Matt Baer - Federated Blogging with WriteFreely

Abstract

As the social media landscape has changed over the last couple years, more people are looking to alternative and decentralized platforms like the ActivityPub-based “fediverse.” While much fediverse content is focused on microblogging, we’ve built an ActivityPub blogging platform called WriteFreely that focuses on long-form content. This little-supported media format has plenty of potential for how people view standard “social media,” especially when combining other networks (e.g. Bluesky’s ATProto) and distribution methods (e.g. email).

In this talk, I’ll show how WriteFreely works, share lessons from implementing ActivityPub, and discuss how we might build a richer web ecosystem with multi-protocol, open source applications that anyone can host themselves. The talk will be in English.

Biography

Matt Baer is a writer and software developer with years of experience building web and mobile applications across a range of industries: education, social media, and human resources.

Today, he helps people create, build, and socialize on the open web through his suite of web publishing platforms and open source tools. He is an advocate for privacy and interoperability on the web.

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