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Which one is best recomended for blogs: Sharkey or Friendica?

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    A blog requires a platform designed for blogging. Staying within the realm of federated software, the three natural alternatives are:

    1. WordPress, which, thanks to the plugin that makes it compatible with Activitypub, has achieved a level of perfect integration with the Fediverse.
    2. Ghost, which, federated a few months ago, is not only a blogging platform but is also specifically designed for creating mailing lists based on the Substack model.
    3. Writefreely, which, despite being natively federated, is extremely focused on distraction-free writing and therefore has some seriously limiting features.

    Friendica

    As for Friendica, I'm a huge fan of that software and manage the second-most active instance in the entire Fediverse. I can assure you that I know it well and appreciate all its most important features. But don't be fooled by the fact that some call it macro-blogging software. In fact, if you visit a Friendica account's profile, it's not possible to filter the Timeline of their posts from the Timeline of the posts they've reshared. So, you could virtually create a page like this:

    https://poliverso.org/profile/saio

    But you could only do that if you don't share too much other content, otherwise the result would be like this:

    https://poliverso.org/profile/notizie

    which would be much more confusing 😅

    However, Friendica is a very powerful software that allows you to republish your blog feed, as well as automatically reshare your federated blogs. Here I've listed some very interesting Friendica features for blogging:

    https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-1366-ebfd-2002-91a370393480

    So, to recap, if you want to use Friendica to create your blog, you can: you can create a new account. Remember to define it as a "page account," if possible, but also remember that when you reshare content you like, it will appear on your profile page.
    However, if you don't need the full suite of tools that characterize a social media platform, you're better off using WordPress.

    Sharkey

    We're talking about software with a very nice interface, but it's still a social networking software. Being essentially a fork of Misskey, it also has a section for creating static pages that can be easily viewed from outside the Fediverse, but these pages can't be federated with Activitypub 😭.
    Ultimately, it seems even less suitable for creating a blog.
    If you absolutely must use a Fediverse social media platform, then you'd be better off going with Friendica!

    Hubzilla

    PS: There's also a software called Hubzilla, which is compatible with Activitypub, although it has developed its own communication protocol. I'm only mentioning it because it's a feature-rich and well-designed product, but its interface is quite complex and unfriendly, so although I've chosen to mention it, I can't recommend it as an alternative.


Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
  • @hendrik@palaver.p3x.de fwiw NodeBB ended up being such a joy to author things in that we switched away from WordPress to NodeBB as our blog. We just blog on our forum.

    Now, conflicts of interest are important... I wrote NodeBB, so I am obviously pretty biased :laughing: !

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  • Unless you are on a frantic hurry to make this change, I might be able to help. You'll need to migrate to Wagtail, and I have done some work on integration with Wagtail and the Fediverse via the Django ActivityPub Toolkit. But if you do consider this, you'd have to keep in mind that the ActivityPub side of things would be a ongoing experiment.

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  • No matter what plugin you find that supposedly will do the job, in my experience it is always a PITA that ends up involving a lot of programming.

    I had a good experience with jekyll's wordpress->jekyll import tool. But see below.

    I would go for a database-less static site generator like Hugo

    Graybeard here, so it's probably just braindamage specific to me, but I've found ruby dependency setup and troubleshooting to be extremely frustrating. Hard for me to wrap my head around.

    When jekyll is actually dead (right now it is "only mostly dead") I'll change to something that does not require ruby (eleventy?) or just go back to the nineties and do something barebones with gtml or whatever. Already playing with the latter.

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  • Yes. I'm not very educated on the Worpress side of things... Kinda necessary, though, to keep compatibility with the Fediverse AND the No-AI people in my opinion. I mean the Fediverse is kind of the place for people to go if they don't want algorithms and bots to dominate the place?!

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  • Our first priority will be to migrate the site as fluently as possible to whatever CMS we transition to. Archiving it as HTML and starting from scratch with a new platform — that's a last ditch effort, I think.

    [Edit: I tried to cover the WP fork subject here]

    Hugo as a longterm solution isn't going to float with some of our users, I'm afraid. I can vividly imagine somebody turning the old site into a single "Hello world!" page given that kind of permissions.

    We will need strictly limited access for contributors, and a clear, friendly input field for text...

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  • maybe go for a combination of them

    This is a very practical solution... until somebody (I suspect me) has to maintain three or more installs instead of one 🙂 But you're right, this could very well be a way to solve the "one size fits none" conundrum.

    As for using a WP fork — the point about the ActivityPub plugin breaking compatibility with ClassicPress makes me wary of this approach. And AFAICT ClassicPress is one of the more reliable WP forks out there? In the long term, I mean.

    I'm fine with switching my personal browsers if/when one or the other FF fork turns to the dark side, but I wouldn't want to hop this site between different WP forks the same way...

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  • Thanks for the suggestions! I realise preserving URLs is perhaps the tallest order here, and that we may have to set up redirection to the new ones.

    Failing that, archiving (a static version of) the site could definitely be an option. Considering the long history of the site though, our first choice is continuity over an abrupt break.

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  • I concur. Currently using 11ty for my sites with Directus on top for managing content with a gui.

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