Blogging platforms and indecisions
Since November last year, I've been searching for a place to blog. I've seen how social media has been deteriorating, and a lot of my friends spread around dozens of other websites. It's becoming harder to keep a consistent presence on the web without fragmenting oneself into dozens of small pieces. Having a blog, while not necessarily providing the most interactive activity on the web, allows one to coalesce the fragmented presence in just one place, requiring only to link things back to it, working as a hub to loose threads.
The issue, though, is how to do that.
My first reaction was to go to WordPress. I've used it in the past and was somewhat familiar with its inner workings for blogging, so I've never run into the bloated mess of issues that people complain about. A few months later, Automattic — WordPress's parent company — started to scrape blogs to feed to an "AI"1, so I backed up my blogs and noped out of it.
I rejected the idea of using static website generators: I don't want to mess around with coding, I don't want to build things from zero, and modifying themes to fit what I want would be a pain. Also, I like to have something ready for me to write and publish, no matter which device I'm using, so the idea of having to sit in front of a specific computer, write what I wanted, compile the blog, and upload, sounded very tedious. If I wanted to write long posts every now and then, it would've been fine, but sometimes I just want to quickly jolt something down in the moment.
The next solution I found was Ghost. To be honest, I quite like Ghost's editor, my only complaint being the lack of working footnotes — the ones I have on my posts there had to be written inside their markdown block editor, which is worse than just using a pure markdown editor like the one here, on Bear Blog. In any case, the platform is great, except that everything is focused on getting subscribers and making money out of blogging. Every theme has huge subscribe buttons everywhere and, although you can disable the subscription part entirely, it disables commenting too, which is an aspect that I don't use much, but I like to leave the option open.
A few months later I found two other cool services: Mataroa and Bear Blog. I don't necessarily like minimalistic themes for blogging, I really enjoyed those themes that had a sidebar with extra content or info, but I like them way more than the "newsletter-y theme" most blogs have nowadays — including Ghost. However, having already a self-hosted Ghost blog all set, with the mailing service running (for people to subscribe and be able to comment) and the internal tipping system working (way better than CTA to subscribe in exchange for money) made things more tolerable. But themes... ah, the themes suck.
Really.
Every one of them is made with "engagement" and "subscription" in mind, so if you don't use images, most of them break. The ones that don't are very minimalistic in nature — while still maintaining some of that "go on and sell subscriptions" feel — which is why Mataroa and Bear Blog sounded interesting: two minimalistic interfaces without the push for forceful engagement.
I did a test run with Mataroa while still running my Ghost blog and, to be honest, I liked it, but it was too barebones and, despite being focused on the written word, its theme wasn't that inspiring and it was a bit tiring on the eye, at least for me. At this point, I'd already made an account on Bear Blog, which I liked a lot, but didn't have a comment system — something that Mataroa did. Nonetheless, I decided to keep running my Ghost blog instead.
However, Bear Blog keeps calling me back. I like the interface, I like the simple theme I found for my blog, I like the typography. But, despite "writing just with words" being what I like to do, sometimes I want to write "professionally-looking articles" about some stuff, making heavy usage of images and other stuff. I know that Bear Blog accepts HTML syntax, and that's very freeing, but it's one thing having to code how to load an image, and it's another to just drag and drop it and then make small adjustments.
I stayed with Ghost still, but I'm conflicted. Ghost still feels "too professional", which is not what I'm looking for, but Bear Blog handles multimedia in a bit more finicky way, and it doesn't have comments.
For now, I'm learning a bit about coding blogs — against my will — so I can try to change my Ghost theme to fit what I expect a blog should look like. On the other hand, despite Bear Blog not having a sidebar, the themes feel a lot more like "blog" than "corporate newsletter for paying subscribers".
I populated my blog here with my articles from Ghost to see how it feels, and, sincerely? Feels awesome. But if I wanted tips, I would have to rely on an external service. I think about writing something like this on Bear Blog and get instantly tired of just imagining how to handle the HTML. And let me be clear: this is not the Bear Blog's fault, it's part of the core philosophy of this space, which I really admire, and that's why I had such a hard time deciding how to proceed. In the end, I went with Ghost, but Ghost keeps continuously sliding every so slightly into "newsletter" territory — which is not what I want — and their use of "AI"1 generated images on their posts about ActivityPub implementation left a sour taste in my mouth.
So, for now, I'll keep using Ghost (I really enjoy their editor, despite not having footnotes and not capturing symbols like © and ™), but I'll keep Bear Blog paired with the posts, just like I did with Mataroa. Despite Ghost being open source and managed by a non-profit, I'm unsure about which path they'll follow. We'll see how it goes.
And, in case I change my mind, I can just redirect my domain to this blog and keep posting as if nothing happened.
The use of quotes here is deliberate.↩