Steven Rosenberg

Even though it's apples and oranges in more than a few ways, Dave Winer is right when he says it's easier to host WordPress than Mastodon.

Dave's a little more all in on WP than I am. Maybe a lot more all in. Still, it's true that anybody can host their own WP instance on shared hosting, a VPS, bare metal — what have you. I've done it more than once, and I've never successfully built a Mastodon instance, though I have tried a few times.

I did get GoToSocial running and used it as a 1-person Fediverse instance for a couple of years. I have it turned off because I was using 80 GB of disk space, and I had trouble properly backing it up. If GtS had the Mastodon feature that allows users to only keep posts from the last week/month(s)/year, that might help. I was following about 2K accounts, so that might why the data ballooned to 80 GB.

WordPress is easier. It's straight up LAMP stack. Very 2000s. But a blog — and even a multi-site blog — is not the same as a Fediverse server. And WP, Mastodon and GtS all include a database. I used PostgreSQL for my GtS instance because I wanted to learn more about "real" databases, but in retrospect I should have used SQLite, which is easier to back up (and move) — no dumps, just a big ol' file.

The whole deal with static site generators like Hugo and Zola (the two I've used the most) is that they produce lightning-fast sites that don't require PHP or a database. They're (very much) wonkier to use, and comments are difficult (so much that almost nobody has them), but you don't have to maintain (and worry about) a huge PHP app with MySQL database on a server somewhere, just waiting to be hacked.

Of course a Fediverse instance — and the Fediverse in general — is all comments, all interactivity (though you can create an account and treat it like a blog, just like you can sort of treat a WP site like a Fediverse account — so they both play in each other's pool).

I thought about starting a blog as a Fediverse account, either on my own instance or another, but I needed one with a huge character count (like GtS, not like most Mastodon servers), and I probably need to NOT follow 2K accounts and see how it uses disk space.

I have self-hosted WordPress before, and I'm sure I could do it again. But it can be a lot of work, and it seems like a lot of infrastructure for a blog.

Only one thing makes me want to do it, and that thing is the integrated comments. Nowadays very few blog engines (and none of the static sites) bother with comments because it adds a lot of complexity. Usually you need to rely on GitHub or another third-party provider, and the whole thing gets messy.

That's why not doing comments seems to work so well. It's simple.

WordPress.com has offered a free tier since the beginning, but it's kind of a come-on for the paid product. I get it.

The biggest problem with free WP.com is the themes. There are not that many available, and almost all of them are awful and not well-suited to blogging. They're better for general product/org websites, which I guess is where WP makes most of its money. More power to them, but I'd like a dozen or more decent blogging themes. You can't even change the colors on many of them without paying.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm cheap. I've paid for hosting before, and maybe I'll do it again, but I'm much more comfortable hosting static sites than I am full WP with the PHP, the database, the plugins, the updates.

I liked the way that NearlyFreeSpeech.net does it — with installation and management via the console over ssh. I think I was paying $5-7 a month when I still had WP on that server (it was for a client … a non-paying client, but that's OK). And back when I was using Hostgator, which I thought was great for WP, I was paying somewhere between $9 and $12 per month (though I could theoretically host all the sites I wanted for that price).

I'm running my static sites on a VPS now, and I don't find the server maintenance to be out of line – I run AlmaLinux 9, and I can camp on that for quite some time, and I know how to update it.

I'll let the cat out of the bag and say that I'm using a free Oracle Cloud VPS. Free is really something. I'm not the sort of person to support Oracle's ownership in a political sense, but they're giving me something free with no strings attached, so it's hard to turn down. And if I get booted, I can easily move to another server or service.

I really should move away from Oracle. If I could find a VPS or hosting provider with $3/month fees, I'd be tempted. I'm sure they're out there, but I haven't really looked.

Upon further reflection: Maybe the $4/month ($48/year) "Personal" WP.com plan is where I should go. That would get me more themes. It says "free domain for a year." I already pay for a domain from a registrar, and I'm not excited about WP managing it. Does this mean I can hook up a domain I already own without paying more? I hope so. I just might try it. WP.com is complex on the backend, but I wouldn't have to manage it.

If Dave Winer's Wordland editor is the thing that gets me writing on this WordPress.com site, I'll have to see what I can do about a new theme. Maybe the fully dark, super spare design is a little much.

I've been thinking and plotting on how to get the hundreds of posts on this site into my Hugo or Zola sites, but maybe I'll just leave them here and start adding.

What I'd really like is a site like Wordland that would allow me to write so easily for a static site generator. A major dependency for those is usually Git (and GitHub at that). I'd rather not use version control for a blog. I just don't want or need that. But if I could figure out how do use local Git and then do the CI/CD from my laptop, I'd consider it. Why is that so hard? Why do we need a hosted Git repo to do this? I'd AGAIN consider it if I could do it with Codeberg, and that probably is doable. I'll have to start planning and testing.