This a good idea?

This sounds like a fun project that needs some customization, like styling and templating everything to make it look like a blog with federation and comments and not like a Lemmy instance.

Edit: You could also setup GoToSocial for example and set maximum character size to 5000 or so.

This will give you a place to blog and get comments. Readers need a front-end and for them it just looks like a Mastodon account, but you could use styling and template magic to convert the back-end into a nice looking blog front-end.

It’s easy to setup, host, and maintain and runs on fairly low resources.

Lemmy or Piefed? Which is easier to host

Can’t say anything about Piefed, but from what I tried quite some time ago, Lemmy is absurdly annoying to properly set up in an already existing Docker environment with an already existing reverse proxy, because it wants to basically handle everything on it’s own.

It might be actually easier to use another machine or a VM and install Docker there and let Lemmy do whatever it wants to do und just proxy from your main setup to the Lemmy setup.

I gave up.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

[Thread #108 for this comm, first seen 20th Feb 2026, 21:01] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I basically do this with https://lemmy.mods4ever.com/

It's fine, I didn't really check out alternatives or real blog platforms though lol. It doesn't use many resources since it isn't subscribed to any remote communities. I can share resource usage numbers when I get home but it's really low, barely uses CPU, the backup zip files are like 60MB

edit: cpu is like below 1%, ram is maybe like 500MB used total? and the backup zip file is 55MB

edit 2: docker stats

My two cents: Hugo+HTTP-Server should perform better when confronted with all the AI crawler bots as only a static site is served. Lemmy or Pifed is diffrent in that aspect. For small blogs it shouldn't matter (jet)...

This seems overly complicated. If you want to run a federated blog with comments and picture uploads why don’t you just host a Ghost instance and be done?

If you want fediverse support WordPress has that through plugins. Lemmy is pretty heavy on resources. Just don't look at Wordpress' code and you'll be fine.