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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

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)…

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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/

Check this https://dbzer0.com/blog/this-blog-is-now-federated-natively-to-lemmy/

PieFed is fairly straightforward if you already know sysadmin basics or have Yunohost. - https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/INSTALL-docker.md

But for blogging only, you’ll find Ghost or Wordpress with the ActivityPub plugin federate with Mastodon better, which is a bigger audience.

That’s a good idea but you don’t need a full instance, only a community in which you are the sole admin. Start with that, do backups, and evolve from that if you feel too cramped

I’m curious, what’s your problem with images in Hugo. I use hugo for my site too and have no issue just including an image like you would with any web page.

I’m probably just stupid.