1d ago

Is there anything like a self-hosted version of medium of substack ?

And by that I mean,

An http server that serves word-like rich formatted text documents and includes a web-based rich formatting text editor to write and edit these documents.

With some searching I found these might be candidates

Ghost
WriteFreely / Write.as
Plume

And maybe the following editors in some kind of standalone mode

TipTap
Editor.js
Quill.js
CKEditor 5
Slate.js

26 comments

... A ... blog? Are you asking if it's possible to selfhost a blog?
- And they've answered their own question by listing several valid candidates.
  
  Well, I'm hoping someone has a better one, or at least can confirm that one of the things I listed isn't actually a huge waste of time.
- You can tell OP is a younger Gen Z by this post lol.
  It sounds like a stupid question but if OP isn’t 30+ it’s perfectly understandable to not be aware of the former ubiquity of self hosted blogs.
  
  I am aware of self hosted "blogs" but that's not what I want.
  A better way to explain what I want is
  This, but opensource and self-hosted
  https://pastebinrichtext.com/
  with per-file access control
- Yes, like that except not with a terrible interface that looks like the unholy union of vscode and vim.
This was a pretty good demo of hugo, a static site generator: https://youtu.be/MX4yy1dTVYg
- Ok, well I see it's not what I'm hoping for And by not this, I mean this
  
  Those are the built in templates, what you add is your markdown for your post. You're not actually adding that. It isn't quite click to save, but it's similar. Write freely may be the closest bet for free
Well, that's just a blog. WordPress comes to mind, though try not abusing it by installing too many plugins and transforming it to an abomination that takes 3 seconds to hack.
There are probably more modern alternatives, I personally wrote my own blog system that uses ActivityPub to synchronise with Lemmy and others.
There are probably thousands of different static website generators that can make a more beautiful website out of the box, for free.
- I want something that is more akin to using microsoft word except it's in the browser and not made by satan Something I can recomment to people and know they're not going to come back to me and ask "what is a markdown code block"
  
  StackEdit is a good rich text to markdown web application: https://stackedit.io/
- SSG are really a pain in the ass to work with, especially if you want something other than the standard theme.
  
  Maybe if you don’t know CSS?
An application to create and publish notes? Something like StandardNotes or Notesnook?
I’ve heard lots of good things about Ghost. I’ve also hosted Grav for a while and it’s pretty solid. You can do Wordpress, but I’d stay away as it gets bad fast and there are better alternatives. If you needed even more scale, Mediawiki is selfhostable too.
- I'm reading the grav page and I have no idea how this is.
  Is this like this
  
  Press a button rich text editor appears write stuff press save send link
  That's what I'm aiming for. I had a look, and the blog platform are so much clunkier and frustrating to use. And each of these seems to want to eat several of my weekends to install so I don't have the luxury of reviewing all of them.
- Grav is nice, as it creates flat files for the front end, instead of server side/database driven pages. That makes it super fast to load.
Check out this list:
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#blogging-platforms
Or
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#content-management-systems-cms
- It's hard to tell if any of these are the thing I'm looking for or not.

26 comments