Building custom site with Micro.blog API instead of using Hugo?

Hosting on Micro.blog
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Hi everyone,

I’ve been reading through the API documentation and I can see that reading posts via Micropub is well-supported. This has me exploring whether I could bypass the Hugo-generated site entirely and build my own custom frontend.

A bit of context: I’m a JavaScript developer with experience in Astro, and I’d prefer to stick with the tools I already know rather than learning Hugo. My idea is to use Micro.blog for posting and Fediverse integration, but pull all content via the API to generate my own site.

My main questions are:

  1. Are there any gotchas or limitations I should know about for this approach? (Rate limits, missing data in API responses, etc.)

  2. Can the Hugo site be completely disabled or removed? If I’m building and hosting my own site elsewhere, is there a way to turn off the auto-generated Hugo site entirely, or would it continue to exist at my micro.blog subdomain?

Has anyone else gone this route? I’d love to hear about your experience.

Thanks!

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  1. You’d likely have a far easier time scraping your own JSON Feed that’s generated with your full content than trying to do this entirely via the API, both in terms of caching, limiting, etc is my guess.
  2. No, that’s not possible.

This is pretty far outside of what Micro.blog is explicitly built to support… I guess if a client can read your content that way so can a blog generation system, but that feels like working pretty hard to make things work how you want.

Have you considered that Micro.blog can auto post to your account from RSS/JSON feeds? You could build your own site using JS and Astro, and then have Micro.blog import your site’s content via a JSON Feed, which then can do the Fediverse integration. That’s a much more common use case for how Micro.blog is engineered.