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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[–] mark@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Hmm I was gonna suggest Mastodon. I always thought it allowed long-form writing similar to blog posts.

[–] CaptainStack@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

Someone else recommended Lemmy which like Mastodon would technically allow me to make text-based posts, but I think both fall very short of what a proper blogging platform would offer. I mean, I don't think Mastodon even supports bold text.

Good articles have formatting, they have embedded images, they have citations, etc. A good publication has featured articles, they have topics and dropdown menus, they let you filter by author, etc.

What made Medium so great was that even though it was an open blogging platform, it made your work look so nice it felt like you got your writing featured in a real online publication like say the Huffington Post. Substack allows writers to build huge audiences and collect monthly subscriptions and make a blog that looks very personalized and legit.

Mastodon and Lemmy are more for sharing and aggregating content than managing original content.