I use the parsedown library with a custom PHP index page to serve markdown files as HTML.
have you tried hubzilla? its multipurpose.
If Jekyll isn't your jam, then Hugo probably won't be, either.
I have a simple workflow based on a script on my desktop called "blog". I Cask it with "blog Some blog title" and it looks in a directory for a file named some_blog_entry.md, and if it finds it, opens it in my editor; if it doesn't, it creates it using a template.md that has some front matter filled in by the script. When I exit the editor, the script tests the modtime and updates the changed front matter and the rsyncs the whole blog directory to my server, where Hugo picks up and regenerates the site if anything changed.
My script is 133 lines of bash, mostly involving the file named sanitization and front matter rewriting; it's just a big convenience function that could be three lines of typing a little thought, and a little more editing of the template.
There's no federation, though. I'm not sure what a "federated blog" would look like, anyway; probably something like Lemmy, where you create a community called "YourName". What's the value of a federated blog?
Edit: Oh, I forgot until I just checked it: the script also does some markdown editing to create gem files for the Gemini mirror; that's at least a third to a half of the script (yeah, 60 LOC without the Gemini stuff), which you don't need if you're not trying to support a network that never caught on and that no-one uses.
Ghost is open source, non profit and self host able.
It wants a gigabyte of RAM. Maybe that passes for lightweight in 2025, but given the fundamental things a blog has to do, I'd probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.
I'd probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.
Not if you want federation.
The answer is probably GoToSocial, which suggests that it can run on 512MB.
Federation doesn't inherently require large amounts of memory. Fundamentally, it's a matter of selecting a list of unique servers (likely tens, maybe hundreds) from a larger set of followers (likely hundreds, maybe thousands) and sending an HTTP request to each when there's a new post. There's a speed/size tradeoff for how many to send in parallel, but it's not a resource-intensive operation.
Growth beyond a few tens of megabytes was a bug in Writefreely, which is a likely-suitable option several comments here recommended.
It costs like $3/mo to host it. If that's too resource intensive then I don't know what your limits are. Compute isn't free—that literally breaks the laws of thermodynamics, no matter what you're told by hosting services, and ghost does server side rendering and has a dynamic admin dashboard and can even work headless... and it costs less than $3/mo for your own personal open source cms.
If you need something that costs less then you can just build your own I guess, but how many hours of your time is that worth when you could just be spending $3/mo. If you make minimum wage at $7/hr one hour of work gets you two months of running a website.
I am not sure about how lightweight they are (but I guess more than WordPress for sure) but on the federated side of things you have plume (https://joinplu.me/) and writefreely (https://writefreely.org/) that you can selfhost. Not super sure about how much you can customize them.
I'm liking them! even if they do not seem very alive (still, blogging itself is not the most "alive" activity around nowadays...)
Writefreely is alive. Plume not.
Not sure how lightweight it needs to be, but I use Ghost and it's pretty simple and basic.
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