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.
He admitted to using AI to write the original post, for some of his comments and for his code. Did you not read the whole thread?
Me:
@rimu@piefed.social
In context, I was asking what if you're wrong about there not being a human being behind this Trained MOLE, reading all these disproportionately negative replies.
I certainly did, why did you think I got so incensed about it? But as I just said to you from my Mastodon account;
My apologies again for unloading on you with both barrels last night. I stand by my objection to the way Stanton was being dogpiled, but in hindsight I was just as merciless to you as I saw people being to him. Which was not only hypocritical, but not good de-escalation on my part, quite the opposite.
I've got some intense stuff going on of late, and struggling with sleep dep. But that's my problem and my responsibility, not yours, or anyone else's. I hope you can accept my apology.
In future I plan to restrict my online posting activities to mornings and afternoons, along with my caffeine intake, and improve my sleep hygiene. Working from my bed must stop.
I'm hoping that this will help me keep a cooler head, and avoid a repeat of this nasty posting behaviour on my part. If there's anything else I can do to repair our relationship as fellow green-left activist and fediverse devs, please do let me know : )