Wanted to share something with this community and see if it's useful to anyone. Inkwell (inkwell.social) is an open source, multi-tenant social journaling platform built on ActivityPub. The goal is to fill the long-form writing gap in the fediverse in a way that's accessible to non-technical users, not just developers who can spin up their own instance of WriteFreely or Ghost.
What it does: users sign up, write journal entries or articles, and those posts federate as Article objects per FEP-b2b8 with preview Notes so they render cleanly in Mastodon and other microblogging clients. You get a title, excerpt, and link rather than a decontextualized URL. Follows, boosts, and likes all work bidirectionally with Mastodon.
It's ad-free, algorithm-free, and the code is open source on GitHub (github.com/stantondev/inkwell). The hosted instance is at inkwell.social if you want to try it, or you can self-host your own.
Some things that might interest this community: ActivityPub federation with HTTP signature verification, Stamps (emotional reactions) instead of generic likes, a tipping system called Postage for supporting writers, newsletter delivery, custom profile themes, and data import from other platforms. Currently working on improving comment edit propagation and post scope handling for better fediverse compatibility based on community feedback.
Would love to hear thoughts, especially from anyone who's been looking for a long-form option in the fediverse or anyone interested in running their own instance. What's working, what's missing, what would make this more useful to the ecosystem?
#fediverse #activitypub #longform #writing #opensource
Edit: Adding this after looking into the spec more closely. Inkwell publishes Article objects following the draft FEP-b2b8 guidance. I was wrong about the Mastodon behavior in my original wording above. Inkwell includes a preview fallback, but Mastodon does not currently appear to render that preview behavior as envisioned by the draft. That is my mistake.
> Sorry to be so blunt, but I absolutely cannot abide bullying, of any kind, for any reason.
Once Stanton revealed his identity and stood behind his work both @rimu@piefed.social and I apologized and offered our help. That's all we're asking for, and it's not a lot to expect someone to stand behind their product.
Generative AI brings out the laziest behaviour in some people. They don't even read responses they just paste it in to the LLM and copy-paste the output. The mismatch in work is not something I abide by.
Some coward last month had their OpenClaw agent with a god complex let loose on another OSS project and when the bot got rebuffed, it wrote a hit piece on the maintainer. The bot owner was (by their own admission) hands off on the whole matter.
So, no, I am not at all going to be patient and accepting when a supposedly fully-formed piece of software is launched with zero prior reputation, no attribution, and shows telltale signs of AI usage. It trips all kinds of flags, and I will be wary of it.
> Mastodon HOA
Respectfully, this comes nowhere near the shit I've seen from that group.