See what Known (withknown.com) offers: an open-source, self-hosted social publishing engine for blogs, photos and group sites, built on IndieWeb principles.
Known is an open-source social publishing engine built around the idea that individuals and groups should own their content rather than renting space on a closed social network. A single Known installation can serve as a personal blog or as a shared site for a whole community, with unlimited collaborators able to post to the same domain.
The project was co-founded by Ben Werdmuller and Erin Jo Richey and formally launched in 2014 after being incubated at the Matter Ventures media-startup program in San Francisco. Werdmuller's earlier work on the open-source platform Elgg fed directly into Known's design philosophy of decentralized, user-owned publishing.
Known follows the IndieWeb principle of publishing on your own site first and syndicating copies elsewhere (POSSE), rather than posting natively into a third-party platform's feed and losing control over that content.
A single post in Known can be a blog article, a short status update, a photo, a bookmark, or another supported content type, all managed from one interface. A browser bookmarklet lets users quickly save or comment on pages they find elsewhere on the web.
Sites support custom domains, custom CSS and JavaScript, hashtag-based content organization, and both raw HTML and WYSIWYG editing. Output feeds are available in RSS, XML, JSON and KML so other tools and services can consume a site's content programmatically.
Because it is self-hosted, Known gives operators full control over privacy: a site can be fully public, a private single-author journal, or a closed group space for a defined set of collaborators.
Known is distributed as free, open-source software that a user downloads and installs on their own PHP hosting, so there is no vendor subscription fee for the software itself -- the only ongoing cost is whatever web hosting the operator chooses.
There is no current tiered commercial hosted plan comparable to WordPress.com; anyone who wants a managed Known site is generally expected to install it on standard shared or cloud PHP hosting themselves or work with a developer to do so.
Yes, Known is free, open-source software. You install it on your own hosting, so the only cost is whatever web hosting you choose.
Known was co-founded by Ben Werdmuller and Erin Jo Richey and launched in 2014 after being incubated at the Matter Ventures accelerator in San Francisco.
POSSE stands for Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Known lets you publish content to your own domain first and then automatically syndicate copies to connected social networks.
Yes, Known supports unlimited collaborators on a single site, making it suitable for community, classroom, or team publishing as well as personal blogging.
Known is primarily distributed as self-hosted open-source software; there is no widely advertised managed hosting tier comparable to WordPress.com.
Known supports blog posts, short status updates, photos, bookmarks, and other content types from a single posting interface.
Yes, Known follows IndieWeb principles around content ownership and portability, and its founder was previously involved in the open-source Elgg community platform.