There is a popular sentiment of escaping walled gardens of Facebook and others. How do you do it?

I want to start a small community with a blog and forum. Preferably the forum would also power blog comments.

Right now I'm leaning towards Ghost+Discourse[1]. But I'm already running into some issues like not being able to localize Ghost, especially search and subscription functions.

Do you have a favourite solution here? A sort of G.E.C.K. but for the web?

[1] https://ghost.org/integrations/discourse/