So I spent a lot of time messing around trying to decide what site to make, and ultimately decided on a Flarum site.

I tried Wordpress and really disliked it, honestly - I have a very old computer (10 years) and one newer but extremely tiny (32 gb total) computer, and found the visual theme editor laggy and annoying (I tried mybb first and found I like going directly to the code for the entire theme without having to dig around for it / only getting sections shown at a time, so that's spoiled me forever on other editor types; I'd try to click on 'edit button css' and not all the css relevant to the button would even show up). I was leaning against it simply because so many sites use it so more bots are auto-attempting exploits and the plugin system is not always very secure, but my annoyance when its own default 'import from blogger' plugin failed silently cinched it.

I also tried Drupal and didn't like it much, but half of that had to do with my attempts to bring tutorials up for it bringing up links 5 years out of date, the other half was trying to dig into the cms and discovering the first several themes I tried wanted you to pay to change the bloody background color or had like a 100 pages in the theme making it annoying to do it manually (and objects/blocks you'd expect to automatically get css classes assigned to them to make it easier to style them... didn't, nor was there an option to in the block editor), and that things I expected to be editable, like the user page or basic things about registration, weren't (I presume you are expected to make a plugin).

I considered phpbb and mybb, which I have some slight previous experience with. However, Flarum has a much more modern interface and look. My big consideration also was 'how intuitive is the plugin system for a newbie developer'? I managed to find a tutorial that covered the basics of adding another field to users, and it doesn't look too bad.

If I wanted a simpler website, I absolutely would have gone with Wondercms, which is a very lightweight (5 files) cms. But I really wanted to try making a blog-forum hybrid. And what should I discover but that Flarum already has a blog extension/plugin you can download, so I don't even have to bother to develop it? And it has a sleek night theme right out of the box.

I was leery of the infinite scroll, but the tiny bar displaying how far you have to go actually makes this wayyy less annoying than other websites I've been on.

For a host, I used the free (yes, free!) Cloud Oracle service. This is my first time messing around with basically a 'bare metal' installation, and it's been quite a learning experience. I can kinda see why they offered it for free, though: when one of their own basic tutorials failed (installing php and apache and setting up the firewall 101), if I had been paying for it I probably would have canceled out of sheer annoyance. They really need to mention that they have their own additional cloud firewall in the basic tutorials (the information was available elsewhere, but I had to dig for it) and that you can't simply ssh and remotely tell the firewall on the computer how to behave like in their tutorial, you need to use their website and configure the cloud firewall too.
I also had a weird bug where ssh public-private key failed to work when I deleted and created a new instance (I wanted an Ubuntu one, not an Oracle Linux, which I accidentally made the first time) which took some time to debug: it was entirely on my end as my ssh config got screwed up somehow.

The only thing I really additionally want is some Fediverse support and nomadic account support, like being able to log in to here if you already have a mastodon account - I thinkkk this should be technically possible by modifying an O-ath plugin. I opted not to get a Friendica, Hubzilla or Mastodon because one thing I don't like about the Fediverse is the way they clone absolutely all the content that comes across feeds, and this IS currently a free website with only a couple gigabytes on it. I don't want it to only be able to support like 10 people who subscribe to a hundred other people and generate several gigabytes of data. If it does come to the point it needs more than a few gigabytes, I'd prefer it to be because it has enough people I can actually ask for money donations to keep it going.

Maybe some limited cloning on purpose of content you really love, but if you just want a feed of content from another site's user, I feel it would make more sense to just have a protocol to temporarily grab (maybe even with an iframe) a pared down version of that site that has just that user's feed. You could have a little list of sites/users, and in some ways this could have benefits over a feed that just shows all the latest: I always get annoyed when one user who posts rarely has all their posts drowned out. Of course, having both would be best experience-wise.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I haven't even created one plugin yet.

Like I said, I technically tried blogger/blogspot first although that isn't a cms, it is a blogging solution with a limited ability to host discussions and add pages. I might keep old one that just for, y'know, free blogging or archival purposes, but it'll be fun to try out the blog plugin at least. At least on my own website I don't have to worry about if my content is slightly too sexy or something.

So! That's my website creation story.

edit: I created a simple quiz. It's an 'improper' extension so may not work for future flarum updates, but their default sign up form isn't something I feel like dealing with right now. I also added https/ssl and a domain which was a little bit annoying: the double firewall on cloud oracle bit me in the butt again.