Some thoughts on WriteFreely

• Quite low bar of entry. There is very little in the way of simply writing something and putting it out there. I actually originally typed these lines in the browser, even though I'm generally not a fan of the web browser as a UI.
• Clear and limited scope of the software. Simplicity is a virtue and often goes hand in hand with efficiency and economy. Indeed, running the WriteFreely service on top of my modest hardware-setup only added a little additional load to the old Raspberry Pi.
• A code base that you can have confidence in. WriteFreely is Free Software and written in Go.

• A bit unstructured. There is the "Pin Post" feature as well as rudimentary support for #hashtags but you are forced into a flat post hierarchy that might cause problems down the road.
• Posts are kept in a database. I like my posts and articles around as plain-text files in the backend, preferably under version control.

At the time of this writing, WriteFreely advertises the following on their website:

WriteFreely lets anyone on Mastodon, Pleroma, or any ActivityPub-enabled service follow your blog, bookmark your posts, and share them with their followers.

All that is certianly possible and indeed works as claimed. What is not mentioned is that the above is almost the full extent of the supported "Fediverse" interoperations. So while one can indeed follow this blog on Mastodon and receive messages about new posts appearing here, there does not appear to be support for receiving any feedback or comment on a post coming back from Mastodon. What is more, Mastodon users do not even get any indication that the comments and favs they bestow on a post will never be delivered. (In fact, to add insult to injury, there is evidence in the log files of such ActivityPub interaction attempts successfully reaching the WriteFreely server process, only to enter nirvana immediately afterwards, unreported and unremarked upon.)

My curiosity about the possibility to (ostensibly) "blog within the Fediverse" was the initial reason why I decided to play around with WriteFreely. But the ActivityPub integration falls short of my expectations. Write-only "interaction" with the Fediverse might be worse than no interaction at all. One might even call it arrogant to make use of such a convenient channel to broadcast one's views without any possibility of discourse and feedback, and without making this lack of a return channel known.