Ghost is self-hostable, easy-to-use, and looks beautiful. (Good) themes are usually a one-time payment, and they definitely have photoblog ones.

I use both Ghost and Wordpress for my sites and, while it’s not as infinitely customizable as Wordpress, Ghost is also not as needlessly complex, vulnerable, or time-intensive.

Do the comments ever load reliably? For me that would be a dealbreaker…

How is your RAM/storage usage? I’m interested in setting up my own instance (no communities, just a username that will always be here) but don’t want to upgrade my VPS again. I already had to do that spinning up a Mastodon server.

SearXNG has come a long way. I self-host, and I consistently get more reliable results than when I use Google, and you can set it to replace something like twitter.com with nitter.net or reddit.com with teddit.net, so you can still visit those sites automatically on mobile (not sure, but that might be a self-host only thing).

Despite the tankie stuff I prefer the interface of Lemmy, though I have accounts on both. Love that they federate. Things are happening.