Are there currently any Substack replacements that integrate with ActivityPub?
So I’m currently looking for a Substack substitute for taking donations.
I’d want it to feature a blog (and preferably newsletters too) that include a mix of publicly-accessible posts, as well as posts that are only visible to donors.
And ideally, I want it to also integrate with ActivityPub too.
That might mean a Fediverse post is automatically generated when a new blog post is published. Or potentially the publicly visible blog posts are published in full to the Fediverse.
Now, I know there are a few donations platforms that can handle the first part, such as Ghost and Ko-Fi.
There are also blogging platforms such as WriteFreely/Write.as and Micro.blog that integrate with the Fedi.
And in theory you could do both with a WordPress blog and number of plugins, some paid. But especially with paid plugins, that’s likely to get quite expensive quickly. (Not to mention some of the questionable things that have happened at Automattic in recent weeks.)
But are there any platforms out there that support both?
Or is the best option at this stage just to get a Ko-Fi/Ghost account for the donations and donor-only posts, with a separate micro.blog or write.as account for the publicly accessible posts?
Wordpress is probably the way to go here. It can either act as a Fediverse node directly with the Activitypub and Friends plugins, or it can auto-post to and display feeds from Mastodon (or anything else that implements the Mastodon API) with the Share on Mastodon and Include Mastodon Feed plugins. All of those are free.
A little secret about most paid Wordpress plugins: if they’re in the official plugin directory, they’re open source under the GNU GPL or a compatible license. It’s perfectly legal to modify them to get their paid functionality without paying.
@Zak Wordpress is about to sell user data for ML training: https://www.shacknews.com/article/138912/tumblr-wordpress-sell-user-data-midjourney-openai
Automattic is planning to sell user data from its commercial Wordpress hosting service for ML training. Don’t host it with them if you don’t like that.
Of course, people trying to train models are very likely to run their own scraper bots and might suck up anything you publish on the web anywhere.
Yeah, it would be awesome to have something like this. The only thing I can think of us Liberapay but I think it only handles donations you can’t create content there (and it probably doesn’t integrate with the Fediverse).
