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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I use 11ty to host my static site. I’ve used it for years. It’s well documented and learning resources.
I didn’t know about 11ty, thanks for the suggestion! I’ve been using Hugo before, but not for blogging. Maybe a static site generator is the way to go after all.
Maybe write freely would be an option? There is also a hosted version of it on write.as. It also speaks Activity Pub so it would be published on the fediverse too. I’ve not looked super deeply into the technology, but considered using it for my (future) blog.
For my purposes, this definitely looks like an upgrade, thank you for the suggestion!
I like how it’s similar to Ghost, but a lot smaller and easier to maintain. There is also an iOS app for editing posts on the go.
I think it will be either this, or one of the static site generators.
Depending on exactly what features you actually need in term of things like commenting, you might want to look into a static site generator. Something like hugo woud probably do what you need in terms of translating the markdown into a blog. It has the advantage that you can them host the pages on a normal web server, rather than running a blogging platform, giving you a much lighter weight server footprint, and a much smaller attack surface too.
I don’t really need comments, only RSS. Hugo is a great piece of software, I actually use it for my personal webpage. It would be an option for the blog too, my only gripe is that it adds some friction. For example if I want to embed images, I have to upload them somewhere, and manually insert the filename. I also need regenerate the site if I add new posts. I know this can be automated using scripts.
With Ghost it’s very simple, I can just write a post, upload the images, hit “Publish” and done. There was even a mobile app for writing new posts, but it doesn’t work anymore.
Hey, I solved the issue with the media by writing a custom app (it’s a bit more advanced than just a script) that copies the media to my server and inserts the links right into my posts. I’m at the stage of testing it, but so far it works. That allows me to host my blog on Cloudflare, plus have all my media on my own bare metal server, with as much storage as I need. Which is incredibly cheap. So far, I pay only for the domain name, and electricity to run my servers. But since they’re very energy efficient, that’s negligible.
I host my hugo site through gitlab pages (any forge “pages” could work) and images are simple. I just drop the image from my file browser into my IDE (VSCodium) in-line and it automatically puts the image in the article’s folder and links to the image in the article. I push the article to gitlab and the site is automatically rebuilt with the new content.
Some hugo themes might have custom shortcodes to display images in certain ways like side by side, galleries, etc with special styling. Invoking those shortcodes is different but just a simple image upload is no trouble. And no scripts necessary
Hugo can handle images through its asset pipelines, so you should be able to just store them with your markdown. I agree it’s a little more friction than a blogging pkatform, but it does mean that you can just write your posts in your editor of choice and publish them with just a command, or if you’re feeling fancy, set up git to trigger publishing when you push.
This is a good point actually. As others have mentioned, editors like VS Code make working with images in markdown easier. I’m also looking into Obsidian, which I already use on my phone, but it might be too much effort to setup for this purpose.
So I’m warming up to the idea of using a static site generator, just need to figure out a workflow. There is also Zola which is kind of like Hugo but smaller and written in Rust.
Hugo is really easy to automate too. Just toss it on a github/codeberg repo and use one of the community’s publish pipelines.
Have you taken a look at bear blog, it uses markdown or html and aimed to be small and maintainable well into the figure
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.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
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.
Check out bludit.com (don‘t mind .com), stores posts in static files (front matter or md, not sure), has some plugins and themes. Worth a look.
On my „check later, no time at the moment list“ ist publii (https://getpublii.com/) - maybe also worth a look.
Eleventy works for me.
I love ghost’s UI and feature set.
What complex data format are you taking about? Last time I checked, it was plain markdown in a database (even supporting sqlite).
What I’d recommend though, is coupling it with a static site generator and only using the ghost server for the administration / authoring (guides). That way, serving the blog to visitors is basically free in terms of resources (at last as low as it gets). You could even push these static builds to a CDN (yes yes, selfhost community, I’m just saying it for completeness)
It might be some hassle to set this up somehow, but you could even have the container stopped unless you actively need it. You could even run the server application on your computer instead of the server, unless you want to access is from a smartphone/tablet.
If you really want an alternative to Ghost and don’t need user management and an online WYSIWYG editor, you could go straight to an SSG and feed itraw it markdown files.
From what I’ve read, the new editor does not use Markdown by default anymore. It’s possible to create a Markdown “card” but that’s still embedded in the new format. So it’s very easy to accidentally create posts that cannot be exported as plain .md anymore.
From the link above:
Koenig has now been rebuilt on a new stack: React.js and Lexical — both of which are open source frameworks developed by Meta. So, Ghost is now using the same underlying technology that powers every single editor, comment box, or user input for billions of users across Facebook and Instagram.
The static site generator is a very cool idea, I didn’t know Ghost could do that.
Ah, right its stored as (rather basic) html instead of markdown.
I had looked into GRAV which is not quite suited for blogging (i.e. date-based posts) but rather for wiki-like content or a simple page structure. Also, they’re also feeling more and more enterprisey, especially with their recent 2.x release.
Tried Serendipity but found it to be more or less on life-support.
And finally settled on a very basic WordPress with only a handful of plugins (all set to auto-update), most importantly SQLite and ActivityPub. Backups are a simple copy of all the files or just the SQLite db. The Gutenberg post format in the SQLite db is easy enough to convert it to anything else using a small custom Python script should need be. I don’t remember how I imported my existing posts, though. Might’ve been via RSS import.
I run Ghost along with a dozen other services on a N100 Mini PC without issue. All files are stored as .md. And you can disable monetization, as I have.
My only gripe is that they implemented email authentication, which honestly infuriates me maybe more than it should.
And also their half-assed implementation of ActivityPub.
But can you be more specific about what you don’t like so that we can recommend a suitable alternative? Are you just looking for something as lightweight as humanly possible?
I don’t like how it’s now a very large piece of software with a lot of features I don’t need. I’ve tried never versions. The backend is now a confusing “dashboard”. I started with version v0.x, the last upgrade I did was v1.0. They are now on v6.0 which was released in August 2025. If you look at their Github releases, the latest is v6.67.0. That means it takes them less than a week to push a new version. Apparently, the project has more than a million lines of code. To me that’s crazy! I want a stable, low-maintenance thing I don’t have to constantly keep up to date.
As it is, I cannot even re-install Ghost v1.0 anymore without headaches, they don’t support it. Apparently it has major security issues, so the only “sane” option for continuing with Ghost is doing all the upgrades.
