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Episode: 3075
Title: HPR3075: Federated Blogging with WriteFreely
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3075/hpr3075.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:14:29
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,075 for Friday 15 May 2020.
Today's show is entitled, Federated Blogging with Right Free Lee
and is part of the series' social media, it is hosted by Ahuka
and is about 12 minutes long and carries a clean flag. The summer is.
A look at a minimally social blogging app using Activity Pub.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Music
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio
and one more in our series on the Activity Pub Conference of 2019.
I want to talk about, in this case, a talk that was given called Federated Blogging with Right Free Lee
and that was presented by the Chief Developer and a fellow named Matt Baer
and the link to the talk is in the show notes as well as a link to his company which is called Right As.
And his company is the lead developer for Right Free Lee
and what does all of that mean?
Well, Right Free Lee is a minimal Federated Blogging platform made just for writing.
It has no ads and has no distractions. You just write.
It is built around playing text but you can also do rich text with markdown.
It is private by design and is lightweight and easy to install because it is written in go.
Now, the idea that there are no distractions and you just write is something that I think is more important than people sometimes realize.
I was at one time a college professor and I remember reading an article.
I think it was in the chronicle of higher education about a study that was done.
And this would be like back in the 1990s when there were basically two major platforms for word processing.
There was a company called Word Perfect and then there was Apple.
Apple had the Macintosh, graphical environment and all of that and Word Perfect was purely text.
You started it up and you had a blank screen with a blinking cursor in front of you.
And at this particular university, they had, as most universities do, a required course for freshmen on composition.
And they had to write essays and things like that and submit them.
So they had certain sections of this course that were designated for people who had Apple computers and other sections were designated for people with PCs that only had Word Perfect.
And what they found very interestingly when they analyzed the data was that the people using Word Perfect wrote better.
Their essays were, you know, better developed. They had better ideas compared to the ones on Apple.
And they tried to see, well, you know, is there some other variable here?
Maybe we just happen to have smarter kids in the Word Perfect class.
But, you know, all the other indicators said, no, they're very, very similar.
The best explanation they could come up with is that if you're using Word Perfect, the only thing you could do is think about your writing because there wasn't anything else going on.
Whereas on the Macintosh, you had decisions about fonts and graphics and all of these other things that they theorized were just distracting people.
Very interesting. So I think this idea that you do better blogging if you just focus on writing and don't have a lot of distractions is probably pretty good one.
I say that as someone who uses WordPress, which theoretically could have distractions, but, you know, I hope I'm doing some decent writing there.
Now, right freely is originally was started as right.as, right as, which was founded in 2015 as an anonymous blogging platform, just right and published no signup required.
A simple idea, but with a few principles.
First one, privacy. You didn't need to sign up to read a post.
You know, I have to sign up to Facebook to see anyone's Facebook posts, don't I?
Interoperability. It wasn't another walled garden. Again, the proprietary models of social media, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
It's not like that. They are all walled gardens and they're doing their best to keep you there and not let you interoperate in any way.
And finally, they wanted to create some longevity, have a business model that would be sustainable.
Now, right as did evolve based on feedback from users into a somewhat more sophisticated blogging platform.
While keeping the anonymity and adding support for multiple identities.
It also supported cross-posting to other sites such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Medium for easier distribution.
And they opened their API to everyone.
And while they were doing all of this stuff, they heard about ActivityPub.
Now, they had not set out to create a social network, just a simple blogging tool.
But they found that some social features worked well for them.
Using the GoFed and some other libraries, GoFed is a library in the Go language that gives you Fediverse capabilities.
So, using these libraries, they were able to implement ActivityPub in mid-2018.
Three months later, the right as code was released as right freely.
And now, right as remains as a flagship instance of right freely.
Now, they decided to be what they call minimally social.
And this is an interesting concept. One of the reasons I was eager to share some of this with you.
So, what does it mean to be minimally social?
The goal is only include what's needed.
People that are trying to sell you stuff are going to include all kinds of stuff that may not be what you need, but they hope to attract you with it.
Now, another thing that right freely does, readers can follow blogs.
Okay, that's fine, but that's part of the minimally social that you can do that.
Readers can boost or announce blog posts, but the author is not notified.
That's different from a lot of other applications.
Okay, if you're on Facebook or diaspora, you know, anyone that boosts your posts or likes them or comments on them or whatever, you're going to get a notification.
There's some degree of controlling that, but not nearly enough.
Readers can favor it or like posts, but again, the author is not notified.
There are essentially bookmarks for the reader only.
So, if I say that I like this post, I have a record of it, but the person who wrote it never hears about that.
They are planning in a future release to allow replies to posts.
So, this is a very different model, an interesting one.
Now, they have created a long form blog reader using activity pub, which is called read.as, read as, which is also what he describes as minimally social.
Now, the idea I'm getting from this presentation is that Matt Baer regards a lot of social media as distractions.
He would just assume do away with.
With right freely, not being notified about reader reactions to your posts means that your phone is not constantly going off.
Now, I happen to agree that that's very annoying, which is why I turn off most notifications on my phone.
I really don't care if someone liked one of my posts.
If I'm going to deal with it at all, I'll deal with it when I'm at a full computer.
I'm not going to be constantly going on to my phone, which may just mean I'm an old fart, but I am what I am.
Now, with read as, the idea is that you just read.
What a concept.
Now, this is a company.
And I mentioned before, a sustainable business model matters since people like need to eat.
Now, their solution is to employ what they call a Libra software as a service, Libra SAS model.
And that means they provide a platform for a fee.
But the Libra part is that there's no lock-in.
Right as, which is their flagship instance, offers you a platform for your blog for a very reasonable fee.
And they also offer right as pro and right as for teams as products.
They also offer hosting for right-freely communities.
The idea is that people want to have communities and interact, but are not necessarily technical.
So offering this as software as a service, particularly when it respects your privacy, is a good solution.
Now, because they are selling the service, they may be more attuned to their customers than some open source projects.
But they also want to keep to their principles of privacy, interoperability, and longevity slash dependability.
By doing these things, they think they can make it easy for anyone to join the Fediverse.
Now, there was also a talk by a related thing by a fellow named Michaelis Demetrio.
And I've put a link to his talk in the show notes.
But I'm not really going to say much about it because, frankly, it went over my head.
It was a technical talk of interest to developers.
You know, the sort of thing where people start geeking out about misplace commas and semicolons and what that means.
And I'm not a developer.
So it just might as well have been Greek, which obviously Michaelis Demetrio is Greek, but, you know, it's there in the show notes.
If you're the sort of person who wants to get into that, there's a link so you can take a look at it.
But otherwise, I think we're about done on this one.
This is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio and reminding you as always to support free software.
Bye-bye.
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