Still in development, but got #ActivityPub replies working! Once it goes live, replies from the fediverse will show up on Remark.as.
Last major issue is to add some basic moderation. Already got instance-level blocking done so I can easily defederate from bad servers, but want to make sure we can handle any potential abuse from individual users too.
@liaizon so Remark.as is really just an experimental UI layer for commenting on Write.as-hosted posts. Behind the scenes, everything is Write.as/WriteFreely.
When it's fully fleshed-out, I think all the social functionality you see in Remark.as will simply be rolled into WriteFreely. Feedback so far is that many people don't want a totally separate interface / app for commenting and interacting with posts.
For federated comments on @write_as, I'm gonna start with just exposing Remark.as comments to the fediverse. This should at least get the basic data there, though you still won't receive replies from Mastodon etc.
Then I'll work on receiving replies from the wider fediverse, and finally moderation tools. We'll see how it looks with replies showing up in the Remark.as UI, and then maybe move to showing comments on blog posts themselves.
Maybe we can start collecting basic stats on likes and boosts from the fediverse before getting to full comment support. That'll at least be easier -- won't have to worry about abuse and spam.
Just not sure where to show those stats. Maybe just to the author on their posts, like we do with views.
Made a bunch of progress on this today — now we're accepting and tracking the number of likes you get from the #fediverse on @write_as!
It's just not displayed anywhere. So that's the question — where do you want to see the number of likes you've received?
I know many people use #WriteFreely / Write.as to avoid likes and normal social media stuff. So should we just display the number on your stats page? Only to you on the post (e.g. next to "views")? Only in social spaces like Read.Write.as?
Made it to Brussels for #FOSDEM! Will be hacking on some #WriteFreely stuff today, but looking forward to seeing everyone and going to some talks tomorrow.
On a similar note, FOSDEM always falls right around Feb. 2, which is the day I launched @write_as back in 2015 (before it was WriteFreely).
It's pretty wild that I've been working on this for nine years, and really amazing to see all it's grown into. I never expected any of this when I started it way back then.
This week, after 3 years of work, I finished a giant project migrating a long-running publication to @write_as. 🥳
Besides getting this site on the platform, a ton of new features and improvements came out with the whole project -- from supporting team publishing to custom layouts.
I'm really excited to see the site up and flying, but also to be freed up again to focus on Write.as, @writefreely, and the rest.
The first thing I'm going to do is get the next @writefreely release out (v0.14). It's been almost a year since the last one (!!) and there are a ton of fixes and improvements that have been waiting too long.
Look for that tonight or tomorrow. I want to get a few more fediverse-related features in there before getting this out the door.
I'm looking for a little help working through some database scaling issues with #WriteFreely.
On our Write.as instance, we're up to 4.25 million rows in our posts table, and it's causing problems for some individual blogs with 9,000+ posts.
I have an idea of what some bottleneck queries are. But wondering if there are easy db optimizations we might make (indexes, etc.), and if anyone can help identify what they might be.
@isotopp Thanks for reaching out! It's MySQL 5.7, running as a service so getting access to the box is a little more difficult.
Slow queries are on now, but logging to a file I can't figure out how to get access to unfortunately.
I made a little progress and discussed the issue a little more here -- would be curious if you have any other input, or if you think partitioning the table might be worth it: https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/issues/741
Suddenly Meta can see a much wider social graph for me. They can find any alt accounts. They can recommend those to the people I know on Threads / Instagram / Facebook -- or to complete strangers.
If those strangers hate me or people like me, oh great, now I'm facing all kinds of new harassment from this poorly moderated meganetwork.
(Obviously many people in marginalized communities have already explained this to us all. All credit where it's due, I'm just walking through the mechanisms here)
But as fediverse admins and developers, maybe now it's worth thinking specifically about these threats to privacy posed by bad actors like Meta.
I can imagine a future where these big players coexist on the network (for those who want it) -- where we use Threads to our advantage to show off the promise of an open social network, and get more people on more humane tools that make up fedi today, while severely limiting the damage companies like Meta can bring to this space.
For the first time in several months, our hosting costs for #WritingExchange are going up again, from $89 to $189 per month.
We can comfortably support it, thanks to everyone who financially contributes to the community! If you're interested in contributing as well, you can do that here: https://opencollective.com/writingexchange
Just read a Wired article about it, where the writer (naturally) poo-pooed Mastodon as "too complicated!" while uncritically saying Bluesky is "decentralized" despite having a single node and an unfinished protocol. And like yes, people wouldn't think that about Mastodon if everyone was just told to sign up on .social