We start with a repost (sort of)

LeafPlaza is the European-sovereign and Bluesky-compatible app. Backed by an end to end European full stack. Company registration, hosting, website, the app maintenance, payments, you name it. All in Europe, so we avoid any dependence on foreign tech or compliance to foreign laws. Get an account here!

Self-promotion done. Let's talk about our attempt to build a blog..

Nothing to complain about our first choice,

@ghost.org

. We love it. Getting it up and running was a bit challenging but we would even argue it was fun (BTW,

@infomaniak.bsky.social

your instructions on self-hosting Ghost are outdated). I would even argue that if you are running a business, it might be one of the best calls for your website, if you're looking for something simple.

The only problem was that we did not want a comment section. We hope the ATP will be the "comment section of the Internet" one day. So having a separate comment section does not make a lot of sense for us. So we went on research mode and found a bunch of integrations that are not exactly straight forward.

We are a team of 2 (check Jake and Pablo here), with a few random collabs. Both have a job paying the bills, so the rule we work with is that we always aim to do things 80% as good as we want but 100% sovereign. This method avoids perfectionism (the nemesis of getting things done) but delivers something meaningful and keeps our value (sovereignty). It also avoids paid solutions for things that are not delivering value to our userbase (we have no investors after all).

Hence we decided to go with self-hosted Ghost and no comments. Effectively, that meant going after one of the complex solutions to integrate ATP comments, but later on. Sovereign, but a bit underwhelming to be honest. And then, there is Leaflet.

If this is your first time hearing about Leaflet, well, you're reading this post created through Leaflet. Recently, we welcomed

@norbertwoehnl.com

as a new LeafPlaza user. So we had to go a bit deeper on how sovereign is to use Leaflet. The good news is that the data seems to be hosted in your ATP server (so if you signed in for LeafPlaza, your data is protected in Europe). You can find more about Leaflet's stack on their Github page.

For the time being, we will be posting here. Is it perfectly sovereign? No. Self-hosting would be better, but it is, again, not straight forward. If you'd be interested in a European sovereign alternative to Leaflet, leave a comment.

We go back to spin servers and whatnot. Read and comment you soon!

LeafPlaza