In late 2021, we announced that we were closing free registrations for new users. This was mostly an experiment to help us focus on the paying customers that keep our small business running, and provide a better experience all around.

Since then, we’ve been able to launch our social platform Remark.as, continue evolving WriteFreely, and add a ton of features around collaboration.

In this time, we’ve also realized that free accounts are one of the best ways for people to get started on our platform. While some people know what they’re looking for, and happily upgrade to our full Pro tier within the 2-week trial period, others just need a place to casually write when they feel like it. This takes a longer time, and doesn’t fit our time-based trial model, so we want to support these writers too.

Another goal of closing free accounts was to limit the number of spam accounts on Write.as. As a long-running platform with plenty of positive search engine authority on our domain, we’re a prime target for Search Engine Optimizers and spammers of every kind. Closing free accounts reduced the number of abusive actors we saw, but never stopped them completely.

Now that free accounts are open again, we plan to develop new anti-spam measures that can eventually be used by all WriteFreely instances to reduce the amount of abuse they receive.

New and existing users

Now, anyone can grab a Free Write.as account, and get a permanent space to write online — you can get started here. Our Free tier includes all the basics, including Markdown support, our Fediverse integration, and even support for monetization through services like sub.club. See our Pricing page for the full comparison with our other tiers.

Along with this, if you signed up for a trial between January 1, 2022 and today but never upgraded to Pro, your account is now completely free! This is our way of saying thanks for sticking around — and if you haven’t revisited Write.as in a while, now is a great time to check it out again.

Thanks for writing with us, and we can’t wait to see what you create!

#free #Writeas #accounts #fediverse

Update: we've removed support for sub.club after it shut down in December 2024.

Today we’re excited to announce a collaboration with sub.club, a brand new platform to help writers sustainably publish on the fediverse! With our new integration, you can offer your most loyal readers a paid subscription, and publish exclusive blog posts that they can subscribe to from their favorite platform.

Since 2018, Write.as has been part of the fediverse, an open social network that enables people to create, share, and socialize seamlessly across a variety of services. Along with WriteFreely, the open source software behind our platform, we’ve helped bring long-form content to the millions of people on this network.

Now with sub.club, your biggest fans can help fund your writing, and read exclusive posts made just for them conveniently in their social web feed. Sub.club’s Anuj Ahooja (@quillmatiq@mastodon.social) shows how our new integration works here:

Getting Started

Connecting your Write.as blog to sub.club is easy, and works seamlessly to keep your posts in sync across platforms.

To get started on sub.club, you’ll first need an account in the fediverse (for example, on a platform like Mastodon). If you’re already a Write.as Pro subscriber, you can grab a free account on our writing-focused community, Writing Exchange — see your Blogs page for more information.

Next, you’ll create a sub.club account and connect it to Stripe. This will allow you to set a subscription price, and start collecting payments from your subscribers.

With that out of the way, you’re ready to connect your sub.club account to Write.as!

Connecting sub.club

Go to your sub.club dashboard and scroll to find the Post via API section. Click the copy button next to where you see API key.

Now on Write.as, go to your blog’s Customize page, and scroll to the Monetization section. Paste your API key into the “sub.club” section, and save your changes.

Note: For full capabilities, be sure to also enable Federation on this page, if you haven’t already.

Now you can start monetizing your posts!

Premium Posts

Write.as makes it easy to choose which posts are free or exclusive to your sub.club subscribers. To publish a paid post, you’ll insert this special shortcode into your posts where you want the paid content to begin:

<!--paid-->

Once published, this will hide content beyond this marker, and create a link that prompts readers to continue reading on sub.club. Once there, they can also subscribe to future premium posts, if they haven’t already.

Over on the fediverse, your Write.as blog posts will show all content up to the “paid” section, with your full post directly embedded. Thanks to sub.club’s close integration with the fediverse, existing subscribers will be able to read the full post right their in their social feed! And for anyone who hasn’t subscribed yet, they’ll be able to head over to sub.club and subscribe using their fediverse account.

Here is an example of what your Write.as post will look, depending on which client you’re using:

What’s Next

As more people use this new integration on Write.as, we’ll continue refining it and improving the experience for readers and writers alike. As you try this out, please send us your feedback on our forum or in the fediverse by replying to @write_as@writing.exchange!

