A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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What is your reason to blog, for yourself? If so I run (used to run gitea) forgejo and just spam everything in issue threads on specific repositories
this uses 150mb of ram, basically 0% cpu
forgejo is actively working on federation, it is there not sure how done it is I don't use it.
I use the parsedown library with a custom PHP index page to serve markdown files as HTML.
If Jekyll isn't your jam, then Hugo probably won't be, either.
I have a simple workflow based on a script on my desktop called "blog". I Cask it with "blog Some blog title" and it looks in a directory for a file named some_blog_entry.md, and if it finds it, opens it in my editor; if it doesn't, it creates it using a template.md that has some front matter filled in by the script. When I exit the editor, the script tests the modtime and updates the changed front matter and the rsyncs the whole blog directory to my server, where Hugo picks up and regenerates the site if anything changed.
My script is 133 lines of bash, mostly involving the file named sanitization and front matter rewriting; it's just a big convenience function that could be three lines of typing a little thought, and a little more editing of the template.
There's no federation, though. I'm not sure what a "federated blog" would look like, anyway; probably something like Lemmy, where you create a community called "YourName". What's the value of a federated blog?
Edit: Oh, I forgot until I just checked it: the script also does some markdown editing to create gem files for the Gemini mirror; that's at least a third to a half of the script (yeah, 60 LOC without the Gemini stuff), which you don't need if you're not trying to support a network that never caught on and that no-one uses.
Not sure how lightweight it needs to be, but I use Ghost and it's pretty simple and basic.
oh, Ghost is cool :)
Not sure how much can use it, but indeed it feels like a great platform (maybe too much for some small posts :P)
Ghost is open source, non profit and self host able.
It wants a gigabyte of RAM. Maybe that passes for lightweight in 2025, but given the fundamental things a blog has to do, I'd probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.
I'd probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.
Not if you want federation.
The answer is probably GoToSocial, which suggests that it can run on 512MB.
Federation doesn't inherently require large amounts of memory. Fundamentally, it's a matter of selecting a list of unique servers (likely tens, maybe hundreds) from a larger set of followers (likely hundreds, maybe thousands) and sending an HTTP request to each when there's a new post. There's a speed/size tradeoff for how many to send in parallel, but it's not a resource-intensive operation.
Growth beyond a few tens of megabytes was a bug in Writefreely, which is a likely-suitable option several comments here recommended.
It costs like $3/mo to host it. If that's too resource intensive then I don't know what your limits are. Compute isn't free—that literally breaks the laws of thermodynamics, no matter what you're told by hosting services, and ghost does server side rendering and has a dynamic admin dashboard and can even work headless... and it costs less than $3/mo for your own personal open source cms.
If you need something that costs less then you can just build your own I guess, but how many hours of your time is that worth when you could just be spending $3/mo. If you make minimum wage at $7/hr one hour of work gets you two months of running a website.
I'm thinking like a programmer about what a basic blog has to do and the computing resources necessary to accomplish it. Software that needs more than a few tens of megabytes to accomplish that is not lightweight regardless of its merits.
This comment seems to be arguing that one should not demand blog software be lightweight because there's inexpensive hosting for something heavyweight. That's a fine position to take, I guess, but OP did ask for lightweight options.
You may be thinking like a programmer but the guy you responded to is thinking like a software engineer.
I'd put it farther removed from the technical side than that; dreadbeef is thinking like a manager. OP might be better off paying a third party $3/month to handle the details and host a heavyweight, full-featured blog for them, but that's not what they asked for.
This is selfhosted, which I think implies a desire to self-host things even if it might seem a wiser use of resources to do something else.
Im merely making a value proposition because im an engineer and I've had this same exact problem and desire. Call it experience — a static blog is fine since I can build one of those in my sleep, but for me I wanted to post on it when I was away and only had my phone. Now do I put it on my git? A separate notebook that is synced somewhere? I have ADHD—if I want to write I have to write and I can't just hope to remember it sometime later. Now what's the point of my blog if I can't write on it when I need to but simply don't have my desktop nearby? Also you have to have pay for a CI to do the building anyway for a static site generator, that ain't free and even if you found a service that provides CI for free you're just externalizing your costs somewhere else. Laws of thermodynamics still apply. So instead of paying for CI to build your static site, I'd argue just pay for the server rendered site. Why choose to have a 1gb ram build server for a blog when you can just use that server to run the blog.
And they want federation support. Ghost is working on that as well speak. What static site generator supports federation?
I am not sure about how lightweight they are (but I guess more than WordPress for sure) but on the federated side of things you have plume (https://joinplu.me/) and writefreely (https://writefreely.org/) that you can selfhost. Not super sure about how much you can customize them.
I'm liking them! even if they do not seem very alive (still, blogging itself is not the most "alive" activity around nowadays...)
Writefreely is alive. Plume not.
Plume isn't currently actively maintained, unfortunately. It's right below the fold of the page you linked 😞
As for customisability, I think writefreely has some different themes to choose from, they're just hidden away in the docs or on github.
Good luck! I did the same recently. I wrote my own blog system, though. I can share it with you, but I'm not sure it's the best for anyone else, there were some shortcuts taken given I did not intend to share it.
You can check out my blog and let me know whether you want to try it: https://chrastecky.dev/ (or federated: !programming@chrastecky.dev, !3d-printing@chrastecky.dev, !gaming@chrastecky.dev).
Maybe git+Jekyll+CD+web server?
You could setup some automation so you just create pages via Git.
Writefreely is super light weight and minimalist in its design. It also federates with mastodon.
I use fuwari
I've heard a lot of good things about Ghost. I see a lot of bloggers running it. I'm not a blogger and I doubt anyone would be interested in what I had to say...lol...so I don't have experience in that area. However, Ghost seems to be the ticket for bloggers. It integrates with thousands of services and some really great theme templates. If I were going to start a blog, that's what I would go with. Jeremy over at Noted.lol has a write up about it and iirc, he uses Ghost for Noted.lol itself.
In order from little to bigger:
Would something like this interest you? Gemtext formatted to html is about as light weight as it gets. lots of automatic gemtext blog software on github that also formats and mirrors an html copy. Whenever a news page article gets rendered to gemtext through newswaffle it shrinks about 95-99% of the page size while keeping text intact. Let me know if you want some more information on gemini stuff.
I use eleventy. Similar to other static site generators.
have you tried hubzilla? its multipurpose.
I recently considered a similar question myself and finally decided on Vercel + nest.js + sanity.io CMS template
Of course, if your programming skills allow you to develop the functionality of the blog yourself
Whats the overrall size and resource use of this setup?