I’d put it farther removed from the technical side than that; dreadbeef is thinking like a manager. OP might be better off paying a third party $3/month to handle the details and host a heavyweight, full-featured blog for them, but that’s not what they asked for.
This is selfhosted, which I think implies a desire to self-host things even if it might seem a wiser use of resources to do something else.
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.
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.
Total Webhosting Solutions
I’ve been with Porkbun since Gandi got acquired. No complaints.
Zero. It seems like software is increasingly expecting to be deployed in a container though, so that probably won’t last forever.
I’ve been using Maddy for about a year. It’s easy to set up and has been trouble free.
It seems to me software designed to facilitate discussion shouldn’t have a downvote buttton. There should be a UI for marking comments as inappropriate, but it should require a second step saying why. Perhaps one of the reasons should even be “I disagree”, but that option should have no effect.
It’s not impossible to abuse of course, but it nudges people in the right direction. Those UI nudges can be pretty effective.
There was a recent related discussion on Hacker News and the top comment discusses why this sort of solution is not likely to be the best fit for smaller organizations. In short, doing it well requires time and effort from someone technically sophisticated, who must do more than the bare minimum for good results, as you just learned.
Even then, it’s likely to be less reliable than solutions hosted by big corporations and when there’s a problem, it’s your problem. I don’t want to discourage you, but understand what you’re committing to and make sure you have adequate buy-in in your organization.
Telegram isn’t open source, so I don’t think you’re going to find forks of it.
I stand corrected. Telegram’s client is open source (GPL) and what OP is asking for is reasonable.
That’s a valid point, though it looks like Popfile’s installation instructions call for manually installing libraries, presumably current ones. I think it processes only text, not PDFs or images, which are traditional sources of vulnerabilities. I’m fairly certain it doesn’t attempt to execute Javascript. It is, itself written in Perl, which is memory-safe.
It’s worth considering security because there’s so much malware out there trying to spread indiscriminately, but Popfile is less vulnerable than an Android app (which bundles its dependencies) or anything written in C (which is subject to all kinds of memory management bugs).
Abandoned doesn’t necessarily imply no longer useful. Sometimes, though rarely in the modern world software is finished.
I may give it a try. It does actually have the features I’m asking for.
I’ve been using one of the Javascript variants of this for a while. While that is a little heavier weight for the client than this completely static solution, it’s ultimately just a few kilobytes and minimal processing that’s fast even on old devices.
The EFF has a good document on this topic.
I use Matrix. I even kind of like Matrix and have high hopes for its future.
But like, good?
why would they?
People use it for things like planning terrorism, child enticement, and sharing CSAM. Discord probably wants to ban those people, and maybe aid in their prosecution.
Of course if you’re sharing something that’s actually private, Discord is a poor choice. So is email or DMs on Lemmy where the server admin could read the content.
It uses the Mastodon API in a client-side script adapted from this one.
I’ve been self-hosting Mastodon for a while and mostly using it to share bird photography, but also to provide comments on a static site. Since Mastodon and Lemmy both speak ActivityPub, those get crossposted to /c/flashlight so Lemmy comments are also included on my site. Federation is cool.
I don’t follow many accounts that post Fediverse meta stuff on Mastodon. While I have some interest in the best examples of that content, the only way to attract a broader community is to promote accounts and content appealing to the interests of that broader audience.
VPNs have multiple effects. Which ones are you asking about?
The common ones that come to mind are:
It won’t do the former because media gets loaded directly from federated servers. It might do the latter.
Federation doesn’t inherently require large amounts of memory. Fundamentally, it’s a matter of selecting a list of unique servers (likely tens, maybe hundreds) from a larger set of followers (likely hundreds, maybe thousands) and sending an HTTP request to each when there’s a new post. There’s a speed/size tradeoff for how many to send in parallel, but it’s not a resource-intensive operation.
Growth beyond a few tens of megabytes was a bug in Writefreely, which is a likely-suitable option several comments here recommended.