2 mo. ago • 98%

What's a cool publishing medium for text-based posts nowadays?

i'm looking for a place/means/medium for texts that i write. content is essays on topics that i find worthy writing about with hints towars philosophy (i guess).

twenty years ago the right answer to my question would have been a (we-)blog - what's the current day equivalent for such a venture?

optimally, a solution would neither be based on lock-ins, data collection/aggregation or other shady business and would be freely (e.g. in a web browser, no login/registration required) and easily accessible.

40 comments

Wordpress recently started offering fediverse federation. That it exists is the sum total of what I know about it, but I can see the potential.

28
- WordPress is still the best option IMO. The software and ecosystem are very mature and as you say they're friendly to the fediverse too
  
  5
- i used wordpress for over a decade but left last year when the AI hype started ramping up and there were reports that even selecting the option to turn off post scraping doesn't work because the bots blocked by the site's robots.txt doesn't update.
  
  basically: wordpress doesn't let you control AI scraping so is it still the best platform those of us worried about that are gonna be able to find?
  
  3
WriteFreely and Plume are based on ActivityPub and can be followed from the Fediverse (in addition to RSS of course)

13
- very intersting! thanks!
  
  2
- Do you have any opinions on or comparison of the two?
  
  1
  
  I used to prefer Plume because it's written in Rust, but, well, it seems like it isn't maintained right now, so WriteFreely is currently the better option
  
  5
  
  Plume seems discontinued or not actively maintained (anymore)
  
  5
  
  Absolutely love WriteFreely. Simple, fast, federation works flawlessly.
  
  3
Writefreely is a fantastic option. Your posts and profile integrate perfectly with the Fediverse right out of the box, it's nice to look at and really nice to use. It's also FOSS. RSS is supported by default. If you want to tinker with it you can add custom CSS and it's self-hostable. I host my own instance and it's by far the simplest & easiest federated software I've run. An absolute peach - highly recommend!

13
Something really weird and interesting is Gemini Gemlogs. Technically not WWW, but still an internet platform.

Something more normal and accessible is Hugo.

7
- i've been into gemini and similar tech - and i really love it! did actually consider it, although i'm not sure whether it's an obstace for less tech-savvy people to reach my content?
  
  Hugo looks promising - especially since i'm somewhat critical of huge (js heavy), dynamic websites
  
  2
  
  Hugo <3
  
  Dead simple, yet so much you can do.
  
  2
ClassicPress is WordPress without Gutenberg, if you're used to that interface. It was based on 4.9 but now on current releases.

Whatever Molly White uses for https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ is something she wrote and was available on one of her accounts.

I'm looking for a similar thing that absolutely excludes all scraping, bots, search engines, etc. I think the only way we get the web back is cordoning the leeches off to one side. Let them drown in each other's AI regurgitation.

7
… Lemmy?

5
Still a blog. Host your own Wordpress or Ghost blog. Substack and others are evil.

5
- but how do i gain reach? should i just advertise on lemmy/fediverse and hope to get traction?
  
  2
  
  with good posts?
  
  4
  
  I suppose promote it everywhere you can? I don't have experience with that. Probably Threads, the Shitter-site, FB, etc, if you have accounts. Anything where people can link something they liked.
  
  2
- What's evil about substack?
  
  1
  
  They defend platforming nazis in the name of free speech or something.
  
  1
Use some static site generator like Hugo and host your files on a Github, S3 or any other static site hosting. For comments you can use disqus or whatever is popular nowadays.

3
It's very cheap and easy to do with static HTML files hosted on S3. But of course, that requires using AWS, which means Amazon, which means corporate evil. You would have complete control over it, though. It can also be slow to propagate any changes, so you'll want to get your pages right before uploading them. You can update them, it just takes a long time to get pushed everywhere. That part is pretty annoying, but it is very inexpensive.

3
I heard substack was a new medium.com so it might be worth taking a look.

3
- Substack is a safe harbour for actual Nazis and they refuse to do anything about it.
  
  Everyone should avoid that site like the plague, and encourage anyone they know using it to do the same
  
  8
- I tried to create a blog on substack once, I got literally zero views across a few posts. I feel like the only blogs there that get recommended are by people who are already semi-famous, suggesting the usual problem of recommendation algorithms killing entry for new creators. It also strongly encourages a paid model, you also usually have to subscribe to comment on others' posts which makes it hard to get your blog out there. I'd say it's more a publishing platform for people who are already well known than for ordinary people.
  
  3
https://everything2.com/

is a text based, massively interlinked website that predates Wikipedia.

The topics(nodes) range from non-fiction informational to philosophical musings.

Will need an account to add nodes.

2
- this looks very interesting! any pointers on how to (get) use(d to) it?
  
  2
  
  Nope, I've never posted, just remember it as a huge trove with a decent vibe.
  
  Pretty sure it is just: create account and post.
  
  I think some people add a CC licence to their works.
  
  This has all the starter info:
  
  https://everything2.com/node/e2node/An Introduction to Everything2
  
  https://everything2.com/title/Everything2+Help
  
  The gridbox shown at the bottom of each page, shows the nodes related to the page you are on.
  
  2
Modern equivalent to blogs would probably be vlogs (videos on tiktok or other platforms like that)

Blogs are still a thing, check out WordPress.org

Another option is publishing on a place like medium.com

None of the above are optimal regarding your concerns about data collection, etc.

To address that, you could just set up your own personal website, if you don't mind learning how to do it

2
- i already know how to create my own website - i'm just curious whether that's (still) the best option
  
  1
  
  Regarding the concerns you listed, it's the option that gives you the most control over content and access to it.
  
  All the others are a trade off in exchange for them promoting you.
  
  7
  
  If you implement activitypub somehow it would be great. If you intend on allowing comments I'd love to be able to do it from an existing fedi acct.
  
  2

You've viewed 40 comments.