merlot VS WriteFreely

Mastodon is a microblogging service, so not meant for large bodies of text. This is why the text entry box is small, the columns are somewhat narrow (especially in deck mode) etc.

Platforms like https://writefreely.org/ , which are designed to be for blogging and long-form writing, are the place to write this. Write Freely federates so one can follow accounts and interact with posts via Mastodon etc.

Write Freely, open source writing space

Docs - https://writefreely.org/

It's all about federation, in these federated networks all these servers talk to eachother and exchange messages about stuff going on on the servers. So it's easy to set up a hidden service for the webui of one of them, but it's sometimes quite obscure to try and set up the federation for one of them. It depends on what settings they honor and what other types of encryption and authentication they require and stuff. But, if you put some effort in ahead of time, you can make it really simple: I don't know how to do it in rust(lemmy is written in rust), but here's a neat example of how to do it in Go: https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/710 which requires no complicated configuration.

An alternative to Plume is WriteFreely, which is a pretty clean & simple experience. Just don't expect to much regarding customization.

I also wish write.as were more popular. It's like old Medium, but less popular but with a more reader-friendly business model and self-host-able (AGPL v3)

And since you've mentioned you want to write a blog, take a look at WriteFreely: https://writefreely.org/