Hi,
I am looking for a good and lightweight blogging solution.
I imagine I can just go with a static site generator like jekyll but I’d like something else… it would be a plus if it can federate :)
Any ideas?
Thanks !
EDIT: I forgot to say that obviously wordpress does not enters in the “lightweight” category ;)
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.
Not if you want federation.
The answer is probably GoToSocial, which suggests that it can run on 512MB.
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.