sunbeam.city is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Sunbeam City is a anticapitalist, antifascist solarpunk instance that is run collectively.

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hazelnot :yell:

Can someone recommend a blogging platform? Ideally a federated one?

I talk a lot about games I play and stuff and sometimes I feel limited by the character limit here (and also some people hate it when others make long posts for some reason?), and I don't wanna use Wordpress or have the energy to set up a proper static blog.

So might as well just, have a blog where I talk about old games and stuff lol

@hazelnot Diaspora or Friendica ? Never tried those, but worth a look.

@emon Those look more like Facebook type places 😅

@aral Oh cool, will look into it!

@aral Oh, they don't have free accounts anymore :(

@hazelnot write.as? or a self-hosted writefreely instance?

you could also, shameless plug here, install gotosocial somewhere :D but it's more microblogging than blogging, even with the large default post size limit

@tobi Hmm, I'll see where I can get with writefreely, though I have absolutely no clue how I'd make it available to anyone

I have a domain but I literally don't remember how to put things on there, I've literally only done it once, 7 years ago

@tobi Oh, write.as don't have free accounts anymore :(

@tobi Well they do but they require you to get an invite from a paying member

@hazelnot @tobi you do also need a vps for that, which is... not easy to set up, and also costs money :/
(same goes for gts, i do think it could be interesting as a blogging platform with a little bit of template modification tho (and possibly public timeline exposed to index, but that is lot harder than editing templates))

@duc Can't I just put it on an old laptop though? Cause that would be free 😅

@hazelnot @duc you can yes, if your ISP permits self-hosting

@tobi There are ISPs that don't? o.o

@hazelnot sure are, some of them don't let you open ports etc. So then you can still run on a laptop at home but you've gotta set up a wireguard tunnel or whatever to a vps, and it becomes more complicated

If you're looking to self host like that it's probs worth reading about some of the ins and outs of it before making a decision. There's also privacy concerns cuz if you self host without a vps, you have to use your actual home IP address for stuff, which is usually geographically locatable

@hazelnot just for context btw, this instance runs on a (iirc) €4 / month greenhost.net instance, which is quite reasonably priced imo

@tobi I'm broke and unemployed to I would genuinely rather expose my IP than have to pay 4 euros a month 💀

@hazelnot that's fair yeah! Don't forget if running at home you gotta price in the electricity to power a laptop 24/7, which also adds up. There's lots of exciting pros and cons to consider :P

@tobi My parents pay my power bill :^)

@tobi I did check to see where my IP places me on a map, and it's just basically the center of the city I live in, which isn't really an issue especially since I have mentioned what it's called both on here and on other platforms 🤷‍♀️

@hazelnot maybe you could ask someone to do the reverse proxying on their server in worst case scenario. tho they'd also need to do the wireguard/zerotier/tailscale/whatever part.

@welshpixie Oh thanks for the offer! I'm not sure if I wanna have a blog associated with a Mastodon instance, even if (especially?) it's not the one I'm on though.

But I'll think about it!

@hazelnot WordPress with activity pub plugins