Scribe - An Alternative Medium Frontend

This is a project written using Lucky. It's main website is scribe.rip.

Deploying Your Own

I'd love it if you deploy your own version of this app! To do so currently will take some knowledge of how a webserver runs. If you want to give it a shot, there are a bunch of different ways to deploy. The main site runs on Ubuntu but there are also directions for Heroku or Dokku.

One thing to note is that this app doesn't currently use a database. Any instructions around postgres can be safely ignored. Lucky (and it's dependency Avram) however does need a DATABASE_URL formatted for postgres. It doesn't need to be the URL of an actual database server though. Here's mine: DATABASE_URL=postgres://does@not/mater

Hopefully a more comprehensive guide will be written at some point, but for now feel free to reach out if you have any questions. My contact info can be found on my website.

Docker

A Dockerfile is included to build and run your own OCI images. To build:

$ docker build [--build-arg PUID=1000] [--build-arg PGID=1000] -t scribe:latest -f ./Dockerfile .

To run (generating a base config from environment variables):

$ docker run -it --rm -p 8080:8080 -e SCRIBE_PORT=8080 -e SCRIBE_HOST=0.0.0.0 -e SCRIBE_DB=postgres://does@not/matter scribe:latest

To run with mounted config from local fs:

$ docker run -it --rm -v `pwd`/config/watch.yml:/app/config/watch.yml -p 8080:8080 scribe:latest

Project goals

I believe that Medium is a bad actor on the web. They offer a bad reading experience. Writing there benefits Medium more than the author. Counter to their promise of a wider reach, they offer worse SEO. They use extortionist business tactics. Finally, they want to centralize the currently decentralized world of blogging.

Since Scribe uses Medium content, I don't want to help people engage with it more than they must. My goal here is not to make a nicer Medium to engage with, but to make a less bad experience when people are forced to engage with it. I want Scribe to be a tool, not a platform.

It's intentional that there is no way to browse content from a user, see popular posts, consume via an RSS feed, or see comments and "engage" with an article. I want to spend my time encouraging writers to move to worthy platforms, not making a bad platform worthy.

Contributing

1. Install required dependencies (see sub-sections below)
2. Run script/setup
3. Run lucky dev to start the app
4. Send a patch to ~edwardloveall/Scribe@lists.sr.ht (yes that's an email address).

• To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about the send patch git workflow as opposed to the GitHub style pull request workflow. I'm trying it out for now. If you can't figure it out, get in contact and we can figure out a way to get your contributions in.

Installing dependencies

General instructions for installing Lucky and its dependencies can be found at https://luckyframework.org/guides/getting-started/installing#install-required-dependencies.

Installing dependencies with Nix

If you are using the Nix package manager, you can get a shell with all dependencies with the following command(s):

nix-shell

# Or if you are using the (still experimental) Nix Flakes feature
nix flake update # Update dependencies (optional)
nix develop

Learning Lucky

Lucky uses the Crystal programming language. You can learn about Lucky from the Lucky Guides.