Plume, the federated blogging application, has announced a brand new alpha release! The platform has been growing in popularity over the last few months – to date, there are 19 different nodes with approximately 800 users spread between them. The largest instance, fediverse.blog, has served as a point of introduction for many fediverse users, and hosts several official blogs for other fediverse projects.

What’s new in Alpha 2?

There are a few fundamental adjustments that greatly improve the Plume experience:

Cleaner Visuals – Numerous design updates and fixes were made: Long-form articles are now handled better within Plume’s visual layout, input fields stand out more, and overall everything looks cleaner.

Cover Photos – articles now allow for a cover photo, which stands out more in article listings.

New Post Editor – A new post editor was introduced, and the team intends to expand it to make composing articles even easier in the future.

Full-text Search – Plume now also features full-text search, which you can learn more about here.

Metadata – OpenGraph tags and microformats have been added to make articles more sharable on social networks

API – Plume now features a posting API, which may pave the way for integrations and desktop clients in the near future. A sample CLI app has been introduced to demonstrate what it can do so far.

Maintenance – users can now delete and edit blogs themselves.

Organizational Changes

There are a number of high-level changes also being made at the project level, in the hopes of stewarding an inclusive community that is welcoming to newcomers:

• Code of Conduct – Similarly to Funkwhale, Plume has adopted a Code of Conduct based on the Contributor Covenant
• Community Governance – Plume also now has a Loomio group (hosted on Framasoft’s instance), where people can join, discuss ongoing issues, and help reach consensus on major decisions.
• New Website – Plume launched a new project site, complete with documentation and information on how to get involved.
• New Logo – Plume officially has a new project logo, which was chosen in a poll from community contributions. The winning entry was made by trwnh!

We’re happy to see Plume progress, and can’t wait to see what they have in store for their next release!