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Comment by dfee | Hacker News Reader

Nothing is free. WordPress is also a blogging platform first and foremost.

I think you're being downvoted as there is both wordpress.com (which you correctly state is a blogging platform) and then wordpress.org (the open source PHP application anyone can freely install on anything from shared hosting on up).

At even a cursory glance, independent Wordpress installs vastly outnumber the number of domains hosted on wordpress.com

Well you can get a VPS for $2.50/mo these days with half a gig of ram, more than enough to handle 5-15 simultaneous visitors on your average WordPress blog.

The WordPress software IS free. The WordPress.com service is not, as you pay for it by attaching their domain name to yours thereby providing them free advertising.

Also, there's nothing to stop you from hosting your personal blog on your personal internet connection. Even if you don't have a static IP there's ways to solve that.

How do you solve around a non static ip?

Dynamic DNS :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_DNS

Dynamic updates. So long as you're not behind carrier NAT you can find your IP number and update a DNS record. Many DNS providers have a specific service for this, e.g. https://dyn.com/dynamic-dns/ (no affiliation, just used them many years ago for this service).

Many ISPs are switching to carrier NAT though and then you can't host as you don't have a routable IP number.

You could host on Tor, or via a vpn. AirVPN provides static port forwarding.

and a slightly bigger ram vps could easily add buddypress with the "BP My Home plugin" and you could give all of your family and friends their own home page profiles with whichever rss feeds they want on their own profile page. This is something I have been kicking around for a while.

This past week I've been researching ways to incorporate the blacklisting and such from a different rss aggregator plugin to give people custom weighting options within them.

After peeking at that BP My Home Plugin - wouldn't your use case also be covered by Nextcloud with a sprinkling of apps? There's a very capable RSS reader available, notes apps, calendar with CalDAV support, address book with CarDAV support, and so on. Depending on what you're actually trying to set up, that might work better than trying to shoehorn functionality into a blogging platform.

I've been meaning to spin up some nextcloud and experiment with the options. It does sound like it's very close to many things I've been wanting to put together as an option for family, friends, and whoever to spin up their own watercooler making a facebook replacement.

Having some experience with BP, it's really easy to get running, and even easier for other people to create a profile and start using it. Is there options with nextcloud for family and friends to join in any of the modules and have their own slice within it?

I'd love an easy button for people to get hosting and spin up a well defaulted nextcould, or buddypress system, or anything similar. With a BP setup, only one person in a family would need to spin up a server and everyone else could use it.. backing up data is the current weakness for easy button with that system, but I see that changing soon.

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