Q. Getting exhausted of WP for my blogs what do people think between Plume vs Write Freely
we could host a blogging server.
A. write freely is a little more maintained at the moment
Q. how do you do image hosting on writefreely?
Q. looking at the back end codeing which do you think we could hack on to maybe do something that works with #indymediaback for the OMN project which is a bit more complex. OMN is everything is a network and data flows round this moderated by people
A. but yes, how do you see the blog being used?
Q. Its another tick box when i tell people they have to get off #failbook or meany of us are going to die #XR So useful even if not used. Best they set up their own. Will outreach to some crew, its useful for the #indymediaback as a campaign site for small groups that then publishes to the imc. Ok that last one is a good use... few... found one ;)
A. What kind of hacking on the backend do you picture might need doing?
Q. Nothing at mo... but would be nice to have a codebase that is open to that.
A. WriteFreely is built around writing. There's no news feed, notifications, or unnecessary likes or claps to take you away from your train of thought. You get a distraction-free writing environment, and readers can enjoy a clean reading experience. I generally like this approach, but the lack of newsfeed could be an issue. It comes down to whether or not we feel a blog should be anything more than an outlet and that other site(s) should do more, including linking to "outlet-only blogs"
Q. The underling code of each, what dose it look like to you. Am getting the feeling Writefreely is much more locked down in its outlook. not nessaerserly a bad thing if we work out if it fits into a #OMN type aproch https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/Open-Media-Network/wiki
we are about human moderated flows of media objects - a blog is a way of adding text articals to this flow and to then display them.
A. writefreely certainly has a strong design decision of being plain and simple, non-cluttered, and actively does not support certain things like "likes"
Q. Well it could be eather, the question is more about flows, can information flow in and out. maybe this is not a issue and these can just be one way feeds?
A. I know that writefreely actively ignores some of the data flow in, like "likes",
but the author is working on allowing comments (like via mastodon replies) to feed in
https://video.writeas.org/accounts/writeas/videos
Q. The videos help - like the simplicity, bit worried by the desire for control that is behind it.
cant have one with out the other - am assuming all the tools are opensource - so we don't get stuck with freemeum open-source paywalls ongoing?
We had this problem when we used https://www.liferay.com which we used for 5 years, they started open and ended up pretty closed as a business model. The writly guys started closed and are now opening up which is a better direction :)
A. Both plume and writefreely are open source and have a pretty good license
Q. The plugins and photo hosting code?
A. Photo hosting is handled by plume itself, I think (not confirmed yet) write freely requires a separate service, I think.
Q. snip.it - which i think they wrote and the embedding uses another outside service which might be commercial?
https://video.writeas.org/videos/watch/c88f7af3-a06c-4285-a245-64763634a07d
https://video.writeas.org/videos/watch/cf606290-11cf-4b2c-9952-16f8df26dbd8
https://embed.ly/ is a #dotcons so sending all your media to them is problematic
https://developers.snap.as/ think might be closed source?
https://github.com/snapas is the code here?
A. looks like snap.as is one of their commercial services, like write.as (where they provide writefreely hosting) . Not sure if it's open source but fairly sure you don't have to use it
Q. aha... so we find the freemium that i was smelling with these guys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium think they are restricting functionality to drive people to use there pro functions, yes you can get round this but only at the cost of complexity and incompatibility. I got lost in this game ones before, now weary. Why is snap.as not open source? it cost them nothing. Why use a #dotcons for embedding the is opencode for this?
A. Fair question, need to look a bit deeper. What do you make of the comments here? https://video.writeas.org/videos/watch/c88f7af3-a06c-4285-a245-64763634a07d There's a reply stating they'll likely open-source snap freely at some point as well - who knows what to believe
I imagine it's maybe what they did with writefreely.
Q. Think this model split stuff into moduals push out a mix of free and unfree, when going is good more free, when thinks start to shrink more unfree... its bad model for open-source but not a bad model to survive in capitalism.
A. do we support this model, is it #4opens
Q. It's partial #4opens at least. If we don't support this model, we will be considerably limited.
A. So a #4opens review. Looking at the pieces most are gold, but looking at the ecosystem its likely silver or bronze - so its #4opens but could do better at best.
Its a hard choice - this one looks cooler and activity maintained the other looks more scruffy and less activity maintained. This is why i have not jumped to add blogging before to #OMN and we are talking about it now.
Q. The mild safety net at least is the license of the code that's currently available. Whichever we find most suitable, we can use, safe in the knowledge that if future code becomes closed, we will always be free to use what's been released up to that point, so us or anyone else can continue to develop. Hence why I say, a key factor is about fostering a strong community around something. It can potentially prevent things becoming closed, or if not, there is more likely to be someone to take up the mantle and continue an open fork
A. This is what we went thought with liferay... in the end we had a abondon it evern though on papper it was a good product/commerty.
#openweb projects are about giveing bup controle and leaning on the support of "starngers" this is a hrd thing to hold in place. One solution is to hold onto control tighter/ one is to let lose controle. its a tension/balence.
wightfreely is holding to controle to much to be a safe #openweb project - but this dose make it a safer "capitalisam" project.
Q. It's even harder in some aspects because as long as we're in the digital realm (particularly - though also applies outside), we are stuck using limited and broken tools provied by limited and broken people who more often than not, feel they are stuck in a limited and broken society (and they might still not accept that)
A. YES... this is a circal.
Q. The way I see it, writefreely is not holding control - but write.as and snap.as, etc are holding some level of control. I think it's unlikely writefreely would get closed up, but I would not use snap.as (for example) as long as it's source is not released
A. for me its about lifting the lid are looking at the agenders under the words/facts.