WriteFreely

WriteFreely is a minimalist blogging platform that publishes to the fediverse via ActivityPub. When you post on a WriteFreely blog, people on Mastodon or other ActivityPub platforms can follow your blog directly from their existing accounts and see new posts in their timeline.

The writing experience is deliberately stripped back. There is no media library, no comment system, no sidebar widgets. You open the editor, you write, you publish. The design philosophy is that a good reading experience follows from removing distractions rather than adding features.

WriteFreely can run as a single-user blog or a multi-user platform with multiple writers on the same instance, each with their own blog. Access can be set to open registration, invite-only, or completely private. The admin interface handles user management and basic configuration.

It is written in Go, which means the binary is small and deployment requires minimal server resources. A single instance runs comfortably on a low-spec VPS. SQLite is supported for low-traffic setups, with MySQL available for larger deployments.

A managed hosting option is available through the creators at write.as if you want the WriteFreely experience without running a server. The self-hosted version is AGPL-licensed and free.

The audience for WriteFreely is writers who want their own corner of the internet that connects to the broader open social web, without the complexity of running a full CMS.