Looking through the writefreely.org instances on their website, a lot of the links are dead or closed for registration. The one that is open and working is promoting a paid version. Is hosting a writefreely instance heavy on resources, attracting the wrong people or just not “cool” enough?
Ghost is working on adding ActivityPub to their self-hostable blog software now.
Easy to run, but for some reason it attracts a lot of spammers if you have open registration.
Ah, that’s what my guess was. It couldn’t be that people just gave up on hosting it.
It’s not difficult to self host. Pretty light on resources. Documentation on how to do so could use some work though. I believe I used a docker image to get up and running.
The main reason I personally don’t allow public signups on my instance is that US law is rather chaotic. If section 230 gets cancelled or repealed I don’t want to be held responsible for what some random person chose to write. It may not be a big risk at the moment but I don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with it.
It’s extremely light to run, and very easy to install and upgrade. I ran one for just myself without open registrations. The only con is that the community (self-hostable) version doesn’t allow js due to “safety reasons” so in order to have something like comments for your blog you have to either perform several janky CSS hacks or adjust the source code yourself. The only reason I chose wf was because of federation, but I eventually switched to standard WordPress with the federation plugin and now have comments and whatever else I want.
Good to know it doesn’t have all the functions. Feels more and more that they would like to make money out of it. Which is fine, but then I feel less inclined to help them serve the fediverse.
I did register writefreely.world planning to host that one day, but I need some more selfhosting nerds to help out running all these instances :-) The foundation is now already running a few dozen Fedi instances :-D
That’s funny I just looked at your site and vacancies today. I do not qualify for any of those spots though. You’ve got an impressive amount of services build up. Keep up the good work!
:shrug:
It’s trivial to host yourself, and super light on resources. Personally, I don’t use it; for blogging I write markdown and rsync it over to the server where Hugo picks it up and turns it into a blog. Now that I think about it, I should probably go shut my WriteFreely down. I have a few pages on it, but I hate web app interfaces, so I didn’t put much content in it.
Thanks, I was also doubting about Hugo but came about writefreely as well.
It depends on how you want to write. If you want to use a web interface, WriteFreely is decent. If you like your text editor, Hugo is fantastic.
