this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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I have a Hugo blog I'm setting up to work on my own forgejo server flow instead of through Github Pages.

I hate how pictures work on Hugo so I was going to just host them on a separate thing and embed the images that way.

Now I'm over thinking it and considering to just run a Lemmy instance, post the markdown for the blog posts there along with the images. Then I have an image host and a place to let people complain about my shotty writing in one go.

Plus there's federation visibility as well.

So short questions

  1. This a good idea?

  2. Are there better options?

  3. is it easy enough to set up a single user Lemmy/Piefed instance?

  4. Lemmy or Piefed? Which is easier to host

top 9 comments
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[–] cyrano@piefed.social 1 points 37 minutes ago
[–] KaKi87@jlai.lu 1 points 40 minutes ago

Funny, I wanted to do the same thing as well, but then I gave up and explained why on the Ghost blog I created afterward : https://blog.kaki87.net/intro/

[–] Dirk@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

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.

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 31 minutes ago)

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

Fewer Letters More Letters
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP Internet Protocol
VPN Virtual Private Network
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

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]

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

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

NAME CPU % MEM USAGE / LIMIT MEM % NET I/O BLOCK I/O
lemmy_proxy_1 0.00% 9.078MiB / 7.57GiB 0.12% 2.42GB / 1.16GB 532kB / 12.3kB
lemmy_lemmy-ui_1 0.00% 157.6MiB / 7.57GiB 2.03% 957MB / 1.94GB 26.2MB / 0B
lemmy_lemmy_1 0.06% 193.2MiB / 7.57GiB 2.49% 7.36GB / 2.86GB 5.26MB / 0B
lemmy_postfix_1 0.00% 6.129MiB / 7.57GiB 0.08% 80kB / 126B 1.87MB / 77.8kB
lemmy_postgres_1 0.02% 578.9MiB / 1.465GiB 38.59% 1.57GB / 6.9GB 98.8MB / 992MB
lemmy_pictrs_1 0.18% 31.53MiB / 690MiB 4.57% 2.73MB / 178MB 61.2MB / 1.5GB
[–] zewm@lemmy.world 4 points 3 hours ago

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?

[–] MatSeFi@lemmy.liebeleu.de 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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)...

[–] nagaram@startrek.website 3 points 4 hours ago

Yeah that's what's going to happen with the main blog.

Forgejo action > static HTML site > Cloudflared tunnel

This separate idea is to have a Lemmy instance to host pictures and federate the blogs comment system so people ideally won't have to sign in or make an account to comment.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 3 hours ago

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.