Hi everyone! I wanted to know what people thought of WriteFreely and Plume and which one you would recommend for a personal blog. Also, if you can, could you suggest some instances? From looking, I often come across instances with strangely little on their about page, and can’t work out who administrates them. Thanks!

  • poVoq
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    2 years ago

    Plume seems to be not actively maintained. (edit: I stand corrected, development is just slow)

    Writefreely doesn’t have comments, but otherwise it works fine.

        • @ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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          32 years ago

          Why disable when you can use something that doesn’t have them in the first place? It would be like buying a car that periodically sends electric shocks to the hands on the steering wheel, but which you can disable. Why would I buy the car in the first place when I can get one that doesn’t periodically send shocks to my hands ever.

          • @DPUGT@lemmy.ml
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            02 years ago

            Because that’s the one where they don’t include the steering wheel at all. Or the engine block. The shocks and the other parts are inextricably linked.

          • poVoq
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            12 years ago

            Any blogging platform supports RSS. So you can subscribe to them just fine.

            What federation brings to the table is the back-channel, i.e. comments. If you don’t want that, you don’t want federation IMHO.

              • poVoq
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                22 years ago

                Yes I know. But you can also just post a link on Mastodon to the blog (via an RSS bot for example). If there are no federated comments, it is functionally identical.

            • musicmatze
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              02 years ago

              (Just to mention it:) writefreely only publishes articles via Activitypub but does not have a way to view replies on an article (yet?).

              • Halce
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                12 years ago

                Yes, exactly. Personally, I think Plume does it the right way here.

      • @X51@lemmy.ml
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        02 years ago

        It is. Without user interaction, it’s very difficult to get readers to come back and read subsequent articles.

        • @ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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          12 years ago

          I’m not sure I follow.

          People can subscribe to my WriteFreely articles on Mastodon and can comment to their heart’s content. And since I too subscribe to them, I can see the comments. I just don’t see the need to host them myself on my blog.

          • @X51@lemmy.ml
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            12 years ago

            I meant to say that allowing comments is a selling point or promotional aspect because it keeps users engaged and give them a reason to come back. They have a reason to revisit the blog, see new posts, and comment on old posts. Having run a message board for over 20 years, I’ve observed that when people visit without posting something back, the quicker traffic dries up to almost nothing.

            • @ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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              12 years ago

              With WriteFreely (and presumably Plume) people can follow via ActivityPub and comment on platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, and other such locations. On top of that Mastodon, for example, can be used to spread the link bringing new eyes to the blog, as well as permitting comments to be spread around even outside the usual circles of the blog’s readers.

              I really don’t see what hosting comments directly brings to the table.

    • Halce
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      12 years ago

      Plume is still active, just slowed down on the release circles.

      • @sibachian@lemmy.ml
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        32 years ago

        afaik the plume team recommends using writefreely since their development is somewhat stagnant. at least thats what i read and started using writefreely (which i don’t quite like because you need to pay to participate in the fediverse on write.as).

        • Halce
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          22 years ago

          The main branch actually compiles and is active. All it means is that you’re not going to see branched-off releases with neatly written up changelogs very often.

    • MossyOP
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      22 years ago

      I’m leaning somewhat towards plume, just because I can find some nice instances for it. What are your reasons behind preferring it?

      • IngrownMink4
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        2 years ago

        These are my reasons:

        • Write.as is written in Go, while Plume is written in Rust and WASM. It may seem irrelevant, but Go has worse performance than Rust (among other things, because of the use of the garbage collector in Go).
        • All Plume functions are free of charge. In the case of Write.as, the basic functions are free, but if you want to customize it to your liking, you have to pay $6 per month, which is not much, but it is something to consider.
        • Write.as has a hermetic development in my opinion, even if it is open source. Plume is open source, hosted on Gitea (a good thing for those who hate Microsoft and GitHub), and they have a room on Matrix/Element.io to talk to the developers directly.
        • Plume has been translated into more languages than Write.as
        • MossyOP
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          32 years ago

          Nice! I made a plume account a couple days ago. I’ll probably host my own blog, but also post entries on Plume so that people can follow it on the fediverse :)

          • mario
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            02 years ago

            it’s been 4 months now and, in the meantime, plume has also undergone a couple of updates it seems. what’s your opinion?

            asking because i was about to start a similar thread. :P

  • musicmatze
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    12 years ago

    I have a writefreely instance for myself and like it. I would like a static site generator much more, because I can edit and view my blog offline, but I like that writefreely uses Activitypub and I wanted to have that explicitly, so here we are.

    It does it’s job though and is usable for me. I normally prepare articles in a markdown Editor offline and just copy them into the web editor.

  • @X51@lemmy.ml
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    02 years ago

    I tried to find an instance of WriteFreely that I could join. I had no luck in my efforts. I’m test driving Plume now. It seems pretty basic, so I may discontinue using it.