I am looking for a fediverse solution for a blog and I tried it with writefreely, but it has some disadvantages I can’t live with.

The most important one is, that it should be possible to communicate with people within the fediverse. People should be able to comment on every article with a fediverse account, like it is already possible between Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube and others. But comments aren’t a thing with writefreely and this is sad.

After using Lemmy for a few days I just thought if it is possible to use it as a blog and ask on lemmys github if it is possible to restrict a group so only one person could post new articles, but all others can comment. And the answer is yes!

But would it be possible to use it as a blog?

Imagine I would have a group called “utopify.org - Research & Development” and would post current progress about a blog series and you can only comment on it. Would it be possible and would it be something you want to see on Lemmy or would this just be an abuse of the software.

If all of this is just a no-go, are there other ways in the fediverse to have a blog article, which can be shared on the fediverse and be commented on?

  • Mwalimu@baraza.africa
    7·
    2 years ago

    If that would be possible, how would you moderate comments, seeing how random things can get? Federating with only approved finstances (federated instance)? What if you keep your blog, then push every post you make there to your solo-community on a finstance? You can engineer your comment section on the blog to pint here or fetch the comments content from fediverse to your blog…

    • maxmoonOP
      6·
      2 years ago

      If that would be possible, how would you moderate comments, seeing how random things can get?

      I don’t know what you mean? If I am the admin of an instance or the moderator of a group, I could delete comments or is this just not possible?

      Federating with only approved finstances (federated instance)?

      Why doing this? Wouldn’t it be enough to block the illegal instances and those who are explicitly against your topics?

      What if you keep your blog, then push every post you make there to your solo-community on a finstance? You can engineer your comment section on the blog to pint here or fetch the comments content from fediverse to your blog…

      I am trying to be as green as possible. Having a blog on one server and the comments on another sounds like an inefficient way of using resources. Why not just put the articles where the comments are?

      With Mastodon I had the same idea, that I will publish an article, post a link with short description on Mastodon and then use the Mastodon post as the comment section, then edit the blog article and put the link to Mastodon on the end of the article with a simple text link like “Comment section”.

      But even this idea felt a bit odd and more unprofessional.

      Lemmy looks like a really good solution to this atm.

      • Mwalimu@baraza.africa
        2·
        2 years ago

        I don’t know what you mean? If I am the admin of an instance or the moderator of a group, I could delete comments or is this just not possible? Some of the darkest side of the internet can rear its head and the gap between their posting and your deletion can be catastrophic.

        Why doing this? Wouldn’t it be enough to block the illegal instances and those who are explicitly against your topics? You depend on the effectivness of admin rules of those other instances. Using an allow list or a block list has significant implication on spam.

        please go ahead and test it, happy to help with testing if you ping me. It is a great idea which I also contemplated quite a lot.

      • ojmcelderry@lemmy.one
        1·
        1 year ago

        To be honest, I think whichever approach you take is unlikely to have a significant effect on how much energy your website uses overall.

        For example, servers in datacentres are very powerful and are able to run more than one thing at once. So if you were hosting your own Lemmy/Mastodon instance, there’d be no reason why you couldn’t also host a standalone website on that same server. The difference in energy usage would be negligible.

        In contrast, you could argue that Lemmy is less efficient than a straightforward static website because the content of your blog posts will inevitably end up being federated to many other instances. That means multiple copies of your blog will be transferred between multiple servers and stored on multiple hard drives, etc. Whereas a static website lives in one place and doesn’t end up using so many resources.

        At the end of the day, whichever you choose will likely have very little impact. So I wouldn’t worry too much about your blog’s green credentials.

        I’m saying this as somebody who is pro protecting the environment, but also pro prioritising our efforts in the places they’ll have greatest impact. You’ll probably have a bigger impact by walking to the store instead of driving.

        • maxmoonOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          I’m saying this as somebody who is pro protecting the environment, but also pro prioritising our efforts in the places they’ll have greatest impact. You’ll probably have a bigger impact by walking to the store instead of driving.

          Whataboutism isn’t really helpful, because you can believe me, that I have already optimized every other field in my life and people even call me extreme.

          I really want to put the focus on this specific topic.

          But you might be somehow right, that IF a server is already used for an energy consuming tool (like a fediverse tool [Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, FireFish, etc.]), the energy consumption is pretty low in comparison of the fediverse tool, if there is a static website running on the same server. What IF there isn’t this energy consuming tool?

          Actually, I am really worried that this could be used as an excuse and the rebound effect takes effect, using a lot of tools on the same server.