As long as they're hosted somewhere on the internet, you can add images with regular Markdown. Built-in support for photo management is in the pipeline though!
No, currently - Snap.as ( https://snap.as/ ) doesn't seem to be open-source and is only available (as a service) if you have a paid Write.as account ( https://write.as/pricing ).
Would also note it works pretty well for microblogging -- here's an example (with some custom styling)[0]. Small posts with a single paragraph also get federated out as `Note`s instead of `Article`s, which makes them show up on Mastodon pretty nicely.
That seemed to diminish in emphasis a few years ago, stopped accepting accounts that didn't give you a credit card end of 2021, and some year recently (last year? I forget…) seemed as though the warrant canary missed a couple updates. (It's up to date now, with an assertion of no warrants ever.)
Are the anonymous speech principles of write.as still as important as when it was launched? Or did the business model for that just not work?
There aren't a lot of options in this class (which I love seeing make it):
And… that's about it? While these other two talk about "no trackers", and mataroa emphasizes ethical (and non-SEO!) speech, only write.as seems to have had had the emphasis around importance of anonymity.
Yes, the project is still alive and well! It also powers our very alive commercial service, Write.as, which has most of my attention. The open source project is just moving at a one-maintainer pace because it only has one maintainer :)
There will definitely be future releases, especially once we get through a roadblock with the tool we use to cross-compile WriteFreely [0]. Otherwise, anyone who wants to see the project move faster is more than welcome to contribute, especially with tasks like code review, to help clear out those PRs [1].
You might like what we've built with Write.as [0]. It's Markdown-based, but without all the publishing overhead of a static site generator.
There are a lot of other great small platforms that are made especially for blogging, rather than being general-purpose like some of the options you mentioned. E.g. Bear Blog [1] and Svbtle [2]
Thought experiment: I have 7 subscriptions. 4 of those are through the App Store. My credit card expires or get lost. What are the chances I enter new credit card information on your site as opposed to App Store?
And let’s not pretend that Apple is making a lot of money off of Indy developers. Most of the App Store revenue is coming from pay to win games and loot boxes.
Oh goody. I get to manage my own payment system. And have to worry about being tax compliant in every country and state. And deal with logins, and refunds and fraud and uptime and customer support.
Or just integrate other third party payment systems like Stripe, Square or PayPal. I'm pretty sure that they will almost immediately make their systems available on both Android and iOS when the bill passes.
Because a market is suddenly opened for business, alternative payment processors can now start offering systems that take care of this, and with different terms from Apple's. You wouldn't have to handle all of it yourself, you could simply sign on with one that provides you with service you like.
This is the free market competition that tech is supposedly in favor of.
The 15% pay cut is an industry convention, but is that actually justified by any financial reasoning? With actual competition in this space, business models can be discovered that could potentially lower costs. Not to mention, given the VC effect, there will likely be newcomers that try to undercut Apple/Google and each other with lower prices by burning investor capital, for a time.
People are already upset that their digital purchases are controlled by Apple. Wait until the startup that they bought stacks of software from goes bust and all of their app purchases are gone.
This current situation already exists with the App Store. There are apps that have been removed from the store that are simply gone forever, such as Flappy Bird, which was at least free. So how does this change anything? Just because Apple will outlive third party stores doesn't mean the situation you're describing doesn't already happen.
I appreciate the feedback. Our setup does require some basic sysadmin knowledge... But did you try installing from source or one of our binaries [0]? What kind of federation issues did you run into? We're always happy to help with installation and configuration issues on our forum, by the way [1].
And out of curiosity, what didn't you like about our thought process on micropayments?
Hey, really sorry this happened to you, we obviously dropped the ball there. If this still needs to be resolved, can you email me again: matt [at] write.as with your username, or a receipt number, etc. so we can get that squared away? Happy to issue refunds for those months when you weren't able to access your account.
Just curious, which features did you want that were proprietary at the time?
The primary reasons for including certain features in Write.as but not in WriteFreely are when they're very early (it's easier to deploy and fix on a single hosted service), or when they involve a ton of external dependencies. My thinking on the latter is that I'd rather leave a feature out than leave admins with a poor experience, vendor lock-in, lacking documentation, etc. But maybe that's the wrong way to think about it.
Either way, "locking features off" isn't a business strategy here, but just a matter of practicality as a very small open source project. As I mentioned elsewhere, we plan to bring things into parity for v1.0. And we very much welcome contributors -- even if it's just reviewing pull requests!
It was a while ago but the ones I remember were email subscriptions, custom javascript, and custom instance support in the iOS app.
Thank You for clarifying the reasoning. That does make more sense and makes it more justified. I still think it would be better to at least have the write.as fork be open source even if you can’t ensure stability/any sort of support.
Hi! I'm the lead developer of WriteFreely -- happy to answer any questions you have!
For a little update on where the project is today: we just put out our last update [0] before v1.0, which we're aiming to release later this year. In 1.0, among other things, you'll find many features we've been piloting on our hosted service (Write.as), including newsletters, social media cross-posting, eBook export, etc.
We're also experimenting with new, non-core features, like photo hosting [1] and comments [2]. Our core focus has always been on just writing, which is why many features (including ones afforded by ActivityPub) have been left out. So we're trying to see what's possible when we keep a clean, simple core with optional "rooms" of functionality around it. If you want to keep up with us, you should see more developments around this before the end of the year, too.
If you ever wanted to hop on my podcast to talk about how you've built and deployed things let me know. We could chat about your tech stack, lessons learned, etc.. The podcast is at: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/ and if you want to become a guest there's a "become a guest" button on the right top to get the ball rolling.
