this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2021
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Starting a website for a SciFi writer's collective? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

So I have been wanting to get into writing SciFi short stories for a while now, but being very much a "infrastructure guy" my preferred approach is to build a structure and dogfeed it then.

So the genera idea would be to put up some sort of fediverse enabled blogging website, but with the plan to allow a (limited) number of authors to sign up and contribute stories.

In addition it should allow posting subscriber only stories and some sort of collective donation account (via Patreon or LiberaPay etc. no blockchain non-sense) so that it becomes more attractive for people to donate and get access to the stories from all the authors.

Any suggestions on what a good server side software for something like that might be?

Ideally of course it should allow curating some sort of collections and also allow easy export of a ebook compatible format, but guess such specialized features could be added later. Some sort of plugin system for adding such features would be good though.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago (1 children)

This is a really great idea! Though I don't know of any software with these features.

As mentioned below, plume sorta fits the bill but is still early in it's development and isn't currently actively maintained. I ran an instance for a few months about 8 months ago and it was a very promising start, so it's a little sad that it isn't getting the development love it deserves.

Anyway like I said I don't know of anything that can really do this out of the box (though I'm sure wordpress can be round-pegged into that square hole). Might be a fun side-project, though. Which, now that my interactive fiction on gemini project has sorta stabilized I am looking for a new side-project. ๐Ÿค”

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

Writefreely seems to fit the bill mostly, at least their non-self-hosted SaaS version. I hope it will trickle-down into their open-source offering at some point, but I am not holding my breath.

But maybe they are more open to external contributions that it looks at first glance, so if you have time for another side project (I don't and not my strong skill set anyways) maybe have a look at it: https://github.com/writeas/writefreely

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago)

Another option would be: Ghost (mainly due to the build in subscription features)

And this Ghost to Mastodon bot.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

I dunno if it's an option, but setting up a Calibre webserver for the paid content might be a possibility?

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (3 children)

I am guessing https://writefreely.org/ is probably the best platform, but I am open to other suggestions.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

yeah that's what I thought of reading this

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

https://github.com/mouse-reeve/bookwyrm

I haven't really looked into this, and I know it's focused on reading but I wonder if this could be useful?

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago)

Looked into this as well, but that is really for readers of published books.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Writefreely does make the most sense to me. I don't know how the subscriber-only stories could work tho.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

That seems to be a build in feature. However I just now noticed that the team functions are still not on the open-source version, but only available on their SaaS version. All in all it seems a bit too open-core sadly, with the FOSS version also lagging behind a lot.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Ahh dang.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

I guess it never the less sounds like the best option for now. Maybe I'll wait and see what the status is when the next version is released.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

A fallback option would be a Wordpress page with an ActivityPub plugin. I tried those previously and it did work, but was sadly very buggy. I am also not too keen on having to run a Wordpress page.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Have you heard of https://cosmic.voyage/ ? It is a community scifi universe of sorts

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

I remember reading about it. Why not post it on /c/scifi ? However that is pretty much the opposite of what I am planning. They are working collaboratively on one huge space opera kind of thing, while I am thinking about lots of self-contained short stories like in the old days of Sci-Fi print magazines.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

I'd definitely be down, especially if there's a place to pair up for roleplaying based on our sci-fi universes!

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

Another possible option: https://joinplu.me/ (but they state it is not actvely maintained) Edit: their git repo looks quite active though :-/

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

Hmm, but it seems to have no moderation tools and also no way to restrict access to certain posts?