Let’s say I decided that instead of blogging, I wanted to host my own Lemmy instance that contained a maximum of one (1) user– me, but allowing other users to subscribe.
To show what I’m talking about, look at how kaidomac uses Reddit as his own personal microblog, which people subscribe to.
What is the cheapest way to do this?
My mental model of Lemmy is that if I were to do this, the instance would still be caching information from other instances. This would– at least in my mine– add up in costs.
I’m a software engineer, so feel free to use technical jargon.
Alternative question– I use Zola and Github Pages to host my website. Does ActivityPub have support for blogging? Like let’s say people on Lemmy or Mastodon could subscribe to my blog through ActivityPub?
From what I can tell Zola does not have anything like this (tried searching GH issues), but I just want to know if it’s technically feasible. I can write Rust, so I could have a crack at it myself if it’s not too cost/effort prohibitive.
Lemmy claims to be able to support any Bootstrap 5 theme as a drop-in Lemmy theme, and it’s surprisingly close to being true. If you go to ponder.cat right now, you’ll see one, based on Sandstone, that I’ve been fooling around with, because the provided Lemmy themes are mostly awful to me.
You could run one backend instance, have a main frontend to it on lemmy.whatever.com, and have a second frontend on whatever.com, with the theme set to a minimally modified version of Clean Blog or something, stripping out all the UI stuff and leaving only a blog. That would give you an RSS feed, a blog, a community that Lemmy people could follow, and a Fediverse actor that Mastodon people could follow, all in one place with all the comments unified. If you want to set the theme up that way, I can give you pointers, since I’ve just now been working on this for my instance.
ActivityPub, as the name implies, is just a protocol for publishing one’s activities. Those activities can be blog posts too (just like they can be Lemmy comments, which is what I’m doing now).
Lemmy only allows subscribing to communities, not arbitrary accounts, but on Mastodon, people can subscribe to anything.
From what I researched some time ago: There are/were some federated blogging systems out there but they’re all stuck in the pre-Docker era installation-wise and technology-wise (i.e. just outdated).
But in the end it makes no sense in my opinion. Blogs nowadays are just publishing and less networking/interaction.
A simple file loader and markdown parser could be enough. I set up my page based on Apache directory listing, a custom Action to parse markdown files, and some fancy CSS. There is figuratively nothing that runs my page, except a web server and a markdown parser.
WordPress?
Fuck no
lol