# Welcome to the first Lemmy-as-a-blog instance Hello, Fediverse! I’m Tiana, 26yo web developer from 🇫🇷 France, computer enthusiast since forever. ## Some personal history Ages ago, I got started with my very first blog hosted on Skyblog [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyrock_(social_network_site)], back when I was still a kid who didn’t (but definitely pretended to) know much about computers. 🧑‍💻 Then, I went hopping between other free providers, until it got serious with WordPress.com [http://WordPress.com], which I eventually migrated to a self-hosted WordPress.org [http://WordPress.org] instance (I also got my first Linux VPS later on). I eventually dropped blogging and never picked it up again though, and for a while I couldn’t figure out why… Until I became somewhat more active social media, and realized : since self-hosting, I missed interacting. People sign up on social media knowing they will experience regular interactions, but not necessarily with the same people, therefore they won’t sign up on every single blog they visit, for possibly commenting just once. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to go back to free hosts with subdomains and ads, so I gave up. ### Discovering the Fediverse I first joined the Fediverse on Mastodon (@ [email protected] [https://mamot.fr/@KaKi87]), and quickly realized how awesome decentralized social media is : the independence that comes with self-hosting, combined with the interaction potential brought by federation. 😍 But, Mastodon is microblogging, not blogging, and I love blogging. So, I looked up federated blogging solutions, and found one : Plume [https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume]. I was excited! Until I noticed its lots of bugs, missing features, and spam issues… There are other notable options like the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress [https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/], or the WriteFreely [https://writefreely.org/] platform, but they’re all incomplete, gluing federation on platforms that weren’t designed for it. Seeing how attractive the modern Ghost [https://ghost.org/] CMS is, people (me included) wished for it to join the Fediverse, which I learned while writing this article that they’re apparently working on it [https://activitypub.ghost.org/] (but Soon™, paid early access, and enthusiastic about federating with Meta’s Threads platform). Finally, here comes Lemmy. ## “Lemmy as a blog” This is mentioned once [https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/0ae7fa494e402357244ecfc4b10760be62c91775/src/users/06-other-features.md#lemmy-as-a-blog] in the documentation (and nowhere else) : > Lemmy can also function as a blogging platform. Doing this is as simple as creating a community and enabling the option “Only moderators can post to this community”. Now only you and other people that you invite can create posts, while everyone else can comment. Like any Lemmy community, it is also possible to follow from other Fediverse platforms and over RSS. For advanced usage, it is even possible to use the API and create a different frontend which looks more blog-like. ### The first Lemmy as a blog? That is indeed what I’m doing here and now, but actually, I started looking into this a long time ago (my fist public question about it [https://sh.itjust.works/comment/1087812] is 2 years old), and as this and all following inquiries I made on this subject remained unanswered, I believed that I was gonna have to be the first one to do it. But… No! As the documentation says, Lemmy isn’t blog-like, so making a blog-like frontend for it would be a good idea, but I don’t wanna make the UI components, so I asked around about whether there is a UI-only framework for blogs somewhere, and I was told “no, but someone made a frontend [https://martijn.sh/] for their Lemmy-as-a-blog instance [https://jlai.lu/c/[email protected]] over there”, and I was like, what? I’ve been looking for this for a while and never found anything… Well, turns out it’s a very new project [https://github.com/kernelle/BlogOnLemmy]. I will not be reusing their frontend though, because that’s not really the kind of design I’m looking for. ### The second Lemmy as a blog. So, I welcome you on the second Lemmy-as-a-blog instance. See you in the comments!