Hey Lemmy - I’m trying to migrate my life as much as possible into open source tech and platforms. Fediverse networks like Mastodon and Pixelfed have provided good enough alternatives to their counterparts in Twitter and Instagram.
Is there such an equivalent for bloggers? I’m hoping to find a platform which is open source and supports self hosting but one that also provides a first-party instance that folks like me can make an account on and start publishing.
Effectively I’m looking for something that would provide a user experience similar to Medium or Substack but which wouldn’t lock me or the community into it. Something based on ActivityPub would be ideal.
Quick question, why not considering lemmy as your “blog” provider? If the “community” concept wouldn’t apply, perhaps creating your own “community” and becoming its “mod”, disabling posts from others except yours, wouldn’t that work? Lemmy already provide RSS feeds so others can follow/track your posts without any lemmy account, just like with any blog providing RSS/atom feeds, and you get “blog” feedback through lemmy, but the same applies to other blog providers, only the ones subscribed can provide feedback.
I was looking for an anonymous blogging mechanism with digital signature (not to identify the author but to verify its authenticity). Long story short, nothing out there seemed to really fit into what I was looking for, but among the suggestions lemmy was there as an option. You can avoid following anything, and looking into lemmy’s default from page, just use it to post and get feedback, forgetting about the social networks characteristics of lemmy, and make it work as your blog provider…
Not a bad suggestion but I’d consider that a pretty big compromise from what I’m looking for. Lemmy is designed as a content aggregator and I’d love a blog platform that makes it easy to post to Lemmy.
But I the what platforms like Medium and Substack do is they allow authors to build a following which allows the platform to build a community. I think Lemmy is just not what readers looking for publications to follow and really dive into the current are looking for.
What I’d like is something that you could put next to the homepage of Vox or the Associated Press, or ProPublica and feel like it looks just as much the part.
It’s not quite what you’re describing, but neocities probably has some blog templates you could use. I know there’s a webcomic artist who hosts their webcomic on neocities using a template
But it wouldn’t be a blogging specific platform, and I don’t expect there’d be any way to integrate with ActivityPub
Good luck in your search for the right platform!
I usually write my pieces on Medium, so I will definitely be cross-publishing on some of these open-sourced platforms! Thanks Lemmy! Thanks OP for the question!
What about WordPress? Do they still give free sites on WordPress.com?
Could use GitHub pages?
GitHub isn’t open source and I’m hoping for something that wouldn’t require git. Something your mom could make an account on and easily use would be ideal.
GitHub isn’t open source
This needs to be repeated for those in the back that still didn’t get the memo. You do not need to use Microsoft products, especially if your goal is free, open, and/or ethical software.
Personally most of my shit is still on GitHub but I’m thinking of migrating my future work to Codeberg which looks pretty nice, built on FOSS, and is community managed.
Codeberg also does have Pages.
Still uses Git, but yeah.
I’m hosting my blog (using Hugo) on codeberg. Here is a quick howto.
The easiest option to post online for free with zero coding skills is bearblog. I’ve used it before hosting my blog on codeberg. Bearblog let you publish and organize your blog using an insanely simple interface.There’s also the gemini option that’s worth considering. There are plenty of easy way to publish there. To cite a few: flounder, gemlog.blue, pollux.casa
Gemini has accessibility & bandwidth problem. HTML is a more accessible format & HTTP offers compression. Add that Gemtext has too few ‘elements’ for technical writing or even basic blogging & I don’t think it should be seriously considered for anything than a novel toy.
Not just community managed but operated as a non-profit. Codeberg won’t be scraping your deleted history to train their LLMs that they will sell back to you unlike Microsoft.
I am still convinced Git is overrated & overly complicated—and it is a shame all of the decent forges (even basic ones) are all built around Git.
