Federated Blogging Platforms

sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to Fediverse@lemmy.ml – 30 points –

Just trying to check and make sure I never missed any. Is it just writefreely and plume right now?

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Wordpress obviously.

Friendica, Hubzilla and Streams also work quite well for long-form blogs.

Thanks, this made me actually take the time to look into hubzilla finally and its my first time hearing about Streams.

@sabreW4K3

you can have all the features of Hubzilla and make it look like Writefreely

https://im.allmendenetz.de/channel/blogbasic-one

Okay, I guess my next big question is, what is hubzilla at its core? Is it a NextCloud alternative?

I think originally it tried to be a Facebook alternative, but over time it developed into a personal cloud space of sorts. I would agree with the comparison to Nextcloud as of 5 years ago, but these days they pivoted into the enterprise space and isn't that nice for home users any longer.

Does Hubzilla have CardDAV and CalDAV support? I'm using NextCloud for calendar and contacts primarily, would be interesting to try Hubzilla as a replacement if it's feasible.

Yes and WebDAV support.

Sorry to bother you again, I was starting to look into Hubzilla and my brain started hurting, because I can't understand how you federate contacts, calendar and file hosting. That said, I started looking into the contacts and calendar thing and this came up

Hubzilla and Nextcloud both offer features for managing contacts and calendars, but they cater to different needs:

  • Hubzilla focuses on social networking and doesn't have built-in calendar or contact management features. However, some Hubzilla servers offer integrations with third-party calendar and contact apps.
  • Nextcloud excels at personal cloud storage, including contacts and calendars. You can store your contact information and calendar events on your own server, giving you complete control and privacy over your data.

Is this correct?

@sabreW4K3

Hubzilla and Nextcloud both offer features for managing contacts and calendars, but they cater to different needs:

Hubzilla focuses on social networking and doesn’t have built-in calendar or contact management features. However, some Hubzilla servers offer integrations with third-party calendar and contact apps.
Nextcloud excels at personal cloud storage, including contacts and calendars. You can store your contact information and calendar events on your own server, giving you complete control and privacy over your data.

NO

Hubzilla has a build calendar and has a contact management, also a personal cloud storage and gives you complete control and privacy over your data.

Well, for various reasons I stopped hosting my own Hubzilla instance some years ago, but back then it absolutely had CalDAV and CardDAV. The problem was mainly that this wasn't well exposed in the Hubzilla web-interface, other than an event calendar. But with Thunderbird and DAVx5 etc. you could connect to it and manage it just fine. The WebDAV file storage part worked fine in the web-interface as well.

Edit: these parts are not federated though AFAIK (contrary to Nextcloud which does have some kind of file-sharing federation).

@poVoq

Sure - Hubzilla has file-sharing functionality... but the files stay on your could....

The magic and real power of Hubzilla however is that you can share permission and access rights across Fedi Servers...

so even the files stay on your server you can "federate" access all over the Fediverse ... you canΒ΄t do that with Nextcloud

With Nextcloud you can share with an Email account holder - with Hubzilla you can share with an Fedi account holder

@sabreW4K3

It's true that Hubzilla has access permissions for files on your WebDAV folder, and those access permissions sort of federate to other Zot protocol using sites (but not the wider Fediverse), but Nextcloud also has its own inter-Nextcloud federation where you can access files on other Nextcloud instances right inside your Nextcloud.

@poVoq

those access permissions sort of federate to other Zot protocol using sites (but not the wider Fediverse),

there were improvements done in the last years... so with the OCAP function ( /settings/privacy ) and guest tokens ( /tokens ) we can share permissions for files across the Fediverse ... and even to people who do not have a Fedi Account jet

come back on board and have a closer look

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@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn't appear to be active, unfortunately πŸ₯Ί

There's a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don't have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn't support members-only posts (like Ghost).

Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There's no shortage of WP plugins!)

As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn't appear to exist at present.

It's a real shame about Plume. I actually saw that notice on the Plume website, but thought as long as I can get it up and running, it can't be so bad.

I've spent the best part of this week trying to get WriteFreely up and running locally as I just want to host a couple blogs without having to agree to let LLMs harvest my musings, but alas, WriteFreely doesn't work with Docker and the community is MIA.

Ghost was something I was excited about but it only allows one blog per instance, so it's not even worth getting excited about the upcoming federation implementation.

WordPress as a company are happy to get into bed with LLMs, so I'm holding them at arms length.

As for Lemmy, it's far too cumbersome and not adept at blogging. But it's an amazing link aggregator.

I keep wondering if lemmy itself could do a decent job of this, and that being native to a communities style platform is a good thing for a blogging platform on the fediverse.

Lemmy absolutely could, but it shouldn't. It's a far better link aggregator than it will ever be a blog platform,

but it shouldn’t

I'm curious about why you think this relatively strongly (if you don't mind my asking)?

I'm a big fan of tools made for purpose. Lemmy has some fantastic features and continues to improve, but it was never designed as a blogging platform. Even when I duplicate self text posts, it doesn't merge. In the timeline. I like Lemmy and want to see it succeed. Though that's not easy with the ML administration team going rogue or the overt centralization fostered on world, but neither of those are software issues.

Even when I duplicate self text posts, it doesn't merge. In the timeline.

That's kinda the beauty of open source though. The clients can manage this function. And they do.

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I read that ghost was federating, I think.

They are definitely working on it.

I was quite excited about it too, but it's only a single blog per instance.

There's also a Fediverse plugin for WordPress if you already have a host. Caveat: I have only seen it on Fediverse directories. No idea whether it's any good.

I hear all this talk about WordPress, but at the same time, they're selling users' content to AI, so I don't want to continue to use them.