I’m starting to wonder just how valuable it is that WriteFreely blogs can be federated.
I follow my blog from Mastodon and have boosted my posts in the past, although I’ve only accumulated a handful of followers directly to my blog that way.
These days I tend to manually toot a link to each new blog post (or at least the more interesting ones). This essentially treats my blog as if it wasn’t part of the Fediverse.
Pardon the heretical thought, but this also means that I could switch to other blog software if I felt the need for features, such as comments or search, that seem tricky to implement with Writefreely.
How much value are you seeing in your WriteFreely blog being federated? I’d love to know.
I get a lot of value from it. I toot updates for new entries, but I still have a half-dozen of my most active followers who follow my woodworking blog directly, and most importantly, I follow my blog, which gives me a toot I can copy-paste from when it’s time for me to publish the update.
Every now and then from my main Mastodon account I share the Fediverse handle of my Write.as blog. This way a small but significant number of readers followed the blog’s Fediverse presence, 53 so far.
I’d like to have my WF posts show up on Fediverse under my Mastodon account, as if posted from there. It’s just wierd, and extra friction, to quote and re-post myself.
Not replacing the blog RSS though. People who don’t want to be subjected to the spur of the moment stuff should have that option.
Perhaps it’s not technically feasible to have it both ways, but it would be nice.
Interesting. I posted about account portability previously (Account portability in the social web — underlap), but I imagined switching the server an identity is associated with, rather than associating a single identity simultaneously with accounts on multiple servers, which is similar to what you describe.
Multiple servers would need to track your identity’s followers in order to send posts to your followers. So when someone followed you, each of the servers associated with your identity would need to be notified. Not sure how feasible that would be, although it doesn’t sound impossible on the face of it.
Maybe WF as a client? For example on Android I use Tusky and on desktop a browser, but they both post through my Indieweb.social persona. On publishing a blog post there could be a checkbox for “trim to 500 characters and share to Mastodon”. For extra hotness also include 1st media item if any.