How about a basic Squarespace business website?

I looked at a bunch of options before and Wordpress seemed like one of the most promising: https://lemmy.world/post/12989654

Not open-source, but I was using Metacritic as an alternative to Steam. Unfortunately, they’ve severely degraded their UI in recent years so I started using GOG.

Why are you worried about your site going down during traffic surge? Unless you’re running a critical service, there is no need to worry about this too much if it’s just your personal sites.

Because it’s an important business website that would have severe consequences if it went down during traffic spikes (which it does get).

With proper caching, your personal site can even tank traffics from reddit frontpage on a $5/mo vps.

Yeah, I’m using Cloudflare, and I saw that Wordpress has a built-in caching option, but I couldn’t find any info on how well that protects sites from traffic surges.

consider hosting it on platforms with autoscaling support such as netlify.

Yeah but I need an SSG with the same capabilities as Squarespace to do that, and as mentioned in the OP, that doesn’t seem to exist.

I’d recommend Statamic

I looked at the demo and it looks like a very simple text editor to make blogs.

Since you posted this into a self-hosting community…

I have two other websites hosted on a $5 Hetzner server (that counts as self-hosted right?). I’ve been considering adding a Wordpress, Grav, or static site to it. But as mentioned in the OP, I have to worry about the site going down if it gets a traffic surge, so I’m thinking it would be safer and similarly/more affordable to host a Wordpress site with Hostinger or GreenGeeks. Am I wrong?

Grab a Raspberry Pi, slap nginx proxy manager and ddclient into it, and point your domain to your home IP.

I’m not likely to do that, for multiple reasons.

What about Arch? I was told:

mint is garbage. The only thing easier about mint or any of those “noob friendly” distros is the initial install

any time you want to do anything outside of its strict little ecosystem it becomes a massive headache

arch’s wiki is unparalleled

Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, or PopOS

What about Arch? I was told:

mint is garbage. The only thing easier about mint or any of those “noob friendly” distros is the initial install

any time you want to do anything outside of its strict little ecosystem it becomes a massive headache

arch’s wiki is unparalleled

Yes, I understood that. I never experienced it.

Lemmy has pretty much all the same problems as reddit does but at a much smaller scale because it’s just not as big. Would you suggest Google use Lemmy?

I agree, and I covered that in my blog. Lemmy is astroturfed and may even be easier to astroturf than reddit. I would like to see a more diversified “discussions and forums”, that’s not just reddit links.

In general, privately-owned forums (running Xenforo, etc.) seem much better run than most reddit subs. I have never experienced the plethora of problems with reddit, on forums. I think it’s harder to spam and astroturf forums, and the owners & moderators have different incentives than reddit mods.

The bar to entry as a new person on smaller forums was often high.

I don’t remember experiencing that, but it makes me think of the bar to entry for running a reddit sub. Anyone can instantly create one for free and do whatever they want with it and get on the top of search results pretty quickly. Setting up your own forum is a lot more difficult and more of a commitment. I think there are benefits to that.

I agree with your last paragraph. I think the type of warnings Twitter implemented are a decent idea. I think in general people need more warnings that what they see on reddit and other social media is not policed for legal content – people can and do say whatever they like, and much of what people say is misinformation and disinformation.

I don’t think most people realize that reddit and other social media platforms have no obligation to take down illegal content. People seem WAY too trusting of things they read on reddit. If Google is going to be highlighting reddit results and putting them at the top, then they bear some responsibility for this.

Since the CDA’s passage in 1996, § 230© has been consistently interpreted by U.S. courts to provide broad immunity to platforms for hosting and facilitating a wide range of illegal content—from defamatory speech to hate speech to terrorist and extremist content.12 Notice of illegal content is irrelevant to such immunity.13 Thus, even if a platform like YouTube is repeatedly and clearly notified that it is hosting harmful content (such as ISIS propaganda videos), the platform remains immune from liability for hosting such harmful content.

Here. Strangely, on Reddit I get much more support. Lemmy is either filled with trolls or is being astroturfed by people who don’t want to see it thrive.

I have never ever ever seen proof that Lemmy is pro-Reddit at anything.

Here’s the latest time it happened: https://lemmy.world/post/11328086

The previous one was deleted, which unfortunately covered it up.

And to the contrary, I’ve seen people claiming blatant bad-faith behavior as “just disagreement”.

if I wanted to bring the Fediverse down or at least keep my customers from going there, I would sow this stuff as much as I can

Agree. And that’s been my experience here too. I made two posts critical of reddit and they each seemed to have been astroturfed by toxic reddit shills.

I think it would require a lot of active and dedicated mods and admins, which I’m doubtful is doable. I don’t know that there’s a fix for this but a “true block” (instead of the current “mute”) might help; but there are major downsides to that type of feature as well. I wrote in a blog that it might require an advanced AI to moderate everything.

Forms vary with those types of rules. I absolutely hate the ones that are autolocking after a few days/months.

It will definitely start to happen more as more forums start to join the fediverse (discourse for Eg).

https://github.com/0x48piraj/fadblock

First time I’m seeing what it looks like. Looks exactly like Twitter.

It is still very similar. Reddit and Lemmy are now primarily fluff content. I’ve had to block dozens of fluff subs on Lemmy. And misinformation and toxic/unintelligent users are a problem here too.

Yep. This is the primary thing preventing me from contributing to, and recommending Lemmy. People confidently posting and upvoting harmful misinformation, and toxic/unintelligent people. I’ve already left Reddit and Facebook (a long time ago) for similar reasons.

It was said in the previous thread that the TPM and Microsoft account requirements can be overridden with Rufus, so anyone can update to Win 11.

It would be better if they gave their AI the task of finding alternatives to antibiotics.

While antibiotic resistance gets all the attention, the damage being done to our host-native microbiomes is arguably as big a threat as climate change, as the damage compounds over generations, and once it’s gone you can’t get it back. (Apr 2019).