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.

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[–] CaptainStack@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] CaptainStack@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Codeberg also does have Pages.

Still uses Git, but yeah.

[–] wwwgem@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] marting@fosstodon.org 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

@toastal @CaptainStack While I agree that git is overcomplicated in some ways, I've always found it harder to get people to try new vcs systems than to try new forges. To get them to change both at the same time would be even harder I think, and in particular would make migrating existing projects from github to elsewhere much more painful.

[–] CaptainStack@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

What's better than git though? I think they only other system I've used is TFS and I didn't think it was any better.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

Depends how you view it & how green the grass is on the other side. Personally the Forgejo approach of copying MS GitHub to ease onboarding doesn’t resonate with me as a user over, say, making a better product by fixing some of the major flaws like the pull request model being a major slowdown, CI in YAML soup, needless social features… but others prefer this approach & a rocked boat is scary.