Goofed Home

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

I should have just written the post myself and been more direct with the URLs. I’m just glad I wasn’t wrong about it being open source. xD

Ok, fair enough. The lure of AI-boosted ‘productivity’ would be irresistible to people in your position.

What grinds my gears is people show up and share their project, without disclosing how it was made, riding on the assumption we all have from the past that you put a certain amount of effort into it and that you did so as a reasonably well-practiced expert in your craft. There’s some gravitas to that and a respect that is earned by giving something of value to us. In this scenario people may value the project and choose to help you by contributing their expertise and time and perhaps a kind of community will form around the project.

Some noob vibe coding a brain fart they had is not on the same level. Noobs are welcome to spit out some slop and give it away, if they don’t pretend it’s something more than it is. And when they share their output in this manner, they shouldn’t expect people to read code that they never read themselves and can’t expect any community to form.

An open source project is not just a bunch of code. It’s also people. When you replace the people with AI, it dies.