WriteFreely VS Hexo

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/

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)

Instead of joining a Mastodon server, have you considered joining a write.freely server? Write.freely is a decentralized platform for writers that integrates the ActivityPub protocol, so anyone in the Fediverse can interact with your posts. This may be more well suited for your needs, although if you still want to join a Mastodon server there are many good answers in this thread.

Lastly, and this isn't Mastodon, but if you want to write long form content on the Fediverse, you might want to check out Write Freely. It's kinda like Medium, but your posts live in the Fediverse.

If you're looking to publish long form content, you should also look at Write Freely. It's a blogging platform where the fediverse is baked in from the start. The plug-in you found will work great, especially when paired with a Mastodon instance. But it might be worth a look if you haven't seen it already. (That said it sounds like you want to deeply structure your content, so Write Freely might not be enough for your goals anyways.)

A lot of great suggestions here and some stuff I’ve never heard of before!

Throwing my own suggestion into the ring, as I was just looking into this last week.

I started setting up a blog using Hexo. It’s another Node based SSG that uses markdown and supports tags. It has a lot of neat plugins that people have developed, too.

I like it so far!

https://github.com/hexojs/hexo

There's also hexo [1]. I saw that on Matt Klein's website [2] and the theme looked pretty clean.

[1] https://hexo.io

[2] https://mattklein123.dev/2020/03/08/2020-03-07-new-website/

Hexo — best lightweight SSG

To make their creation easier, numerous open-source static websites generators are available: Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, Hexo, etc. Most of the time, the content is managed through static (ideally Markdown) files or a Content API. Then, the generator requests the content, injects it in templates defined by the developer and generates a bunch of HTML files.

https://gohugo.io/ written in go, support md https://hexo.io/ written in node

Hexo's

I'm currently using Hexo, I write articles in markdown, commit them to a git repository and push them to Github. I then have a Github Action to bundle the static website and publish it on Github Pages, so I get free hosting 👌

Some alternatives I'm considering learning instead of Gatsby are Jeckyll or Hexo.

Hello Joe_Boogz,

Blog is using Hexo (https://hexo.io/) and a little modified Cactus theme (https://probberechts.github.io/hexo-theme-cactus/). If some of the websites looks interesting to you and you would like how they are built you can use Wappalyzer (https://www.wappalyzer.com/lookup/0ut3r.space)