Now that Medium has fully enshittified, and Substack is well on its way, where can I publish for free with good discoverability and no paywall? I’ve considered starting my own blog site using a static site generator, but I figured I’d get people’s thoughts prior to doing that. Thanks!

4 points

If you want a platform with ActivityPub integration (i.e. it’s part of the Fediverse), then there are several options:

There’s also WordPress, which has a free hosted tier, and can alternatively be set up on your own server. There is an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, which can be used freely on your own server, or with the paid business plan on wordpress.com.

Another possibility would be to use a Mastodon instance that doesn’t limit your character count to 500, such as Aethy (which IIRC has a limit of 1M characters per post).

If I were to start a blog again (and I have considered it), then I would probably use WriteFreely, or alternatively Aethy.

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1 point

Awesome, thanks!

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3 points

Pillowfort and Dreamwidth come to mind. Pillowfort designed to be based on original Tumblr. Dreamwidth based on LiveJournal.

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2 points

Neocities

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2 points

It feels like there should be an ActivityPub-enabled easy-to-deploy personal site setup, but I haven’t been able to find one.

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1 point
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You can host your blog on GitHub pages, some technical know-how required. But it’s free of charge, and you have complete control over what’s hosted, so you can host a plain HTML page if that’s what you want.

There are quite a few static site generators which you can use. Jekyll and Hugo are the most popular, and have quite a few themes to pick from.

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