something called WriteFreely? Any others? Which do you prefer and why?

Really appreciate any pointers on this, and if this thread doesn't turn up anything useful I promise to come back and do my own writeup after finding out the answers by myself.

Cheers!

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[–] russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I myself haven't done any major blogging in a while (Last year I started one and just used Hugo as a static-site-generator so no ActivityPub integration, but also ended up not really posting much), but from what I've always heard about WordPress the major "selling" point would be its vast ecosystem of plugins and themes.

But that ecosystem is a double-edged sword, because there is tons of malware for WordPress that comes in the form of plugins (I know WP itself used to be exploited a lot in the past, not sure what its reputation on its own codebase is these days).

I've not ever seen WriteFreely before, but I doubt its ecosystem is anywhere the size of WP. Whether that's a roadblocker is of course only a decision you can make.

I'm sorry that I didn't have much more to offer as an answer, but hopefully it's something at least!

[–] ares35@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

wordpress, and especially its plugins, is definitely still exploited, and targeted--heavily. mod_security works overtime here just from attempts to get at exploits in them. i don't even have a wordpress install, but that doesn't stop the tries--about half of all 'visitors' to my http servers are bots looking for one to exploit.

if you're gonna wordpress, using them (their service, at wordpress.com) as your host is the best option, i think. let them deal with maintaining the server, software, security and stuff.

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

the one thing that could hinder adoption of writeFreely for blogging is the lack of interactivity. Sure you can share via activitypub your posts but that was all you can do with it.

[–] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

No worries, appreciate the reply! I actually used to work as a WP developer so am fine setting that up if it ends up being the best option. But it's been a while, so I just have no idea if it is.

One thing I've turned up so far is that WriteFreely doesn't seem to have any kind of commenting, so that's a big downside for a blog.

Hoping these aren't the only two possibilities!