Macroblogging on the Fediverse

KapmK@kbin.social to Fediverse@kbin.social – 8 points –

I've been exploring and comparison-shopping fediverse server projects recently. I'd like to do some tech blogging for some personal software/hosting projects. The Fediverse feels like a natural fit for tech blogging, considering how relatively tech-savvy the userbase is.

Strangely, though, I've noticed that there isn't much of a presence for macro blogging among all these server projects. Some platforms support relatively feature-rich markup languages, and post size limit is apparently configurable on the instance level for a lot of them, but none of the platforms I've looked at have a UI designed with macro blogging in mind.

Does anyone know of any server projects, either in development or with active running servers, that are designed to support macro blogging?

I've got a list of some of the basic features I'm looking for:

  • Draft posts
  • List view of posts
  • Sorting and filtering posts at the user level
  • An editing UI that isn't a 150px by 200px rectangle in the center of the screen
  • Content previews
  • Decent NSFW content filtering
  • Threaded replies/comments
  • Federation (obviously)
6

If you're already using Wordpress, there's an ActivityPub plugin, it's semi-offficial, and this close to becoming official.
i.e. it was developed independently, but Automattic bought the plugin and hired the developer. Apparently, it'll eventually be integrated into Wordpress (probably through Jetpack - my assumption).

I use it, it basically allows people to follow your Wordpress blog through any Fediverse account, just like any other Fediverse account. You can decide if the full post gets pushed in followers feed, or just an excerpt, or just a link, etc, a bit like RSS.

You might also want to add in the Friends plugin. It allows you to follow Fediverse accounts from your WordPress blog once you have the ActivityPub plugin installed.

https://writefreely.org/ federates via ActivityPub. Last I checked, it was send only — meaning, your posts will federate to other AP services, but you can't receive messages or otherwise interact with accounts on other services. https://write.as might have more features in that regard.

One workaround is that you can set posts to include a signature with another fediverse handle, like a Mastodon account. Then, when people reply to your blog posts, your microblogging account will get a notification, and you can reply from there.

From these write.as has the best writing capabilities, but the federation is push only. You can publish to fediverse and follow the posts from Mastodon, Akkoma et.al. None of the replies are visible from the blog.

The editor and layout is superb though, so worth a try at least.

WordPress has a fediverse plugin I haven't tried, but it is supposed to be quite good. Maybe things change when Tumblr joins the fediverse, we'll see...