WriteFreely VS Hugo

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/

This blog is running on Hugo. It had previously been running on Jekyll. Both these SSGs ship with the ability to create excerpts from your markdown content in 1 line or thereabouts.

Hugo

Hugo is a popular static site generator specifically designed to create websites and documentation lightning-fast. Its minimalist approach, emphasis on speed, and ease of use have made it popular among developers, technical writers, and anybody looking to construct high-quality websites without the complexity of typical CMS platforms.

As per many other comments, it sounds like a static site generator like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) or Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/), hosted on GitHub Pages (https://pages.github.com/) or GitLab Pages (https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/pages/), would be a good match. If you set up GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD to do the build and deploy (see e.g. https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/), your normal workflow will simply be to edit markdown and do a git push to make your changes live. There are a number of pre-built themes (e.g. https://themes.gohugo.io/) you can use, and these are realtively straightforward to tweak to your requirements.

Create the technical documentation of your project You can use any of the following options: * A wiki, like the ArchWiki that uses MediaWiki * Read the Docs, used by projects like Setuptools. Check Awesome Read the Docs for more examples. * Create a website * Create a blog, like the documentation of Blowfish, a theme for Hugo.

Doing this made me appreciate existing SSGs like Hugo and Next.js even more👏👏

I suggest hugo: https://gohugo.io/

Generates a completely static website from MD (and other formats) files; also handles themes (including a lot of them rendering well on mobile), and different types of content - posts, articles, etc. - depending on the theme.

It's open source and, being completely static, cheap as fuck to self host.

I would suggest looking into static site generators. Some popular examples, which are used myself are: - Hugo: https://gohugo.io/ - Jekyll: https://jekyllrb.com