I want to make a blog and I'm thinking #writeas or #writefreely because of #federation support.
Any reasons why a vps solution is better than the pro plan they give?
@zem
@kev moved from Wordpress to Jekyll about a month ago or two. Wordpress isn't bad but it is overkill for a blog site. Kev was using paid plugins to achieve static site performance on his old dynamic blog.
https://kevq.uk/goodbye-wordpress-switched-to-jekyll/
@murtezayesil @zem @kev I searched about jekyll+activity pub and I didn't find any info about them working together.
@apathetic_bystander @murtezayesil @zem they do work together, but it’s very complicated and you have to set it all up by hand. I’ve considered re-implementing it, but honestly, it’s not worth the hassle IMO.
@zem thought wordpress as an option but I think that it is a bit overkill for me and I also read that activity pub plugin has some issues. Not sure how true is that though
@zem @apathetic_bystander - I didn't know that such a thing existed in WordPress. Thanks
@apathetic_bystander while I use WordPress and still federate, I can't think of any reason that it's better than @write_as. Their service is wonderful.
@arh Thank you so much! 🙏
@apathetic_bystander Uh........ SELF HOSTING! Yea! That's surely a good thing.. Right? Right?
(And because I'm from reddit... /s)
@apathetic_bystander @ChrisWere always useful to have a VPS if you don't have one already - I guess it depends on your skills (and how easy you want things)
@neil @ChrisWere With the Pro plan you can also use the snap.as to host photos. With the freely(self host) you have to find another solution.
I can create something from scratch (only html and css no js) but I prefer not to, unless there are big benefits
I assign a unique toot to each blog post and pretend that they are bond in such a way that boosting the toot boosts the blog post or replies to toot actually are comments to blog post 😁
Pros
> I don't have to run a hefty server for dynamic site generation.
> I can evaluate toot's favourites and boosts as analytics for that blog post.
> Git repository is my backup.
Cons
> Blog is static and I don't see others' "comments" in blog posts.
Maybe it would be possible to pull all comments from your own federated timeline by a bit of Javascript to display them inline in your blog. Not necessarily the most elegant (I normally disable Javascript), but it could fall back to a link anyways.
@kristof
I was thinking of embedding the toot at the bottom of the blog post but it imports JS from the instance which in turn increases blog's weight. Not necessary.
Pelican SSG is written in Python. Possibly a plugin could be added to put replies into blog. But I don't want posts to get longer forever. I actually prefer not having the replies in same page as post.
If I want to feature a particular reply, I can quote it.
@murtezayesil this is a very creative idea 😀 I don't know if anyone would like to read or comment on any of my blogposts but I think that having that option is the whole benefit of the federation.
@apathetic_bystander I'm all about personal blogs, but would you care to explain what would be the benefit of federating a blog? What does that even mean? Genuinely asking out of curiosity 
@gabmus through your mastodon, pleroma etc account you can follow a blog, reply to the blogposts etc.
In a way you can substitute the email subscriptions or disqus for comments.
Not 100% sure how mature the whole system is but you get the point
@apathetic_bystander Thanks for the clarification, gotta say it's interesting. But this way the blog needs a full fledged ActivityPub compatible backend, right? If so, would that mean that blogs built with static site generators shouldn't be compatible?
@apathetic_bystander I am honestly thinking about good old wordpress again, with ActivityPub Plugin. My thoughts are not finalized yet, an static blog might also be possible.