Mike Stone

Mostly The Lonely Howls Of Mike Baying His Ideological Purity At The Moon

Troubleshooting Write.as

13 May 2020

Day 18 of the #100DaysTo Offload Series:

When Kev finally convinced me to start blogging again (something he’s been working on for a while, god knows why), I elected to move from Wordpress to write.as. I need to troubleshoot an issue.

One of the features that I most liked about write.as was the simplicity of the platform. I could have self hosted with WriteFreely, but I elected instead to pay for a “Pro” account so I could leave all the technical hand waving to the people who know the platform the best.

The next thing that drew me to write.as was it’s integrated federating using ActivityPub. _In theory a Pro account allows for following the blog on any ActivityPub platform, like Mastodon. Considering I spend pretty much 100% of my social network time on Mastodon, that was a “killer feature” for me.

I configured the @blog@mikestone.me account to be my blog and away I went.

That worked great! Up until April 29th. I posted my Two Space Or Not Two Space article and it worked fine, but on April 30th (or more fairly the wee hours of May 1st), when I published my National Poetry Month article, it didn’t federate.

I know my poetry is bad, but I didn’t think I would break the whole system.

A few details here.

  1. The posts are being published on my blog.
  2. The generic write.as account @mikestone@write.as appears to be working.
  3. There are people that seem to see it at @blog@mikestone.me.

For the third bit there, in talking to people at write.as, they say they’re able to see the new posts at the @blog@mikestone.me, and it’s been theorized that this is an issue with Fosstodon.

This is were you guys come in. For anybody that reads this and has managed to get this far into my word salad, if you’re seeing this on @blog@mikestone.me, please reply to that post and copy my @mike@fosstodon.org account. If you look at @blog@mikestone.me and the posts unceremoniously end on the 29th of April (or some other date), please message me at my @mike@fosstodon.org account and let me know.

I’d love to get a nice cross section of people from various instances. I’d love it if you’d boost the post if you’re on another instance so more people can see it, but that seems oddly self serving beyond this one issue.

Thank you all for your help, and hopefully we can get this resolved here soon.



Looking for comments? There are no comments. It's not that I don't care what you think, it's just that I don't want to manage a comments section.

If you want to comment, there's a really good chance I at least mentioned this post on Fosstodon, and you can reply to me there. If you don't have a Mastodon account, I'd suggest giving it a try.

If you don't want to join Mastodon, and you still want to comment, feel free to use my contact information.

Also, don't feel obligated, but if you feel like buying me a ☕ cup of coffee ☕ I won't say no.