Goodbye WriteFreely (for now)

I have decided to take my WriteFreely instance down due to abuse by spammers and filled with AI generated misinformation. Well, at least I got a good lesson.

In case you are wondering, I am talking about the service I announced in this blog post. But if you don’t want to read that now, here is a summary. WriteFreely is a blogging platform that communicates with the rest of the Fediverse social media platforms. Which means it allows your WriteFreely blog to be followed and rebloged by the people using Mastodon or Bluesky.

I wasn’t much worried about the abuse when I started this service, and made it available for public use. Forget WriteFreely, the entire Fediverse community was tiny. There were only 4 other WriteFreely communities listed as available to join at the time. And the largest of those had less than 200 members. Humble beginnings indeed.

Given that WriteFreely was an infant, it didn’t have sufficient moderation tools to prevent abuse. Only ways to find a post that was violating community rules was to either be notified by someone else on antoher platform, or read each new post one after another. At the beginning, this wasn’t an issue. It had such a tiny member count that if there was a day with new posts, all the post shared that day could be read within 15 minutes. Also, the early members were very respectful. Reading posts to find abusers felt like I was trying my hardest to distrust the respectful bunch. So, I stopped moderating. I would only read what caught my attention.

Another thing I hate is growing for sake of growing. I came to Fediverse to stop caring about floower and repost counts. That meant I didn’t check the member and article count in my WriteFreely service. Those number didn’t have a meaning for me. If I cared though, I would be proud of hosting a blogging platform with over 80 thousand members.

On 2nd of March 2025, I wanted to check on how my service was doing. It has been a while since I visited it to read new posts that my dear members published. I was flabbergasted when I realized that it had over 80 thousand members. I didn’t care about the member count, but I never thought that my instance would grow that much. I felt proud of what I was providing. When I start reading the posts however, all my excitement disappeared. They were either AI generated garbage, or not far from what we were taught to be scam materials. I was providing a platfrom for people to host scams. I decided to close service to registration and give 1 week for the real, respectful members to export their data.

I feel responsible for not being more proactive with moderation. Or at the very least, not building the habit of checking it in regular intervals. I feel obligated to deleting the entire thing to avoid providing a nest possibly used by scammer, spammers, and those who want to spread misinformation without a care about the damage they are doing.

Sorry. And goodbye for now. I learned a valuable lesson. A lesson that will help me make better decisions for my future public facing projects. If you are an aspiring future Fediverse platform admin that would learn a thing or two about my experience, I am available to chat. My Fediverse handle is @murtezayesil@fosstodon.org