I self-hosted a writefreely instance for a while but I found many features were proprietary and only available in the paid managed hosting (write.as). All features that I didn’t need that much and could workaround however it just made me feel quite dissatisfied with the project.
People self hosting are not likely to be the same people who would pay for managed hosting so it makes no sense to lock features off for them.
I forked the codebase and added stuff myself for a while because even after funnelling users to their commercial option they still do hardly any development, see how long this one line PR I made took to be merged: https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/429.
Now I just have a simple python script that makes everything I need in a blog [0] (markdown, resources, mathjax, atom feed and all completely static with no JS). There is no need to have complicated blog services, just compile static html.
People self hosting are not likely to be the same people who would pay for managed hosting so it makes no sense to lock features off for them.
I forked the codebase and added stuff myself for a while because even after funnelling users to their commercial option they still do hardly any development, see how long this one line PR I made took to be merged: https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/429.
Now I just have a simple python script that makes everything I need in a blog [0] (markdown, resources, mathjax, atom feed and all completely static with no JS). There is no need to have complicated blog services, just compile static html.
[0]: https://github.com/x4e/Blog/blob/master/make.py