Brief Project Description
WriteFreely is a privacy-focused, minimalist blogging platform made to remove friction and help more people write on the open web. It's used by over 600,000 people, from hobbyist bloggers to major publications across our flagship instance, Write.as, and hundreds of independently-run communities. Authors can connect and build community with their audience over open protocols like RSS, ActivityPub, and email.
After initially adding support for Web Monetization in 2021, our current project with ILF is meant to modernize our implementation and help readers support their favorite writers and creators publishing on our platform.
Project Update
We made significant progress updating our support for Web Monetization within WriteFreely and Write.as. This included updates to current practices and the user experience for readers. We altered previous functionality like paywalls, and now guide users through the most current flow for joining in and supporting Web Monetization-enabled blogs.
Our major roadblock right now is the user experience and education needed to help the uninitiated navigate creating a wallet address (or multiple ones). We do, however, have a largely technical userbase that are often happy to dig into less polished experiences, so we aim to help guide them and encourage them to share knowledge with each other, when we're ready to announce the latest changes in this next phase.
Project Impact & Target Audience(s)
Many of our writers come from a wide variety of backgrounds and locations. Especially on our flagship instance, Write.as, we see a large number of writers from outside of the US and Europe publishing their stories. Many communities have sprung up on other social networks like X/Twitter and Bluesky, where writers create and share fanfiction, personal stories, and more under pen names and other personas. We see Web Monetization especially helpful to these communities, where authors have close-knit followings that are often very eager to support their favorite creators. The ability to monetize their work encourages even more writing and creativity with what they're publishing.
Progress on Objectives, Key Activities
- Update code to current WM standard: this has been updated on our flagship instance, Write.as, and is staged for the next release of WF (v0.17).
- Add Web Monetization support over ActivityPub: we added blog wallet addresses on articles sent out to the fediverse via the ActivityPub protocol, to prepare for a future when receiving platforms can utilize these and stream payments to the original author.
- Enabled WriteFreely admins to set instance-wide wallet address: this work, meant to supplement admins running their own WriteFreely-powered communities, hasn't been implemented yet. When it is, it will be included with the next v0.17 release.
Communications and Marketing
We previously announced our support for Web Monetization in 2021 on our blog. Now, we aim to announce this new work when it is complete and available in WriteFreely, especially as wallet support is more widely available.
What’s Next?
Next, we aim to wrap up our implementation and release the updates to Web Monetization to all WriteFreely instances in v0.17. With that, we'll begin reaching out to past Coil users and our wider userbase to increase adoption, gather feedback, and improve the experience for everyone.
Community Support
We would love to have more people interested in using Web Monetization on their blogs sign up, add a wallet address, and give feedback on how it works or how we might improve.
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