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.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.net
        2·
        2 days ago

        Movim actually predates the creation of ActivityPub (and its precursor protocols) and back then XMPP was the popular choice, even Twitter experimented with running their service on an XMPP backend. But despite its age, Movim has kept up with the times quite well (as did XMPP in general).

  • Intergalactic@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 days ago

    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!

    • ProblemMan@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      A lot of folks recommending Ghost/WordPress I think are not understanding that a huge part of what I’m hoping to find is an active community of readers and writers that I may contribute to - I’m not looking to build a new destination site.

      When you sign up on Medium.com you’re effectively given a free blog, but the real value they offer is that when you publish people who are on Medium.com who have never heard of you or your blog are recommended to read your articles. Every writer and reader on the platform is contributing to building a bigger network which makes it more valuable to everyone on it.

      • wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        0·
        2 days ago

        So two things

        Activity pub is federation. So you’d be publishing to anywhere. Which as I said before, ghost is actively working on. They have a weekly mailer.

        If your looking for an algorithm publishing centre, your going to find open source to be lacking. Generally speaking people who are looking for open source, don’t want the algorithmic feeding that your describing.

    • ProblemMan@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • toastal@lemmy.ml
        1·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • ProblemMan@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          0·
          2 days ago

          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.

            • www-gem@lemmy.ml
              1·
              2 days ago

              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

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    2 days ago

    WordPress has an ActivityPub plugin. I suspect you already know about it.

    Some months ago I read about something called “Ghost” which either already has or is planning to add ActivityPub integration.

    • ProblemMan@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      Yes WordPress and Ghost would be great options if I wanted to host my own blog but I’m really looking for something I can just sign up for and start posting. Certainly something like that could be built on WordPress or Ghost but I’m not aware of any active instances that subject-agnostic platforms that are open to anyone to sign up and start reading, following, and posting content/authors.