OpenJournal:News 1 2026-09-11

OpenJournal is now live!

I first imagined a world of open blogging a few weeks back when I stumbled upon OpenStreetMaps due to my love for climbing.

It was Saturday morning, I was mapping out a route to a particular bouldering spot I wanted to try when I misclicked and went into somebody's OSM profile.

There I saw "User diaries" and thought "Oh cool, it plugs into some other diary-based wiki, nice idea".

What I didn't realise is that it was all baked into OpenStreetMaps, no flexibility and not fully open. From then, I started brainstorming and looking around for things that did scratch the itch of a fully free (as in freedom) blogging system that was distributable and decentralised. Surprisingly and disappointingly, there was none.

I triple checked thinking surely someone had thought of this but no, I found something that someone hadn't done, a rare thing.

Fast forward to now and OpenJournal is live. Sign in with your Wikipedia log-in, join the community, and start writing!

In time, I'd like this for this to grow and be a hub of blogs that are mirrored and shared far and wide.

Let's see how far we go.