What are all the federated blogging options available? I know of a few that are mostly clunky in my eyes.
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I think Ghost might be the best option. They just launched their beta Fediverse integration a few days ago.
There’s WriteFreely for example. There’s also Plume, but looks like it’s not actively maintained anymore.
I wanted to try WriteFreely, but their federation seems to be broken according to this ticket. And the fediverse observer shows 0 WriteFreely comments since January 2025.
I’m not sure what version they’re running on their flagship but I last posted from there on March 20th and my blog federated to Mastodon.
More for the OP but if you’re looking for a blog with a comment section, I wouldn’t recommend WriteFreely at present. Customization is also unnecessarily painful.
It does federate. Social features are rudimentary. I end up using my existing microblogs to promote the posts anyway.
I knew all that going in and chose it anyway. It’s not for everyone but it does what I need it to at a price I’m fine with.
Even more interesting IMO: what are the options that do not involve self-hosting (thus avoiding the PITA of babysitting a domain and server security)?
Hosted Wordpress with ActivityPub plugin
Full DB-driven monster for a few bytes of text. Sledgehammer to crack a nut if you ask me. But sure, this is the obvious answer.
Eh… Wordpress isn’t that heavy. Probably not as heavy as matrix or even Mastodon. It’s a very versatile, expandable and easy to use platform which I’d strongly recommend.
Sure, it’s fine. But if I’m only publishing text and photos, and I don’t need tons of specialized plugins, and I’m dealing with things myself - then personally I will go with a static-site generator every time. It’s at least as fast, and more secure by design.
