Onward, #fedivoyage! This is the last stop; afterwards @blinry and I will wrap it up and look back.
I will take a look at #plume, a "blogging application". This means it's an alternative to #writefreely, which we visited approximately one year ago. So let's see!
https://plume.fediverse.observer/list doesn't list a huge number of servers; and only 6 with more than 100 users. I took a look at those: The non-logged-in start page looks very similar on all of them; it is rather friendly, you can see the newest articles of the local and the federated feed: https://fediverse.blog/
During fedivoyage (maybe even earlier) I learned to really love this kind of clean interface. I already feel well oriented.
The first post seems to be Russian news about a new irrigation device.
"Currently, Plume developers have less time and Plume is not actively maintained. New features may take time to be implemented. Could you consider similar purpose software: WriteFreely, WordPress with ActivityPub plugin and so on?"
:(
But at least the part about the federation (see image) sounds promising...
By the way, if you want to have less Russian and more Ukrainian: On this server you can find a daily "Ukraine summary", which seems to be an inofficial mirror of an Ukrainian newspaper:
So, those six servers I wrote about... Two of them have mostly Chinese (I guess?) articles and aren't very up-to-date. One server only has rare, but continuous posts in portuguese. The two largest servers host a mixture of English and non-English articles: Russian, Indonesian, Chinese... This is much more global than my mastodon experience, which seems to be mostly English, German and sometimes a little French. But that might also be caused by my bubble...
The remaining server is https://write.tchncs.de/ which is, who would have guessed, mostly in German. But it doesn't have open registration, so I'll probably settle for sometimes-indonesian otakufarms:
Yes, I created my #plume account on otakufarms. It works like writefreely: You have an account, with which you can start blogs, on which you can post blogposts. My account (Piko) has a blog (Fedivoyage), and I already started posting:
But the interesting part is how well it federates...
Using the mastodon syntax, my plume account should be something like this: @Piko – which works for a lot my of other fedivoyage accounts... But it doesn't show up. I can think of three possible reasons: 1) plume doesn't federate well; 2) my Mastodon instance defederated with plume.otakufarms.com; 3) it's not synchronized yet, but will show up later. I don't find the latter very convincing, because I created that account some days ago...
Ah, ok, after @pascoda pointing it out to me, and me noticing @blinry already following the plume account, I found it myself. -.- I'll leave the comments above for further reference and shame.
I tried to make a timing experiment, but the plume server timed out. I don't think that it's a plume problem. But still, the blog post got published (although it doesn't show up here on Mastodon, I think?). Not the best experience.
And I think you have to "fetch" every single blogpost by searching for it's URL on Mastodon to have it show up on the Mastodon profile. I'll do an experiment with that – or at least I try; I think I'll get another timeout while trying to publish it.
Well, I'll finish my little tour of plume with that. It's nice, but as it's not actively developed right now and hasn't a ton of open instances, I'll stick to writefreely. Both of them have nice, clutter-free interfaces – writefreely is a bit too extreme on that, which even makes it a little worse for reading. I prefer plume's blog overview.
If anyone finds a way to follow certain blogs on plume, please tell me.
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