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.
@julian@activitypub.space
This was in the context of suggesting that because Inkwell was developed with what appears to be a centaur(1) approach, and you think the Portafed ReadMe reads a bit like Trained MOLE scat, the two might be linked. This is drawing a rather long bow ; )
I think you may be tilting at windmills about Portafed. The author confirmed, in response to your post, that they used a Trained MOLE to help with some surface documentation. This could also be an example of a centaur approach.
Maybe English is not their first language? Perhaps they have a form of neurodivergence that makes them excellent at writing cryptographic hieroglyphics, but poor at writing natural language to explain their work to other humans? It pays to ask probing questions, for sure, but not to leap to conclusions.
(1) I'm referencing @pluralistic@mamot.fr's writing, on when automation is used to support a human (centaur), and when a human is reduced to a meat-based support system for the automation (reverse-centaur, or "human in the loop"). IMHO his best piece on this is Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs.