Fox in a field, panting from the heat

Introduction

Going to make a bet that you didn’t know that I was gone, and really, you don’t give a bleep. And you know what? That is perfectly fine. In fact, I’m happy if no one missed me.

Want to know where I went? No? Well, okay… But I’m going to talk about it anyway. I was in the process of migrating web hosts. Oh, so now you are interested? Okay, so, I think it’s fair that we talk about hosted blogs for a bit. But not just any hosted blogs, ones that are specifically more Fediverse native or adjacent.

Blogs We’re Not Talking About

Of course, there are some juggernaut blogs that have been out there for years. And, some of those blogs have adapted to the Fediverse. What do I mean by adapted?

Well, the biggest name that comes to mind is WordPress. They started offering Fediverse integration a few years back. Automattic went so far as to hire the author of the first working ActivtyPub plugin for WordPress in order to integrate support for ActivityPub more tightly into their platform. Which all sounds great… Except for a few things.

There are two routes to go with WordPress: hosted or self-hosted. If you go the hosted route many providers don’t know anything about the ActivityPub integration, and you will find yourself having to figure out what isn’t working in order to get support to fix the issue. All the while you are likely paying pretty good money for the service.

If you go the self-hosted route, you likely have a fair amount of time to spend maintaining your WordPress installation. There is very little that is easy about maintaining WordPress, plugins, a database, etc. It’s not the kind of activity that most people want to do when they are trying to write.

For similar reasons to these we can skip Blogger, Drupal, Wix, etc. They all have interesting features, some have better integration for the Fediverse, and some offer none.

What We Are Talking About

Let’s call them the minimalist blogs, and specifically ones that offer Fediverse integration. In particular, I’ll talk about five of them very briefly: Bear, write.as (WriteFreely), Pika Page, Micro.blog, and Pagecord. There are others, but most of them fall into the self-hosted category, and I want to focus on hosted options.

Bear is the one that I initially saw getting a lot of buzz. The promise of a “forever” blog with minimal features that you could just rely on was quite appealing. For me, it was too minimal. And, in order to enhance or extend it, you have to find a bunch of recipes that have been gathered together and copy and paste the ones you want into the back-end. The whole thing has a very hack-ish feeling to it. While the pricing for Bear was great, I had concerns about extensions being incompatible or breaking. That would lead to more time invested in maintaining the back-end of the blog than I wanted.

write.as is the hosted version of WriteFreely. It has a minimal interface that allows you to write as much as you want. And, the paid plans are competitive with Bear. But, write.as does have some odd quirks. For example, to create a page you write a post and then pin it to your menu. This can be annoying because you have to pin posts to the menu in the order you want them. But, not only that, since you have to save your page as a post first, it gets posted to the Fediverse, even if you don’t want it to. I could go on about quirks of the system, there are a lot of quirks.

Pika Page was probably the cleanest minimalist blog setup I’ve seen. It’s flexible and has a fair number of options, but isn’t overwhelming. As such I think it looks really nice, but there were a couple of things that I didn’t find all that nice. First, I didn’t see any Fediverse integration (ie, I didn’t see a way to directly publish posts to the Fediverse). Second, the pricing was limiting for me personally. I need to have 4–5 blogs, which would be considerably more expensive than either Bear or write.as.

Pagecord is the next level of Pika Page. It’s a simple blogging system, but has a fair amount of flexibility. It has Fediverse integration, but not as complete as a platform like write.as. I had a long talk with Olly, the Pagecord creator, about a number of features… Without getting into the weeds too much, some he was investigating adding, and others were outside the scope he had in mind for Pagecord. Pricing wise, Pagecord is a more expensive solution than Bear or write.as, but not quite as expensive as Pika Page.

Finally there’s Micro.blog. Micro.blog is (potentially) the most interesting option out there. Not only is it a blogging platform, but it also adds a lot of extra features, like Bookshelves, Movies, and Notes that can be used as part of the platform. Basically, Micro.blog is the fusion of a blogging platform along with a Fediverse Mastodon-like system. You can read, follow, and interact with users on the Fediverse. You can write blog posts, and publish them directly to the Fediverse, and you can send out notices for new posts on your existing Fediverse, Bluesky, and other social media accounts. Pricing is in the sweet-spot: between Bear and write.as, while offering options that aren’t as expensive as Pika Page or Pagecord.

But, there is another consideration when it comes to Micro.blog. It is based on the Hugo flat-file website generator. This is great for page loading speeds, but it brings a level of complexity that may not be for everyone. If you aren’t comfortable getting into the guts of templates, HTML and CSS, it may not be for you.

My Ultimate Decision

Admittedly, I wasn’t one hundred percent happy with any of the options. But, I knew that I needed something that would be flexible enough to let me create the site(s) I wanted, and at a reasonable price. So I made the decision to migrate to Micro.blog. It wasn’t the easiest migration. I spent several days reading documentation on templates and stuff in Hugo in order to make the site look and (mostly) feel the way I want it to.

But, once I had one site done, it was simple to copy-n-paste my work to the other sites with minimal changes necessary. And, much to the credit of Micro.blog it made migrating one of my sites easier than I’d expected it could be. (I had a site with over 400 posts, images, etc. that needed to migrate. I was able to backup the posts and import then into Micro.blog in a very short amount of time.)

So, that’s where I’ve been the last week: investigating blogging platforms, and deciding what to do. And, yes, there is more to this story. I will write about my research (which went a lot deeper) in another post. And, I will likely share more of my story on why I decided to migrate a second time after setting up my previous blogs.

UPDATE: Just to clarify my comments regarding the pricing of each option. I was thinking about this in a price-per-blog manner. write.as has an option for a 5 year plan with 5 blogs. This plan is $250, which amounts to $10/yr per blog. Bear is $49/yr for up to 10 blogs, or $5/yr per blog. And Bear offers their $189 one-time / forever price. Pagecord is $40/yr for 2 blogs, which is $20/yr per blog.