Beyond that, we’ll bring this feature to WriteFreely, so even more people can publish premium blog posts across the open social web. We can’t wait to see what everyone creates!

#integrations #subclub #fediverse #ActivityPub #WriteFreely

We first joined the Fediverse in 2018, as one of only two long-form publishing platforms implementing the ActivityPub protocol (the other being Plume). Even then, we knew the promise this new protocol held for the open web. We had already joined Mastodon and even started our own instance, Writing Exchange. So by the time we implemented it ourselves, we already knew this was finally a modern protocol that could turn the internet itself, with its billions of independent sites, into a social network.

Soon after, we took Write.as open source, and called it WriteFreely. It’s since been used around the world by hundreds of thousands of people and organizations outside of our single, centralized service on Write.as. And we’ve continued to support and evolve on the Fediverse ever since.

Today, we’re proud to be one of many launch partners with the newly-formed Social Web Foundation. Started by Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca), Mallory Knodel (@ohmallory@socialwebfoundation.org), and Tom Coates (@tomcoates@me.dm), its mission is to educate people on the fediverse, enhance the ActivityPub protocol, make it easier to use, and inform policy-makers about issues on the social web.

As a long-time developer on the Fediverse, our goals perfectly align with the Foundation’s — and its work will be invaluable toward fully realizing the dream of a truly open and vibrant social web.

Among some of its first projects, the Social Web Foundation will convene implementers like Write.as, Ghost, WordPress, and others to work out issues with long-form content and the Article type in the Fediverse. With this work, we hope to see more consistent presentation of long-form content, and solid cross-platform compatibility as platforms like Ghost join the fediverse.

We hope our financial support and continuing collaboration with the Social Web Foundation will help the Fediverse grow into the social web we’ve always dreamed of — one where everyone can control who they interact with and how, and do it free from the whims of the centralized social media platforms of yesteryear.

You can follow the Social Web Foundation in the Fediverse at @swf@socialwebfoundation.org or @socialwebfdn@threads.net.

#fediverse #ActivityPub #SocialWebFoundation

While we would love to continue supporting this feature for all the writers who use it, ultimately we’re glad to cut ties with a platform that has become unreliable in many ways under its new ownership.

Twitter Changes

Since changing ownership in November, we’ve watched Twitter transform quickly and often whimsically. We trudged through new bugs and instability, and alerted others when they started censoring alternatives like Mastodon and Substack. We watched advertisers, news organizations, and everyday people flee to other social networks like the fediverse and Bluesky, as new conversations about decentralizing social media started.

Then in February, Twitter announced new pricing changes to their API:

Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead 🧵

- @TwitterDev

With this announcement, in light of the platform’s unreliability, anti-competitive tactics, and disregard for its users and developers, we decided we’d remove our Twitter integration. In mid-May, Twitter finally revoked our access to their API, and today we’ve officially removed support from Write.as.

Going Forward

With this change, you’ll no longer be able to connect your Twitter account, or cross-post to any previously-connected account from Write.as. Instead, writers can still manually copy and paste any published post URL into a tweet.

We really try not to remove useful features from our platform, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience this causes. However, we’ll continue building our platform (and the software underneath, WriteFreely) toward our long-term mission of advancing the open web, outside of siloed social networks that are easily bought and sold.

As we have for years, we continue to believe that the future of writing, publishing, and socializing online is in small and interoperable communities. It’s why we added support for ActivityPub and the fediverse back in 2018, and continue supporting the ecosystem to this day.

If you’re looking for a new social space to rebuild and find your community, we’d highly encourage trying the fediverse. Readers there can directly follow your blog and interact with it — and soon, you’ll also be able to receive replies on your blog posts directly from the fediverse.

If you prefer Twitter-style microblogging, our Mastodon instance, Writing Exchange, remains open to Write.as Pro subscribers — even if your subscription ends. Just visit your Blogs page as a subscriber to learn more.

Following Us

Going forward, the best place to follow us is on the fediverse: @write_as@writing.exchange. We’ll continue sharing important updates and information there. We’re also on Bluesky for jokes and little announcements.

Otherwise, as of March, we stopped monitoring our Twitter account. It’ll remain online, but we won’t post any critical updates, so we don’t suggest following it anymore.

Have any thoughts? Let us know on Remark.as: Discuss...

#updates #Twitter #fediverse #ActivityPub