this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2022
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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?

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[–] LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago

Kbin has microblog.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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 :)

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] letstry@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

I would love to see a Blog front end for Lemmy.

[–] ajjlyman@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] comfy@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] comfy@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] baronvonj@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You wouldn't even need to host your own instance, really. You could create a community and check the option that only mods can post. But you can't follow people on Lemmy.

What about calckey?

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[–] mwalimu@baraza.africa 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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...

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] m_randall@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Holy Necro….since I’m here tho I think kbin is more set up with this. It has a microblog section although I haven’t really explored it.

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[–] Awoo@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't see why not. Several subreddits over on reddit function this way, with one or a group of approved posters while everyone else can only comment. The main features of a blog are a front page feed and posts, this is precisely what you get with these platforms.

You could make an instance that is entirely blogs. Or you could make an instance that is just your blog. Or you could just make a comm on any existing instance and specifically utilise it as your blog, like people do on approved-submitter-only subreddits.

Really the only barrier to succeeding with this is whether or not what is put into the space(whichever method you go for) is legitimately something people find interesting enough to come back to repeatedly.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

You could make an instance that is entirely blogs. Or you could make an instance that is just your blog. Or you could just make a comm on any existing instance and specifically utilise it as your blog, like people do on approved-submitter-only subreddits.

This is a really good idea. You even described what i wanted to do long ago. I wanted to create an old school forum (like bulletin board) to discuss several specific topics, but one board will be for blogs, but which are able to discuss on. It seems an own lemmy instance might be the perfect software for this.

[–] coldhotman@nrsk.no 3 points 2 years ago

Perhaps petition the devs to be able to lock a community's sorting to "New" only?

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[–] saba@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] altair222@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago (8 children)

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.

[–] sexy_peach@feddit.de 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

some mastodon servers have a higher character limit!

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[–] kujaw@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

Maybe try Hubzilla.

[–] coldhotman@nrsk.no 2 points 2 years ago

The word limit is a setting in the config files, admins can set it to whatever. Glitch-soc is a fork of Mastodon that even has an interface to set the character limit. I think I just put in 50.000 IIRC.

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[–] human_no_4815162342@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Lemmy has a 10k character limit per post, something to keep in mind.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yep! Just pointing it out as I wrote some 12k characters yesterday and had to trim.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can you show me the blog article, I am just curious how it will look like if it's trimmed.

[–] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

So it's just a post on our instance, but it was written like a blog article. https://beehaw.org/post/107014

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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?

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[–] hamborgr@feddit.de 3 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Yes. IIRC it's even discussed in the official docs. Basically just limit post creation on the server and allow comments.

The nice thing about open source is that in the future there might even be add-ons that better format it for blog display vs thread display.

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[–] geoma@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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 :(

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[–] octt@feddit.it 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

comments aren’t a thing with writefreely

What do you mean? You can look up any profile in the form of @blogname@writefreelyinstance.domain from 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)

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[–] jakob@lemmy.schuerz.at 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

Funny coincident: nutomic even wrote something about it here in this thread.

[–] SudoDnfDashY@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] KaKi87@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hi,

I'm feeling the same and wondering the same, did you ended up trying this, and if yes, do you have some advice on how to manage this particular use case ?

Thanks

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Someone had mastadon comments on their blog. Maybe something similar?

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[–] FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Because of the "abuse of the software" I mentioned above.

But I think my current solution to this would be to keep the static website (blog) and just add a sentence there, like "Click here for the official comment section to this article", linking to a Lemmy/Mastodon thread.

With this I can have the advantages of both worlds and even if I will change the blog software, the comment section will be the same, which is a big plus, because I already switched from Wordpress to Pelican and there was no way to backup comments.

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