this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2022
65 points (91.1% liked)

Asklemmy

43531 readers
2169 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy πŸ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago

Kbin has microblog.

[–] ajjlyman@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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 :)

[–] baronvonj@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] m_randall@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] human_no_4815162342@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] mwalimu@baraza.africa 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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...

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] mwalimu@baraza.africa 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] saba@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] saba@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] kromem@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Every time someone says IIRC in a topic about communication, I think they recommend to use IRC :D

[–] SudoDnfDashY@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

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...

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Someone had mastadon comments on their blog. Maybe something similar?

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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"

[–] FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] utopify_org@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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 :)

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] KaKi87@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] comfy@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: next β€Ί