haven VS twtxt

I'm kinda split between "everyone should be blogging" and "I don't want what I say today to be archive.org'd and used to embarrass me 5/10/20 years down the line."

I've been exploring Haven (https://havenweb.org) and the idea of an invite-only blog is appealing. Keep your crawlers off my writing, please.

I started building an open source private blogging system[1] when my first kid was born, and it eventually evolved into the skeleton of a social network--but fully decentralized using RSS and self- (or paid-) hosting. I concluded the only way for a network to actually avoid selling out was for there to be nothing to sell. If I give away the software, and don't control the network then there is no need for users to trust me. It continues to be an interesting journey as a side-project (not raising money means I'm still working a day-job).

[1]: https://havenweb.org

Can I plug Haven: https://github.com/havenweb/haven here too?

It is a solid RSS reader, while also letting you publish privately. The plan is for this to expand into a social reader[1] soon!

[1]: https://indieweb.org/social_reader

You're welcome to adapt the AWS deployment scripts I setup for Haven[1]. I tend to adapt them when deploying other personal projects like the sites I've built for my family tree or privately hosting/sharing old family home movies.

[1]: https://github.com/havenweb/haven/tree/master/deploymentscri...

I've been working on a self-hosted private blogging platform called Haven (https://github.com/havenweb/haven) that I use instead of FB. I've been a FB non-user for the last 10 years, but when I had kids I suddenly really wanted a place to share pictures with people. SSB, Mastadon, etc all seem to be focused on sharing things publicly but I hadn't found anything with a focus on private sharing. After trying to do it with Wordpress and struggling with spam and a fractured plugin ecosystem I just built it myself!

GitHub repo

> there really oughta be a text-only implementation of mastodon or one of the other fediverse ecosystems

Something like this that I know of, in a very simplified form.

> twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.

> So you want to get some thoughts out on the internet in a convenient and slick way while also following the gibberish of others? Instead of signing up at a closed and/or regulated microblogging platform, getting your status updates out with twtxt is as easy as putting them in a publicly accessible text file. The URL pointing to this file is your identity, your account. twtxt then tracks these text files, like a feedreader, and builds your unique timeline out of them, depending on which files you track. The format is simple, human readable, and integrates well with UNIX command line utilities.

https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

I will note that indieweb folks sometimes get a little dogmatic about POSSE being better than PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site). Because POSSE necessarily entails write-permissions, it's titchier to set up than PESOS-ing your public content elsewhere back to your own site. I had a lot of stuff PESOSed from Lemmy (https://lemmy.ml/post/47757) to my own site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/01/14/recyclable-plastic-is...) because I could just scrape the content out of the Lemmy RSS feed and reformat. Similarly I pull over Hypothes.is annotations (https://via.hypothes.is/https://theprepared.org/features-fee...) to a personal wiki where I clean them up into posts for my site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/07/29/geofoam-giant-styrofo...). Sure, if I wanted to update in two places it'd get titchy, but because I'm mainly using these other sites as front-ends to get a canonical personal copy I then mess with, it works pretty well. Hell, I even take Mastodon (https://occult.institute/@maya) and shove it into a twtxt (https://github.com/buckket/twtxt) file on my site (https://maya.land/assets/twtxt.txt). Once you start thinking about stuff with these approaches you can always find a convenient way to duct tape things together.