What's better than git though? I think they only other system I've used is TFS and I didn't think it was any better.

It doesn't need to be algorithmic - like Lemmy and Mastodon and Pixelfed all let people follow, like, comment, up vote without algorithmically promoting content.

Try Pixelfed for a good Insta alternative. It's open source, supports self hosting, and federates with ActivityPub.

Thank you that's very interesting!

Personally most of my shit is still on GitHub but I'm thinking of migrating my future work to Codeberg which looks pretty nice, built on FOSS, and is community managed.

Someone else recommended Lemmy which like Mastodon would technically allow me to make text-based posts, but I think both fall very short of what a proper blogging platform would offer. I mean, I don't think Mastodon even supports bold text.

Good articles have formatting, they have embedded images, they have citations, etc. A good publication has featured articles, they have topics and dropdown menus, they let you filter by author, etc.

What made Medium so great was that even though it was an open blogging platform, it made your work look so nice it felt like you got your writing featured in a real online publication like say the Huffington Post. Substack allows writers to build huge audiences and collect monthly subscriptions and make a blog that looks very personalized and legit.

Mastodon and Lemmy are more for sharing and aggregating content than managing original content.

A lot of folks recommending Ghost/WordPress I think are not understanding that a huge part of what I'm hoping to find is an active community of readers and writers that I may contribute to - I'm not looking to build a new destination site.

When you sign up on Medium.com you're effectively given a free blog, but the real value they offer is that when you publish people who are on Medium.com who have never heard of you or your blog are recommended to read your articles. Every writer and reader on the platform is contributing to building a bigger network which makes it more valuable to everyone on it.

Looks nice! XMPP is an interesting choice - wonder why they went with that.

This is actually the closest to what I'm looking for. It is a bit more basic and stripped down than I'd like which is why I was asking for other options out there but it does offer the most basic functionality I'm asking for. Seems like there isn't really support for images so that's tough.

GitHub isn't open source and I'm hoping for something that wouldn't require git. Something your mom could make an account on and easily use would be ideal.

Not a bad suggestion but I'd consider that a pretty big compromise from what I'm looking for. Lemmy is designed as a content aggregator and I'd love a blog platform that makes it easy to post to Lemmy.

But I the what platforms like Medium and Substack do is they allow authors to build a following which allows the platform to build a community. I think Lemmy is just not what readers looking for publications to follow and really dive into the current are looking for.

What I'd like is something that you could put next to the homepage of Vox or the Associated Press, or ProPublica and feel like it looks just as much the part.

Yes WordPress and Ghost would be great options if I wanted to host my own blog but I'm really looking for something I can just sign up for and start posting. Certainly something like that could be built on WordPress or Ghost but I'm not aware of any active instances that subject-agnostic platforms that are open to anyone to sign up and start reading, following, and posting content/authors.