2d ago

How do you actually find fediverse bloggers

I'm starting to get in to self hosting and am looking at self-hosted blog solutions. It looks like WriteFreely is the main fediverse blog platform, with Plume as second though I don't see it used much.

But that got me thinking that it'd be good to follow federated blogs and have some long form reading that I follow, like we did back when RSS was the main way of doing things.

But how do I actually find bloggers? It looks like WriteFreely can federate with Mastodon, but it doesn't look like there's a federated blogging platform like lemmy or mastodon. Is this correct? Where I can I go (other than Medium) to find blogs and bloggers in the fediverse?

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read.write.as shows posts from users on that platform. maybe a good place to start looking. at any rate, it's pretty ad-hoc and manual because, while it federates, you're not going to see activity other than posting.

Oh sharkey (misskey fork) they have a lookup popup, where you can paste any ActivityPub post and it will fetch and display it. Very useful, and if someone shares a link to something Activityoub compatible, it will automatically render under it.

@RagingHungryPanda WordPress is integrated with the Fediverse through the ActivityPub plugin.

This doesn't realllllyyyy answer your main question, but you got me curious how WriteFreely blog posts look from other platforms, and which ones can see them. So, I tried a few with this post of mine. Obviously some of these wouldn't make any sense, and also for some of them I may have just never figured out how to properly format the URL/search the way it wanted. But, here's what I got on every platform where I have an account:
Mastodon ("https://todon.eu/@the-rose-garden@text.tchncs.de/113624027917705904"): If you're logged in, it shows the title, any pictures, and a link to the full text. If you're logged out, it shows you a redirect option to the originating blog. Had to remove this link because PieFed hates it for some reason.
Friendica: Shows the whole post roughly as it should look, albeit with a "read more" accordion.
WAFRN: Shows the whole post roughly as it should look, albeit with all the pictures at the bottom.
BookWyrm: Logged in, it can see the blog but can't retrieve the post. Logged out, it automatically redirects to the blog.
NeoDB ("https://neodb.social/users/@the-rose-garden@text.tchncs.de/"): Logged in, it can see the blog but not the post. Logged out, it asks you to log in. Had to remove this link because PieFed hates it for some reason.
Lemmy: Can't seem to access the post or blog at all.
PieFed: Can't seem to access the post or blog at all.
Pixelfed: Can't seem to access the post or blog at all.
Mobilizon: Can't seem to access the post or blog at all.
Ibis: Can't seem to access the post or blog at all.
Peertube: Can't seem to access the post or blog at all.
- https://calckey.world/notes/a1kv9u8g33 on sharkey (misskey fork) it shows up and it looks okay. For the few where it doesn't work at all, those are very specalist platforms, so it doesn't surprise me.
  
  Oh cool!! Yeah I definitely tried it on a few silly ones just because lol. Now somebody's just gotta try Sharkey, Misskey, MBin, uh... GoToSocial. Probably a bunch more that I don't know about. ActivityPub is so neat!

Feedle seems to be a normal RSS directory, but they make lots of noise on Mastodon - so I guess a lot of the blogs listed there will have some Fediverse representation as well…

@raginghungrypanda@lemm.ee for discovery, the best looking up-and-coming solution is Ghost. They've been around for a decade plus, but they're actively working on their ActivityPub integration.
Early looks at their discovery reader is really promising. A separate tab for "Article" type posts, and another for "feed" type posts.
A lot of the other long form softwares are aligning on the standard that Ghost will try to set... NodeBB, WriteFreely, WordPress, etc. They've all signalled compatibility with each other, which is great!
For more, see @index@activitypub.ghost.org
- Oh Ghost looks really nice. It's pretty slick. It seems to be geared slightly more for creators than consumers in the initial UI, but it's not hard to start digging around.
  It'd be nice if I could sign in as a user and save people to follow, but at least I can bookmark them and add them to rss. I like it - this is a great source!

For microblogging, platforms like Mastodon with large instances. For long form blogging, there aren't any major platforms or instances yet. Discovery happens the old fashioned way with links.

Sharkey seems to support hosting blogs (pages) directly on the platform itself.
- Pages aren't made for blogging, ActivityStreams2 defines some of the post types activitypub can handle, article and page are both different types, articles are for long form writing, pages are for collections of other types of posts.
  
  I honestly don't understand it, that's why I said "seems to support", but thanks for the clarification.
- Anyone had luck installing it recentlly? It worked one day and then some update got pushed (not to misskey/sharkey but something they depend on) and now I can't install it. I'm pretty sure its not exclusive to sharkey or my vps, saw people talking about it for unrelated stuff.
  
  Nope.

The same way out found bloggers for your RSS catchers.
- I haven't done that in 15 years XD

Wordpress supports activityhub, idk how it works.
- You can configure it to make your author page also your ActivityPub profile (compatible with Mastodon). Once people subscribe to that author account, they will get notified of new posts and see them in their timeline. But IIRC there’s no support for historic entries, i.e. people will only see new entries from the moment they subscribed onwards.
  E.g. my blog is available as @mbirth@blog.mbirth.uk within the fediverse. If you go there, you’ll most probably see an empty profile. Only when you follow that account, you’ll see future entries pop up in your timeline.
  
  I think it only shows as empty, as the server won't recieve posts unless at least one person is following it.

It might be nice to have a community or something where people link interesting blog posts or blogs. Maybe there is one? (plz share the link if there is!) I always used to find new blogs from people who did like weekly good post round-ups.
- There is !interestingshare@lemmy.zip, not limited to blog posts, but could fit
  
  Probably better to use a more general community for the time being, yeah

25 comments