WriteFreely federation in the future

I would want to do a little more testing but at face value, it's just an ActivityPub share button with zero potential for abuse. I'd be comfortable federating with WriteFreely instances on the grounds that they wouldn't qualify for stewardship.

I expect that many who are interested in the software will still want a presence on one of the social software instances as well. I am currently running WF alongside my node software and wouldn't change that setup if we allow WF into the League.

Definitely not something I'm feeling motivated to Proposal right now given Everything Else. Especially because there's nothing stopping me from just sharing direct links to WF posts in the meantime. But I doubt I'd vote against WF's inclusion if someone did put it to Proposal.

I think testing is definitely needed. Though mostly I don't know the extent of it in terms of how much it shares, but if WriteFreely is mostly just an ActivityPub share button then I don't see much of a problem, judging that it seems that it doesn't really interact back.

I can see it being great for mostly write-ups in an isolated world and I wouldn't mind either federating with them. I can see the convenience of it. I assume it doesn't share comments/replies on each of the posts?

One thing I agree on, is not qualifying for stewardship since they're much less of an actual node.

@wishdream comments on WF blog posts do not currently get federated, however i believe this is a planned feature on the roadmap somewhere

One concern I have is the potential for abuse by nodes that initially pretend to be running writefreely and then switch to something else. I think that would be technically difficult for the same reasons that switching from akkoma to gts on the same domain is, but allowlisting fundamentally allows a domain to do everything: fetch posts, like, comment, etc.

@oboemeister I think that would be a pretty clear case for ejection from the network IMO - I see no valid reason to do this, especially without informing anyone first. That should be something we have automated tooling for eventually

I think anyone should be able to join as a "syndication" member, one who's not active in the social network, but whose posts are proliferated through it either directly or through an intermediary or bot.

This would also account for "syndication bots", e.g. like Cohost's https://cohost.org/Hackaday-feed which reposts Hack-A-Day blogs to Cohost. HaD has no participation or interaction with the community; comments and reblogs/quotes to those reposts only occurred within in the bubble.

All other parts of League Code considering content and so on, would still apply; first-party syndicators (e.g., writefreely blog users) would be directly responsible for infractions, while third-party syndicators (e.g., bots which post timely content from elsewhere) may be asked to stop their bot, or to employ manual moderation or a sense pass by a human before reposting.

The syndication rules would not apply to "random picture bots" like DailyManul or Coyote A Day or Wolf Daily or SquirrelFeed or other random-posting bots or picture bots like that, which post from a pool or a queue, since the content is not considered "timely" or news.

@sirocyl haven’t decided on a personal stance, but if adopted, we may want to encourage open usage of syndication. what would it take to make this seamless?

@kouhai in the simplest form? a (write-only) RSS/feed bridge, I think. This is how things like said HaD feed worked in Cohost, I believe - a bot simply cronjobbed a refresh of the RSS and posted when new articles appear.

It may be necessary for the individual operating a syndication to post as the human, too - the ability to do so should be preserved.