Notices by Matt Baer (matt@writing.exchange)

Hello again 👋 I'm back, getting caught up and back to work on @write_as & @writefreely. More updates soon!

I'll be talking about @writefreely at #FOSDEM tomorrow at 15:00 in the Social Web devroom, UA2.118. If you're around, stop by and stay for the many other great talks going into the evening!

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6017-federated-blogging-with-writefreely/

#SocialWebFOSDEM #FOSDEM2025 #WriteFreely

n.b. this was a "dispelling the illusions" post, not a "welcoming our new Meta overlords" post, btw

E.g. the days of every fedi platform needing to be open source (as you'd get dogpiled for back in 2018) are gone. Proprietary platforms and major corps like Meta are joining, and they're collaborating with other major fedi platforms behind the scenes to take this all mainstream.

But that's what's happening right now, just so everyone knows.

And there should probably be some more transparency. And it can absolutely be alienating, especially to long-time fedizens.

But it doesn't exclude similar efforts from *everyone* building this space. It doesn't crush those fighting for what has made this place great in the first place.

The fediverse is everyone's, and we should all recognize that. Don't lose hope. Keep on building the web we all want to see.

The fediverse is a strange place to be sometimes. It's an open network where progress happens in fits and starts in random, often hidden, pockets. And the rest don't often hear what's really going on. In the 6 years I've built on #ActivityPub, we've all had to fight for some kind of coordination.

Especially re: the new #SocialWebFoundation (which I've backed as an outside supporter via my tiny company @write_as), you can see something new is happening.

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.

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?

@fraying @bedast Not an expert on their implementation, but from the description, they probably only have content that came from directly interacting with a wordpress.com-hosted blog, e.g. fediverse likes and replies / comments.

Since the WordPress plugin is more for broadcasting content to the fediverse and less for consuming it (i.e. can't "follow" from your WP blog), their data collection is probably limited to that at the moment.

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.

@raccoon Appreciate you asking. Yep that's all fine -- there aren't really hard limits on what writing you share, as long as it isn't abusive, hateful, harassing people, etc. (what you'd typically expect from a well-run instance). If you use CWs sensibly then all is good.

@raccoon unfortunately no, since we're using managed hosting we aren't able to change that.

Would recommend a fediverse blogging platform like Plume for long-form content. WriteFreely is another one, which I develop.

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.

Boosts appreciated!

Oh wow, why am I just now trying Vivaldi?

when you think the AI is sentient

@wordsmith @ewdocparris We could keep throwing resources at it and growing this instance, but there's also the manual work needed to moderate and maintain this community.

Since I'm the only admin, and it's still manageable and finally running smoothly on the technical side, I'd like to keep us at our current size.

As people eventually leave, we can look at opening invites again. But there's no definite timeline on that. In the meantime, I'd recommend sending people to other instances.

@ewdocparris @wordsmith Absolutely, the more the merrier! Would be happy to point people to your instance if you do.