I have WriteFreely version 0.15.0~ynh1 installed on a VPS running YUNOhost. I’ve searched the documentation and posted to the YUNOhost forum but not made any headway so far.
I’m having trouble getting my WriteFreely instance to federate. I’ve made it visible to the public and enabled federation in the admin settings but I cannot find users or posts from my instance via most Mastodon or Pixelfed instances. The one exception to that is my ‘home’ Mastodon instance mastodon.me.uk. I had WriteFreely installed once previously and followed it from mastodon.me.uk and so it seems that mastodon.me.uk has somehow ‘remembered’ it and allows discovery of users and posts, although it is no longer picking up hashtags. I cannot find my WriteFreely instance from any other Federated site.
The domain is blog.micromail.me and has a valid Let’s Encrypt certificate. I’ve been testing it with the user @testing@blog.micromail.me
I have SSH access.
This one is a little tricky because the documentation and directional copy in customization aren’t entirely correct in the case of custom domains. I helped someone else figure this out here:
Hi Mark, thanks for your help.
I’m selfhosting the WriteFreely software on a VPS completely under my own domain, as opposed to having write.as as a host with a custom domain pointing to it. Do you know what implications this might have?
Many thanks
Unfortunately I don’t have any experience with WriteFreely, so I can’t answer that with any confidence. But I do suspect it would either be the same, or at least close.
Best of luck on this. Self-hosting is brave and rewarding.
searched from an NZ mastodon instance and found you fine searching for https://blog.micromail.me/testing/
Couldn’t find your profile via mstdn.io instance though.
I personally got frustrated with yunohost for other things though); it felt like everything I wanted control over was being kept away from me. I learned to run on a VPS directly instead and things worked fine.
I tried on a pleroma instance too and it finds it just fine.
Hi Nigel, thanks for looking at that for me. Very annoying, especially as it seemed to be working perfectly a few months ago…
My WordPress site is federating fine, hosted on the same VPS. I suppose I could set up a second WP site but I really like Writefreely.
What did you find was harder to control under YUNOhost? And was that because it wasn’t available in the web admin or simply because as an OS it doesn’t allow it, even from the command line?
I thought about trying to install WriteFreely manually on my VPS (as opposed to via the web admin) and had a look at the documentation but concluded that I would probably struggle to find time to dedicate to it currently, having recently become a parent!
Perhaps in future I’ll be able set up things up from scratch like you have and have things working more reliably.
If you can recommend any noob guides and/or scripts for that I’d like to check them out.
Just checked from our writing.exchange Mastodon instance, and I can find and follow your @testing@blog.micromail.me profile just fine. What other instances have you tried? And are they running other software besides Mastodon (there may be compatibility issues).
Otherwise, you can always run writefreely with the --debug flag to get more output in your application logs (though I can’t help with specifics on YunoHost). If you check those logs while trying to search for your blog and follow it, you might find some other hints.
