Important Notice: this service will be discontinued by the end of 2024 because for multiple years now, Plume is no longer under active/continuous development. Sadly each time there was hope, active development came to a stop again. Please consider using our Writefreely instance instead.

Should we move to WriteFreely?

Update: i have decided to wait for their next release.

WriteFreely is under much more active development than Plume was over the past months… or years. It even comes with mobile apps (paid tho).
Of course, one appealing factor of Plume is how clean the interface is – especially the discover page.

The (seemingly only) overview page on WriteFreely: WriteFreely explore page. There seems to only be a mix of local and federated posts.

I can and will try to make it less like a simple list and modify it to look similar to read.write.as. Possibly still not as nice, but maybe functional enough. Blogs can have custom CSS, which some of you might want to consider.

One interesting feature seems to be Web Monetization. It might be disabled at the beginning tho, because if enabled, saving changes to your blogs will fail unless WM is set up.

[Enter the poll]

Known drawbacks:

  • WriteFreely supports markdown just as Plume does. This would simplify your migration.
  • WriteFreely appears to neither support sending emails nor uploading files. That’s a bummer, because this way, not even confirming user accounts will be a thing and:
  • The moderation interface also is a primitive list without search functionality – just as with Plume… however, i can edit the url to do moderative actions for a user unlike with Plume, so that’s a small win after all!

Workarounds

  • Uploads could be done by a third party service and embedded using markdown. WriteFreely (or their write.as flagship instance) promotes the snap.as service for it. Of course tchncs.de services could be an option. Unhandily not CryptPad (due to its crypty nature).