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looking for lightweight ghost blog alternative
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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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I love ghost's UI and feature set.
What complex data format are you taking about? Last time I checked, it was plain markdown in a database (even supporting sqlite).
What I'd recommend though, is coupling it with a static site generator and only using the ghost server for the administration / authoring (guides). That way, serving the blog to visitors is basically free in terms of resources (at last as low as it gets). You could even push these static builds to a CDN (yes yes, selfhost community, I'm just saying it for completeness)
It might be some hassle to set this up somehow, but you could even have the container stopped unless you actively need it. You could even run the server application on your computer instead of the server, unless you want to access is from a smartphone/tablet.
If you really want an alternative to Ghost and don't need user management and an online WYSIWYG editor, you could go straight to an SSG and feed itraw it markdown files.
From what I've read, the new editor does not use Markdown by default anymore. It's possible to create a Markdown "card" but that's still embedded in the new format. So it's very easy to accidentally create posts that cannot be exported as plain .md anymore.
From the link above:
The static site generator is a very cool idea, I didn't know Ghost could do that.
Ah, right its stored as (rather basic) html instead of markdown.