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

Edit: Adding this after looking into the spec more closely. Inkwell publishes Article objects following the draft FEP-b2b8 guidance. I was wrong about the Mastodon behavior in my original wording above. Inkwell includes a preview fallback, but Mastodon does not currently appear to render that preview behavior as envisioned by the draft. That is my mistake.

  • evan@activitypub.space
    3·
    13 days ago

    @inkwell@piefed.social Hey, I’m really sorry for all this dogpile. You shouldn’t be getting this kind of flack when you took the time to implement ActivityPub.

    Thanks for your work. I’m trying it out as @evan@inkwell.social and I have to say it’s a really lovely UI. I’ll give any feedback I can on the ActivityPub implementation.

    • strypey@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      11 days ago

      @evan@activitypub.space

      I’m really sorry for all this dogpile. You shouldn’t be getting this kind of flack when you took the time to implement ActivityPub

      You took the words right out of my mouth. I have no bones about dismissing #MOLE Training as a technology for most purposes; https://disintermedia.net.nz/invasion-of-the-mole-trainers/

      I might argue the toss with someone using a Trained MOLE, outside of the narrow range of applications it’s suitable for (eg digging holes in data). In fact, it’s pretty damn likely. But I don’t bully hobby developers for making technical choices I disagree with. Some of the comments I’ve seen directed at Stanton here are worse than the Mastodon HOA. Which is usually at least about some kind of substantive issue with the project (eg not respecting posting scopes when displaying replies), even if the overreaction is nuclear scale.

      @rimu@piefed.social @julian@activitypub.space If you really believe you’re talking to a Trained #MOLE, do you expect it to take offence and withdraw its participation if you’re sufficiently mean to it? Why would it do that? If you are talking to a chatbot, you’re just hurling all this toxic negativity into the fediverse for no reason. It’s a special case of flooding the zone with shit.

      But take a breath, touch some grass, and consider this; what if you’re wrong? Which is a possibility a rational person must always stay open to. Have you considered how you would feel if somebody judged your AP implementations and your fediverse replies to be the work of a MOLE, and treated you this way? What if this is an unusually prompt and calm person (maybe they meditate regularly or something)? Or they have a disability and they’re using a MOLE to help them reply promptly, but there is a thinking, feeling human being reading these replies. Honestly guys, pull your woolly head in.

      Sorry to be so blunt, but I absolutely cannot abide bullying, of any kind, for any reason.

      • julian@activitypub.space
        2·
        11 days ago

        > Sorry to be so blunt, but I absolutely cannot abide bullying, of any kind, for any reason.

        Once Stanton revealed his identity and stood behind his work both @rimu@piefed.social and I apologized and offered our help. That’s all we’re asking for, and it’s not a lot to expect someone to stand behind their product.

        Generative AI brings out the laziest behaviour in some people. They don’t even read responses they just paste it in to the LLM and copy-paste the output. The mismatch in work is not something I abide by.

        Some coward last month had their OpenClaw agent with a god complex let loose on another OSS project and when the bot got rebuffed, it wrote a hit piece on the maintainer. The bot owner was (by their own admission) hands off on the whole matter.

        So, no, I am not at all going to be patient and accepting when a supposedly fully-formed piece of software is launched with zero prior reputation, no attribution, and shows telltale signs of AI usage. It trips all kinds of flags, and I will be wary of it.

        > Mastodon HOA

        Respectfully, this comes nowhere near the shit I’ve seen from that group.

      • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        11 days ago

        what if you’re wrong?

        He admitted to using AI to write the original post, for some of his comments and for his code. Did you not read the whole thread?

        • strypey@piefed.socialEnglish
          2·
          10 days ago

          Me:

          what if you’re wrong?

          @rimu@piefed.social

          He admitted to using AI to write the original post, for some of his comments and for his code.

          In context, I was asking what if you’re wrong about there not being a human being behind this Trained MOLE, reading all these disproportionately negative replies.

          Did you not read the whole thread?

          I certainly did, why did you think I got so incensed about it? But as I just said to you from my Mastodon account;

          My apologies again for unloading on you with both barrels last night. I stand by my objection to the way Stanton was being dogpiled, but in hindsight I was just as merciless to you as I saw people being to him. Which was not only hypocritical, but not good de-escalation on my part, quite the opposite.

          I’ve got some intense stuff going on of late, and struggling with sleep dep. But that’s my problem and my responsibility, not yours, or anyone else’s. I hope you can accept my apology.

          In future I plan to restrict my online posting activities to mornings and afternoons, along with my caffeine intake, and improve my sleep hygiene. Working from my bed must stop.

          I’m hoping that this will help me keep a cooler head, and avoid a repeat of this nasty posting behaviour on my part. If there’s anything else I can do to repair our relationship as fellow green-left activist and fediverse devs, please do let me know : )

    • Rev_Stanton@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      12 days ago

      Thanks, Evan! I honestly didn’t take it personally and there were some learning I needed that will just help me be a better fediverse community member. And thanks for the kind words and feedback! That’s mostly why I’m reaching out. The AP integration seems to be working okay, but I’m sure there are gaps I’m missing from a lack of knowledge.