Open Source Medium Alternatives

Ghost treats publishing as software you install rather than a service you rent. It is a headless Node.js content management system aimed at independent, professional publishing, and it is built to work with the tools already around it instead of replacing them.

Installation runs through a CLI tool pulled from npm. One command brings up a local instance in under a minute, while the full server install adds automatic SSL certificates issued through Let's Encrypt. The documentation covers a recommended hosting stack and the upgrade path between versions.

Beyond running a site, the project documents several surfaces worth knowing about.

• Themes: theme documentation covers building your own front end rather than settling for a default.
• Content API: a documented API pulls posts into other applications and front ends.
• Monorepo: contributors get a codebase guide alongside the contributing guide.
• Managed hosting: a paid service from the same team launches a site in about two minutes with a worldwide CDN, backups, security and maintenance handled.

All revenue from that managed service goes to the Ghost Foundation and funds maintenance and further development of the project itself, so paying for hosting doubles as the funding model. Support comes from a large community forum, with round-the-clock email for customers of the paid service. The code is MIT licensed, though the name and logo stay trademarks with a published usage policy.

Sigle is a writing platform for web3 content creators, NFT projects and crypto analysts who would rather own their audience than rent it from a publishing network. It answers the usual trade where a blog lives on someone else's domain and the archive disappears with the service.

The project sits in the Stacks ecosystem, and posts can be stored on IPFS or inscribed as Bitcoin Ordinals so the writing outlasts the platform that published it. The editor and dashboard are a TypeScript web application, and the codebase is MIT licensed.

Sigle bundles the pieces a small publication normally assembles from several services.

• Publishing: an editor and dashboard for unlimited posts, with an explore page for finding other creators.
• Custom domains: blogs run on the writer's own domain rather than a shared one.
• Newsletters: subscribers are mailed from the same place the posts are written.
• Analytics: audience numbers are reported without advertising or third-party trackers.
• Gated content: premium posts lock behind an NFT through Unlock Protocol, with Stripe for direct payment.

A free tier covers publishing and Ordinals, while paid plans add newsletters, monetization and custom domains, and holders of Explorer Guild NFTs unlock paid features without a subscription. Sigle suits a writer already working inside the Bitcoin and Stacks world who wants a publication that outlives the tool it was written in.

Pagecord is a personal website and blogging platform whose pitch is that it meets you where you already write. A post can come from the editor built into the site or from an email you send, so publishing rarely means logging in first.

The application is conventional Rails 8 with Hotwire and import maps, Postgres for data, Sidekiq for background jobs and Minitest with fixtures for tests. Fat models, skinny controllers and RESTful routes, with the conventions written down for anyone contributing. One docker compose command brings up Postgres, Redis, Memcached, Rails and the Tailwind watcher, and a seeded blog is served on its own subdomain.

The hosted product describes what a blog gets.

• Writing tools: posts are published from the built-in editor, by email, or from Obsidian and iA Writer.
• Pages and themes: static pages sit alongside posts, and a blog carries a theme of its own.
• Subscribers: readers subscribe by email and receive posts as they go out.
• Comments and analytics: reader responses and traffic figures live in the same account.
• Your own domain: a blog runs on a domain you control rather than a shared address.
• Imports: posts written on another platform are brought across for you.

Local development works in Docker or natively, with notes covering email processing, billing simulation and log analysis, and production operations are documented in the repository too. It suits anyone who wants a small, well trodden Rails codebase behind their writing.