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Comment by dabockster | Hacker News Reader

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dabockster

Agreed, but there isn't a really solid blogging platform anymore that:

- Offers a dev "enough" control (some HTML/CSS/JS support but not total control)

- Stays largely out of the way (maybe something like a "powered by" header/footer only)

- Doesn't try to lock free posts behind paywalls

- Is independently owned and not a big tech product (so no Blogger)

- Is abstracted enough so that someone doesn't need to know domain, DNS, hosting, VPS, or sysadmin stuff in general to start a website

The closest things I've seen to this are Neocities and Glitch. The best one used to be Blogger, but again it's big tech so you can't use it without being assimilated into the Google collective consciousness.

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Bear Blog meets every one of your requirements.

https://bearblog.dev

You can see examples on the discover page.

https://bearblog.dev/discover

It has a small collection of simple pre-built themes, while also supporting custom CSS.

https://docs.bearblog.dev/styling

The barrier should not be the platform. If you have something interesting to say, there are many ways in 2025 to deliver text to people’s eyeballs.

You can use GitHub pages with Hugo which is what I do. You can build out a series of GitHub gists that link to each other. You can host a static S3 website with raw HTML. You can post redundantly to Twitter/Bluesky/your own subreddit/Medium/Google drive.

It doesn’t matter if there’s no single solution to every possible problem. The point is to write something interesting so 1) you understand it better 2) you can reference it later if you forget some details 3) you can show off to potential employers.

Whether or not it’s owned by big tech is a non-goal as far as getting a job is concerned.

At that point you just whip up a github pages domain and use your favorite frontend framework with some blogging framework taken into account. If Microsoft is still a deterrent, you just register your own domain and pay the dozen bucks per year to keep it spinning.

if you really can't be bothered to set any of that up, I suppose you can always find one of the non-mainstream open-source microblogging platforms. I'm sure there are some lovely "reddit alternatives" out there that feel great to blog on but has an audience of a dozen people internally.

There's a ton of those platforms, varying from extremely unknown to fairly well established. I'm pretty sure multiple of them end up as a Show HN every year. The only thing on your list they generally don't do is domain registration, but keeping that separate is generally a good thing. Sibling mentioned bearblog.dev, I'll mention write.as[1].

[1]: https://write.as/

Micro.blog covers all of your requirement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro.blog

Just write your own blog software. It's surprising how much you can do with just a <textarea> save it in a database. Then print out the content on a web site.

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