When I used to blog 10+ years ago I had a killer list of WordPress blogs I followed but as time went on I sort of gave up on the whole blogging thing and forgot about most of them. Now that WP is part of the fediverse I’m curious, what are some of your favorites?
Just a reminder: All WordPress blogs, and the vast, vast, majority of other blogs still support RSS. I’ve never stopped using RSS to read blogs, if one doesn’t support it, it’s not worth reading.
Self-hosted WordPress blogs were actually already able to federate with the fediverse (if the blog admin installs the requisite plugin). The recent news is that blogs hosted on WordPress.com are now also able to federate.
WordPress.com is the name of the hosting service by the creators of WordPress, but you can also choose to host the WordPress software elsewhere (and many do).
Also note that WordPress.org is run by a non-profit organization called the WordPress Foundation which is a separate entity from Automatic, the for-profit business that runs WordPress.com and provides hosting for their own proprietary version of WordPress that costs significantly more than the vast majority of WordPress hosting platforms that provide the unmodified version of the software with all of the features and none locked out behind a paywall.
Moved my personal site off of WordPress around 5 years ago because, for my single-user purposes it was resource heavy compared to a static site generator like Hugo or Pelican. I also had quite a lot of spam traffic, even with anti-spam plugins, and eventually I just disabled comments outright and the new user registration page. Admittedly, I was never that active with it, so I’m fully willing to accept that it could have been a me problem.
I also recall the general security of WordPress being a concern around that time, mostly because it was a popular target, so a big part of me moving to a static site generator was just to avoid having to constantly get on and update WordPress for security patches, when I only posted on the blog a few times a year at most.
Fediverse support has me considering returning to WordPress, but I’m curious how much upkeep running your own instance is these days.
IIUC the main problem with security (and how most WP sites get pwned) is the plugin ecosystem. There are thousands of plugins out there, which means that among many secure ones, there are also many (very) insecure ones. If you’re judicious and don’t install low-quality plugins, it shouldn’t be a major problem.
WordPress itself has automatic updates turned on by default, so if a vulnerability is patched in WP core, that will land on your site automatically without any effort on your part.
One plugin that’s I use on my WP sites is the free version of the Wordfence firewall. While not really necessary given the above, it does give me a little peace of mind.
All that said, the main draw for WP is to be able to manage a website without having to touch code. If you’re happy to write your pages by hand, a static site generator is definitely a lot more lightweight than a CMS like WordPress.
It’s literally the same issues, except that the market usage of WordPress is much higher now at over 43% of the entire Internet and around 60% of sites that use a CMS.
You can use WordPress as a “headless CMS” to generate static pages, but at that point just use something else.
While not blogs, im a big fan of Webnovels.
Check out Worm and Twig from wildbow and Practical Guide to Evil by EE. Some great stories and im sure there are even more
Awesome, will do!
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Aw dang that makes sense. Like when you migrate servers on mastodon you can’t import posts. Well at any rate it will be cool to see how it unfolds.
Just curious, how does WP federation work with Lemmy/Kbin or other Fediverse platforms?
Actually I’m not sure, I know you can follow them on mastodon
From what I can tell, lemmy can’t subscribe to wordpress blogs (?).
This, from what I can tell, is because wordpress is using the User/Person actor and not the Group actor, where lemmy is built on the group actor (community = group).
On the one hand, it would be interesting to see lemmy expand into recognising the User/Person actor in some way, which the devs acknowledge would be quite some work and so not worthwhile at the moment.
On the other hand, I wonder if wordpress has made the right choice here? Given that a blog can generally be a bit more like a community, with multiple authors, and articles with accompanying comments sections, using the Group actor by default or at least as an option in the set up might have made a lot of sense. Of course mastodon is the opposite of lemmy and is built on top of the User/Person actor with minimal support for groups and I’m betting wordpress’s choice was in part driven by that.
Overall though, I feel like the fediverse is quickly heading toward a state where the minimum for any platform is to support both groups and users. I’d suspect that with good support for both, a number of options open up to mould a platform or its underlying API to what a user needs/desires.
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I imagine it means that a Person enabled service allows you to post under your own account as a standalone post, a Group enabled service makes you post under a community or topic instead, mixing with posts from every other participant.
WordPress doing only the former can’t be easily or at all compatible with Lemmy, since Lemmy only supports the latter currentlyReddit is an example of a Group system where posts are associated with a group. This is the model Lemmy uses.
Twitter is an example of a Person system where posts are associated with a person. This is the model Mastodon uses.
Some services can do both; like Kbin with their microblogs and magazines.
Sounds like the Wordpress implementation uses the Person system that Lemmy does not support at the moment, but probably works on Mastodon and Kbin (idk for sure).
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