Federated blogging with WriteFreely

Your editor has never been a prolific blogger; a hard day in the LWN salt mines tends to reduce the desire to write more material for the net in the scarce free time that remains. But, still, sometimes the desire to post something that is not on-topic for LWN arises. Google+ has served as the outlet for such impulses in recent years, but Google has, in its wisdom, decided to discontinue that service. That leaves a bereft editor searching for alternatives for those times when the world simply has to hear his political opinions or yet another air-travel complaint, preferably one that won't vanish at the whim of some corporation. Recently, a simple blog-hosting system called WriteFreely came to light; it offers a platform that just might serve as a substitute for centralized offerings.

WriteFreely is written in Go and released under the Affero General Public License, version 3; WriteFreely version 0.8.1 was released at the beginning of February. The project is clearly relatively young: a look at the project's public Git repository shows a total of 275 non-merge commits from nine developers. Only two of those developers exceeded ten commits, though, and one is responsible for 241 of them (and 99% of the code). For the security-conscious, numbers like that are a bit of a red flag; it seems likely that few eyeballs have passed over this body of code.

That one author, Matt Baer, is the founder of write.as, a commercial blogging site built with the WriteFreely code. Would-be contributors are expected to sign an expansive contributor license agreement that, seemingly, grants both the owning company (called "A Bunch Tell") and any other recipient the right to distribute the code under any license.

Installation and setup

WriteFreely is not generally packaged by distributors, so users must obtain a copy directly from the project's site. A Linux x86-64 binary is available, but your editor, naturally, preferred to build from source. After all, a local build is more secure, even if one hasn't actually looked at the code being built, right? Any such notions were quickly abandoned, though, after typing "make"; the build process immediately goes off and downloads several dozen packages from a whole range of GitHub repositories. There is no way to get a real handle on what it is pulling in, or to verify that any of those packages are what they claim to be. This is discouraging, given the experience (and more experience) of how this kind of build process can go bad. Kids these days definitely have different ideas about how software should be built and distributed. [Update: the situation is not as bad as portrayed here; see the comments for more information.]

There is a configuration file that controls how WriteFreely works; it is not particularly complex, but there is a menu-driven mode to generate it interactively anyway. The biggest decision that needs to be made is whether it will host a single blog, or whether it will operate in a multi-user mode where users can create accounts that will each be able to host multiple blogs. Once that's done, WriteFreely can either run standalone with its own built-in HTTP server (which claims to be able to handle TLS when configured with the certificate and key files) or behind a proxy server.

The standalone mode is fine for trying things out, but using a "real" web server as a proxy is probably the way to go when hosting something exposed to the Internet. Among other things, that makes TLS support with a certificate from Let's Encrypt easy. (As an aside, it is impressive just how easy Let's Encrypt has made things; there really is no excuse for a site that throws certificate warnings or lacks TLS support entirely anymore.) WriteFreely has achieved its goal of making it possible to set up a new blogging site with a minimum of effort.

The result can be seen over here thanks to an idle domain your editor has been hanging onto for a while. At least, it can be seen there for a while; no promises about that site's permanence are made at this point, and future readers may be disappointed. (Update: the site has since been taken down).

Writing freely

When WriteFreely is configured in the multi-user mode, the top-level page it serves to unauthenticated users provides a little form for account creation and an extensive advertisement (including an embedded video) for the software itself. There is no way to change that front page within the system itself. It does not take much searching, though, to find the template files for the built-in page and tweak them. It would sure be nice if the templating language (and, in particular, the specific resources available to templates in WriteFreely) were actually documented, but one can't have everything.

For a logged-in user, though, the view changes to a blank page with the word "Write" and a few grayed-out icons at the top. The intent is to provide a distraction-free writing environment, and it would appear to succeed; there is little distraction to be found in a blank page. One is expected to enter one's prose, then hit the arrow up top to post the result, either to the blog or to a drafts folder. Text is formatted using Markdown, unless one would rather use HTML; WriteFreely simply accepts either and tries to do the right thing with them. There is probably more in the way of interesting features but, as of this writing, the writer's guide is a little on the sparse side.

Posted text is formatted cleanly, without a lot of extra markup — it's meant to be read. There is little control over the appearance provided to writers beyond the ability to chose between a serif and a sans-serif font. There is a mechanism by which a relatively advanced user can provide custom CSS declarations for a given blog and some minimal documentation on the classes in use. For the most part, it seems that one is not meant to mess around much with the appearance of the site.

There is no support for hosting images in the WriteFreely system; the write.as guide suggests that, to put an image in a post, one should "first upload it somewhere on the web and get its URL, then use markdown or HTML in your post". That is likely to work better for some users than others; naturally, write.as comes with a commercial option that includes image hosting.

In the multi-user mode, the first account created has administrative privileges; subsequent users do not. The administration screen can view the current users and their information, but makes no provision for changing anything. There is no way, for example, to silence or remove an account that is making abusive posts, no way to moderate posts, and no way to take down a problematic post. Some of those things could certainly be done by typing SQL at the underlying database (SQLite and MySQL are supported; no PostgreSQL, alas), but that's no way to run a site. The administrative side of WriteFreely will need some enhancements before it can be used to host accounts from untrusted users.

There is, though, a flag that controls whether new accounts can be created or not. If account creation is disabled, the administrator can send out invitations (in the form of special URLs) to enable specific people to create accounts anyway.

Users can create multiple blogs under their account, up to an administrator-controlled limit. That feature can be used to allow authors to segregate different types of posts. Thus, for example, readers who are only interested in your editor's complaints about the weather can be spared the indignity of reading his political opinions. Until one gets to climate, at least. Users can export their data at any time in a handful of different formats; there is no provision for importing data from elsewhere, though.

Syndication, federation, and export

WriteFreely automatically creates an RSS feed for each blog. There does not appear to be a way to get a feed for the site as a whole, which could be a nice feature for some types of installations. It also claims support for the ActivityPub protocol so that, for example, blog posts can be followed by Mastodon users. Mastodon appears to be the intended means by which others can comment on blog posts; there is no comment-posting feature built into WriteFreely itself. Your editor, not being a Mastodon user, has not had a chance to play with this aspect of the system, but it could prove to be an important piece if the vision of moving away from centralized platforms ever comes to fruition.

The world is full of blogging systems. Many of them are hosted by companies that try to make money with ads, abuse their users' data, or may turn off the whole thing if the CEO has a bad day — or all of those things. Compared to those business models, the simple flat-fee structure used by write.as comes as a breath of fresh air. Other blogging systems are free software, but many suffer from a high level of complexity. WriteFreely tries to address these problems by providing a blogging platform that is simple to set up and simple to use while providing most of the features that somebody focused on blogging might want.

Will your editor maintain a WriteFreely site as the new outlet for his rare non-Linux writings? That remains to be seen. But WriteFreely does have most of the features that would really be needed to implement such a system. The current lack of code review and seemingly uncontrolled build system are the source of legitimate worries; hopefully those will be addressed as more developers discover the project. Meanwhile, it provides a way to keep a blog under one's own control and tie into other federated systems with a minimum of administrative fuss; that is hard to complain about.

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