Cryptpad has a rich text editor that could meet your needs, files can be shared with a readonly link
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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... A ... blog? Are you asking if it's possible to selfhost a blog?
And they've answered their own question by listing several valid candidates.
Well, I'm hoping someone has a better one, or at least can confirm that one of the things I listed isn't actually a huge waste of time.
You can tell OP is a younger Gen Z by this post lol.
It sounds like a stupid question but if OP isn’t 30+ it’s perfectly understandable to not be aware of the former ubiquity of self hosted blogs.
I am aware of self hosted "blogs" but that's not what I want.
A better way to explain what I want is
This, but opensource and self-hosted
with per-file access control
Yes, like that except not with a terrible interface that looks like the unholy union of vscode and vim.
Well, that's just a blog. WordPress comes to mind, though try not abusing it by installing too many plugins and transforming it to an abomination that takes 3 seconds to hack.
There are probably more modern alternatives, I personally wrote my own blog system that uses ActivityPub to synchronise with Lemmy and others.
There are probably thousands of different static website generators that can make a more beautiful website out of the box, for free.
I want something that is more akin to using microsoft word except it's in the browser and not made by satan Something I can recomment to people and know they're not going to come back to me and ask "what is a markdown code block"
StackEdit is a good rich text to markdown web application: https://stackedit.io/
As far as the editor, this is great. I pasted formatted text out of libre office into it and everything was fine except the images. Way better than a lot of the options here.
Althought one caveat, and it might be a big one,
It seems it can't actually host files publicly, you need to publish them to a third party cloud hosting platform...
But other wise, it's very nice...
There has to be a way !
Look into the GitHub integration. Your pipeline could be StackEdit -> GitHub + GitHub Actions -> Self-hosted final destination.
SSG are really a pain in the ass to work with, especially if you want something other than the standard theme.
Maybe if you don’t know CSS?
The problem isn’t really CSS, it’s that each theme has its own components with their own rules you have to learn. There’s no real standardization even within one kind of SSG.
It would literally be much easier to just write everything the old fashioned way by hand.
An application to create and publish notes? Something like StandardNotes or Notesnook?
This was a pretty good demo of hugo, a static site generator: https://youtu.be/MX4yy1dTVYg
Ok, well I see it's not what I'm hoping for
And by not this, I mean this
Those are the built in templates, what you add is your markdown for your post. You're not actually adding that. It isn't quite click to save, but it's similar. Write freely may be the closest bet for free
I’ve heard lots of good things about Ghost. I’ve also hosted Grav for a while and it’s pretty solid. You can do Wordpress, but I’d stay away as it gets bad fast and there are better alternatives. If you needed even more scale, Mediawiki is selfhostable too.
I'm reading the grav page and I have no idea how this is.
Is this like this
Press a button
rich text editor appears
write stuff
press save
send link
That's what I'm aiming for. I had a look, and the blog platform are so much clunkier and frustrating to use. And each of these seems to want to eat several of my weekends to install so I don't have the luxury of reviewing all of them.
Grav is nice, as it creates flat files for the front end, instead of server side/database driven pages. That makes it super fast to load.
It's hard to tell if any of these are the thing I'm looking for or not.