It wants a gigabyte of RAM. Maybe that passes for lightweight in 2025, but given the fundamental things a blog has to do, I’d probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.
It costs like $3/mo to host it. If that’s too resource intensive then I don’t know what your limits are. Compute isn’t free—that literally breaks the laws of thermodynamics, no matter what you’re told by hosting services, and ghost does server side rendering and has a dynamic admin dashboard and can even work headless… and it costs less than $3/mo for your own personal open source cms.
If you need something that costs less then you can just build your own I guess, but how many hours of your time is that worth when you could just be spending $3/mo
I’m thinking like a programmer about what a basic blog has to do and the computing resources necessary to accomplish it. Software that needs more than a few tens of megabytes to accomplish that is not lightweight regardless of its merits.
This comment seems to be arguing that one should not demand blog software be lightweight because there’s inexpensive hosting for something heavyweight. That’s a fine position to take, I guess, but OP did ask for lightweight options.
Im merely making a value proposition because im an engineer and I’ve had this same exact problem and desire. Call it experience — a static blog is fine since I can build one of those in my sleep, but for me I wanted to post on it when I was away and only had my phone. Now do I put it on my git? A separate notebook that is synced somewhere? I have ADHD—if I want to write I have to write and I can’t just hope to remember it sometime later. Now what’s the point of my blog if I can’t write on it when I need to but simply don’t have my desktop nearby? Also you have to have pay for a CI to do the building anyway for a static site generator, that ain’t free and even if you found a service that provides CI for free you’re just externalizing your costs somewhere else. Laws of thermodynamics still apply. So instead of paying for CI to build your static site, I’d argue just pay for the server rendered site. Why choose to have a 1gb ram build server for a blog when you can just use that server to run the blog.
And they want federation support. Ghost is working on that as well speak. What static site generator supports federation?
Federation doesn’t inherently require large amounts of memory. Fundamentally, it’s a matter of selecting a list of unique servers (likely tens, maybe hundreds) from a larger set of followers (likely hundreds, maybe thousands) and sending an HTTP request to each when there’s a new post. There’s a speed/size tradeoff for how many to send in parallel, but it’s not a resource-intensive operation.
Growth beyond a few tens of megabytes was a bug in Writefreely, which is a likely-suitable option several comments here recommended.
Zak@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It wants a gigabyte of RAM. Maybe that passes for lightweight in 2025, but given the fundamental things a blog has to do, I’d probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
It costs like $3/mo to host it. If that’s too resource intensive then I don’t know what your limits are. Compute isn’t free—that literally breaks the laws of thermodynamics, no matter what you’re told by hosting services, and ghost does server side rendering and has a dynamic admin dashboard and can even work headless… and it costs less than $3/mo for your own personal open source cms.
If you need something that costs less then you can just build your own I guess, but how many hours of your time is that worth when you could just be spending $3/mo
Zak@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m thinking like a programmer about what a basic blog has to do and the computing resources necessary to accomplish it. Software that needs more than a few tens of megabytes to accomplish that is not lightweight regardless of its merits.
This comment seems to be arguing that one should not demand blog software be lightweight because there’s inexpensive hosting for something heavyweight. That’s a fine position to take, I guess, but OP did ask for lightweight options.
False@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You may be thinking like a programmer but the guy you responded to is thinking like a software engineer.
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Im merely making a value proposition because im an engineer and I’ve had this same exact problem and desire. Call it experience — a static blog is fine since I can build one of those in my sleep, but for me I wanted to post on it when I was away and only had my phone. Now do I put it on my git? A separate notebook that is synced somewhere? I have ADHD—if I want to write I have to write and I can’t just hope to remember it sometime later. Now what’s the point of my blog if I can’t write on it when I need to but simply don’t have my desktop nearby? Also you have to have pay for a CI to do the building anyway for a static site generator, that ain’t free and even if you found a service that provides CI for free you’re just externalizing your costs somewhere else. Laws of thermodynamics still apply. So instead of paying for CI to build your static site, I’d argue just pay for the server rendered site. Why choose to have a 1gb ram build server for a blog when you can just use that server to run the blog.
And they want federation support. Ghost is working on that as well speak. What static site generator supports federation?
shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol 2 months ago
Not if you want federation.
The answer is probably GoToSocial, which suggests that it can run on 512MB.
Zak@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Federation doesn’t inherently require large amounts of memory. Fundamentally, it’s a matter of selecting a list of unique servers (likely tens, maybe hundreds) from a larger set of followers (likely hundreds, maybe thousands) and sending an HTTP request to each when there’s a new post. There’s a speed/size tradeoff for how many to send in parallel, but it’s not a resource-intensive operation.
Growth beyond a few tens of megabytes was a bug in Writefreely, which is a likely-suitable option several comments here recommended.