I am looking for a fediverse solution for a blog and I tried it with writefreely, but it has some disadvantages I can’t live with.
The most important one is, that it should be possible to communicate with people within the fediverse. People should be able to comment on every article with a fediverse account, like it is already possible between Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube and others. But comments aren’t a thing with writefreely and this is sad.
After using Lemmy for a few days I just thought if it is possible to use it as a blog and ask on lemmys github if it is possible to restrict a group so only one person could post new articles, but all others can comment. And the answer is yes!
But would it be possible to use it as a blog?
Imagine I would have a group called “utopify.org - Research & Development” and would post current progress about a blog series and you can only comment on it. Would it be possible and would it be something you want to see on Lemmy or would this just be an abuse of the software.
If all of this is just a no-go, are there other ways in the fediverse to have a blog article, which can be shared on the fediverse and be commented on?
Kbin has microblog.
You could… but it’s singly not setup for that. There are blog softwares out there that support activitypub-- I have no experience with it, but microblog.pub was nativity designed as an activitypub blog. There’s also a WordPress plugin that’s basically official (maintained by the company that owns WordPress.com) and has known good integration to at least mastodon, so I would assume it works well with lemmy, peertube, etc, since AFAICT, mastodon is the most opinionated of them when it comes to activitypub conformance.
microblog.pub
Ooof, the design of this website is pretty terrible. I couldn’t figure out where a post starts and where it ends or what is even part of a blog post or other stuff on the website?
And in general it really looks polluted and invites people to pollute. Not really something I was looking for. But thank you for mentioning it :)
You wouldn’t even need to host your own instance, really. You could create a community and check the option that only mods can post. But you can’t follow people on Lemmy.
What about calckey?
I think, currently I am traumatized because I was depended on other companies/people, which had the power to just destroy what I built up. If I will build up something new, it should be under my control.
I think calckey/firefish has too many features and might be overwhelming if you want to focus on stuff.
Holy Necro….since I’m here tho I think kbin is more set up with this. It has a microblog section although I haven’t really explored it.
The first time I’ve seen kbin, it looked like the old unstructured and cluttered version of reddit and the old version only was a unusable mess or only if you like being distracted by all the stuff, which is going on around the content you’re there for.
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wow you’re posting this from frendica? do you see my comment? i know mastodon can see lemmy post but not up-to-date. Is it the same in frendica?
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thanks foe the update. im curious if the federation issue is with friendica or lemmy
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i went to your instance to view this lemmy post but while browsing site went down?
Internal Server Error
Apologies but the website is unavailable at the moment.
Request: acf0ba69361dd302df180527d98e9ebc
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I switched from Wordpress to a static website generator (Pelican), because it was bloaty and something broke like after every update.
There was a guy on GitHub that added a Lemmy comment section to his blog hosted on his website. So it’s already an accepted although niche usecase.
I feel like a single user instance of Pleroma would be more appropriate (and easier to host) but even though the character limit can be increased the remote limit of other instances might reduce your visibility, I am not sure.
Because Pleroma is pretty similar to Mastodon, I don’t think it will be good, because both use a time line and important stuff could go to the void if it was posted to the wrong time or it just goes down between a lot of content.
If that would be possible, how would you moderate comments, seeing how random things can get? Federating with only approved finstances (federated instance)? What if you keep your blog, then push every post you make there to your solo-community on a finstance? You can engineer your comment section on the blog to pint here or fetch the comments content from fediverse to your blog…
If that would be possible, how would you moderate comments, seeing how random things can get?
I don’t know what you mean? If I am the admin of an instance or the moderator of a group, I could delete comments or is this just not possible?
Federating with only approved finstances (federated instance)?
Why doing this? Wouldn’t it be enough to block the illegal instances and those who are explicitly against your topics?
What if you keep your blog, then push every post you make there to your solo-community on a finstance? You can engineer your comment section on the blog to pint here or fetch the comments content from fediverse to your blog…
I am trying to be as green as possible. Having a blog on one server and the comments on another sounds like an inefficient way of using resources. Why not just put the articles where the comments are?
With Mastodon I had the same idea, that I will publish an article, post a link with short description on Mastodon and then use the Mastodon post as the comment section, then edit the blog article and put the link to Mastodon on the end of the article with a simple text link like “Comment section”.
But even this idea felt a bit odd and more unprofessional.
Lemmy looks like a really good solution to this atm.
If you’re looking for efficiency, nothing beats a static website.
I don’t know what you mean? If I am the admin of an instance or the moderator of a group, I could delete comments or is this just not possible? Some of the darkest side of the internet can rear its head and the gap between their posting and your deletion can be catastrophic.
Why doing this? Wouldn’t it be enough to block the illegal instances and those who are explicitly against your topics? You depend on the effectivness of admin rules of those other instances. Using an allow list or a block list has significant implication on spam.
please go ahead and test it, happy to help with testing if you ping me. It is a great idea which I also contemplated quite a lot.
