I’ve long been thinking about writing some technical things I didn’t find easily on the internet down somewhere.
I don’t want to use a platform like medium as I’d like to have control over my data. I’m already selfhosting diffrent web services like a password manager (vaulwarden), audiobookshelf and more in docker behind a reverse proxy. So whatever software I decide on should have a docker image available.
It would also be rather nice if the software would play nicely with the fediverse, so from some quick searching it seems that WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin would work nicely.
It there some other software I’ve overlooked that I should also consider?
I thought about doing something like this, but came to the conclusion that ActivityPub doesn’t make too much sense for a traditional blog. A static site generator with RSS is cheaper, easier to host, more reliable, and a better experience for users.
If I want it on the fediverse, I can just post a link on my mastodon account/lemmy communities. If I’m extra lazy, I can automate that part.
The main issue with the AP protocol is that there’s no way to see old posts. If a new user wants to see your blog content, their server might not have recorded older articles. It’s simply not a good protocol choice for publishing that type of content (IMO)
Wordpress+AP would solve that problem, but only because wordpress remains accessible as a regular website. Unless you want to integrate e.g. a comments/like system using AP identities, I don’t think it’s worth the hassle of maintaining a stack like that.
Plus, if you are publishing content directly to the fediverse, you need to worry about how your article’s formatting will render in the various fediverse clients out there. You’ll also need to worry about actually federating with other servers, and potentially being blocked for arbitrary/technical reasons you need to debug.
…those are just my initial thoughts on this idea. I’m interested to hear opinions from others who disagree and/or are running their own AP blog. SSG + RSS still feels like the winning combo to me.
It generally works, but comments are messy. You need to lock them down in Wordpress as otherwise spammers will use it to spam the all federated subscribers (which is much worse than regular Wordpress comment spam), but if you do that incoming comments from Mastodon seem to require manual approval in Wordpress, which is quite annoying.
Just thinking out loud here, but could only allowing people to comment with their fediverse accounts from elsewhere be a solution?
That is exactly what I was describing in my post. Sorry if it wasn’t clear.
But in Wordpress these comments then show up as for approval before they are displayed under the article on the Wordpress website itself. Maybe there is a way to configure that better, but I have not found it yet.
Oh okay, so you’re saying that the only way to only allow people to comment with fediverse accounts also involves manually approving all of them? That’s a bummer, hope wordpress fixes that at some point.
I think the comments work fine when viewing them from Mastodon etc. but to have them show up under the article on my Wordpress page I currently have to manually approve them in the Wordpress admin page. It is either a configuration mistake I did or something that the activitypub plugin for Wordpress could maybe improve, not sure.
That is actually interesting to know. Could you maybe link a blog that is using the plugin so I can see how it looks both on the Wordpress page and on Mastodon?
What I realized is what I really would like is for the blog to present itself to lemmy as a community and each blog post as a post in lemmy. So everyone that has a lemmy account somewhere could comment it and follow the blog just like a community on an instance. But I don’t think there is a plugin currently available like that. So maybe the best I can do right now is what @[email protected] is doing and posting the blog entry as a lemmy post aswell.
https://wedistribute.org/ is an ActivityPub enabled Wordpress site.
However, currently you have to follow individual authors as the Wordpress AP addon is geared towards Mastodon style user following.
I’ve got mine all over the place. Typically I contribute to the Gentoo Wiki, but I recently started using my Lemmy instance for that, because why not?
https://lemmy.srcfiles.zip/post/3841
In terms of self hosting though, WordPress isn’t a bad option, and it’s often used for this purpose “in the wild”.
You mentioned that you don’t like the styling of MediaWiki - it’s possible to skin MediaWiki; the wiki version of that Lemmy post is hosted on a MediaWiki instance that doesn’t look like Wikipedia!
Other things to consider:
- static site generators
- pandoc markdown / RST -> html workflows
That seems like an interesting idea. But even if it dosen’t look like Wikipedia I don’t really like the “look and feel” of MediaWiki for what I want it to be.
But posting it on a private lemmy instance seems like a really nice thing. As noted in another comment that is probably the route I will go for now.
Did you take a look at write freely or other blogging software with native ActivityPub support?
No, but I will check it out now!
Edit: Sorry for the double response… I got an error the first time I hit Submit.
Sorry for the double response… I got an error the first time I hit Submit.
My favorite feature of good old reddit (rip)! Makes me feel right at home.
I almost deleted it but decided an edit would be more fun. I’m glad I didn’t delete it now 😊
