looking for lightweight ghost blog alternative

8 days ago by simon574 to c/selfhosted

My blog is currently running on Ghost 1.0 I'm blogging for almost 20 years, started with blogger.com I think, eventually migrated to self-hosted Ghost when it was pretty new and lightweight. I can host anything that runs on Linux, I can even use Docker.

I don't want to migrate to the latest Ghost version because it feels very enterprisey now, needs a lot of resources on the server and uses a complex data format instead of Markdown. I don't need monetization either.

My requirements are:

possible to migrate ~30-40 Markdown posts + embedded images from Ghost 1.0
future proof, i.e. simple data format so I don't get locked in
low RAM/CPU usage
easy maintenance, creating posts, backups, etc
RSS support

I'll be very grateful for any suggestions.

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lilith267 3 points 8 days ago

Have you taken a look at bear blog, it uses markdown or html and aimed to be small and maintainable well into the figure

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simon574 4 points 8 days ago

I've already looked into bear blog, I really like the philosophy behind it. The reason I don't use it is because ideally I want to self-host, and bear blog is not open-source (edit: cannot be self-hosted easily). Also, I want to embed images in my blog, and from what I've seen, you have to either take care of the image hosting yourself or pay a monthly fee. It also looks like the backups are only text, no images, which could make migration to a different platform painful. I had the same issue with blogger.com back in the day, it was possible to export the text, but then the image links were all still pointing to Google's CDN.

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lilith267 1 point 8 days ago

Bear blog was open source under the MIT license, and then they changed to a copyleft license in 2025. What I didnt realize is they dont have any selfhosting tooling or documentation which is a shame

Looks like im gonna have to go with mataroa like I originally planned and write some custom css to inject

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simon574 1 point 8 days ago

Oh, interesting! I was wrong about bear blog not being open-source, thank you for the correction! So it would be possible to self-host, it's just not officially supported. mataroa looks interesting as well, maybe even more minimalistic than bear blog.

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