I just read these 2 blog posts recently where they are using ActivityPub for comments:
https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastodon/
https://fietkau.blog/2023/another_blog_resurrection_fediverse_new_comment_system
Interesting, I had a similar idea to just link to a Mastodon/Lemmy thread in the blog article, saying “Here is the comment section!”, because I want to keep a static website.
on my pelican generated website I have the rss feed of my mastodon account. I have a script that downloads & converts the rss and then pelican runs and regenerated and includes that on my site. Something similar might work with your idea for comments.
Can you show me the link, I am curious on how this look like?
https://mastodon.sdf.org/@saba/110470671030115751 here’s a mastodon post I made about it and on my site you can see my feed on the bottom of the page: https://chven.us/profiles/sam.html
Looks really nice!
If you decide to try the rss-to-html.py, let me know if you want some help or to see what I changed. I don’t know python well, but I did change a few things in it to get it to work right for me and to include the photos. Or if you come across anything else that does similar, I’d like to have a look at it.
Thanks a lot.
I will only link to a fediverse post in the end of a blog article like “Here is the official comment section”, because I want to keep my blog as static as possible.
Yes. IIRC it’s even discussed in the official docs. Basically just limit post creation on the server and allow comments.
The nice thing about open source is that in the future there might even be add-ons that better format it for blog display vs thread display.
I was just thinking that. You could either implement a way to render the linked content as an article, or allow more rich formatting in the text body itself.
Every time someone says IIRC in a topic about communication, I think they recommend to use IRC :D
Hi,
I’m feeling the same and wondering the same, did you ended up trying this, and if yes, do you have some advice on how to manage this particular use case ?
Thanks
You could solve this with the same approach as lemmyBB. In other words, program a new frontend for Lemmy instead of the default lemmy-ui, and use it to render your site. It would connect to the Lemmy backend to fetch data, and then render it as HTML. This could be written in any language/framework you like, and display a real blog-like layout. This would allow you to set “Only moderators can post to this community” as default when a new community is created, and use different sort orders by default.
I didn’t do front end for a very long time and stuff changed a lot, because I looked at lemmyBB and I have no idea what handlebars or cargos are, I might heard of Rust, but never used it. But at least CSS is still a thing…
Can you recommend a language or framework, which could be even interesting for employers (don’t want to learn too exotic stuff) and it would be useful to work with this technology every day, so I will be faster to make something in my spare time.
I would be very interested in learning new stuff to make a new front end for Lemmy. I really like Lemmy so far :)
Not sure, but Rust is probably not a good idea in your case because it has a quite steep learning curve. You could just make a post in asklemmy or /c/programming to ask for suggestions.
Sure, why not?
Because of the “abuse of the software” I mentioned above.
But I think my current solution to this would be to keep the static website (blog) and just add a sentence there, like “Click here for the official comment section to this article”, linking to a Lemmy/Mastodon thread.
With this I can have the advantages of both worlds and even if I will change the blog software, the comment section will be the same, which is a big plus, because I already switched from Wordpress to Pelican and there was no way to backup comments.
Someone had mastadon comments on their blog. Maybe something similar?
Yes, I had the idea to put a link to a Mastodon/Lemmy thread in a blog article like “Click here for the official comment section”
Yeah. I would personally recommend using a website that you own, and then linking to in on Lemmy, but it is entirely possible to use Lemmy as a blog.
What if I own the Lemmy instance?
I am still undecided about what the solution will be.
On the one hand a clean minimalistic and static blog is really good to read and on the other side, on Lemmy a discussion will start really fast and as an author of those “embedded blog articles on lemmy”, I can see discussions and can even react to them.
The only problem might be the design, which we already discussed here with nutomic.
There might be much more advantages to have a blog inside Lemmy, if it’s optimized for long reading…
You could. The better question is if you should.
Who is your target audience? Would a microblogging platform like Pleroma or Mastodon be more appropriate? They’re pretty popular.
I am testing Mastodon for a few weeks, now, and I have to say it’s much better to link to a blog and then ask a question and create a poll about it. Many people will react to it. But talking about a topic, using all 500 chars, doesn’t work at all. People don’t want to read a lot there, they just want to quickly get out their opinion on a head line, a picture or a question.
Lemmy seems more like for people who are interested in specific topics and a topic can be found fast, because those are groups (instead of searching through hashtags and even then not all posts have something todo with that tag). On Lemmy a link is shown and the people read the article and start discussions about it. I really want to involve people who are interested in those topics. This is what I am looking for.
I might keep posting the link on Mastodon just to get reactions, but atm I think Lemmy might be better.
Yeah, I hesitated to mention Mastodon and Pleroma as I don’t know the policies on character limits (I suspect it can change per site???)
Link aggregators (like Lemmy and reddit) are weird in that they’re literally invented for the purpose of linking to other sites, like you suggested you would do on Mastodon, but it’s become normal in the past 10 years to make text posts and start uploading media directly on the site. It’s an interesting shift. I guess that’s why I wasn’t sure to recommend it for blogging: you totally can and have a connected community available, it just feels like an unintended purpose. But it seems like it would work, I say go for it.
