glitch fixes this because it collapses posts larger than a certain (adjustable) vertical height with an overlay container, rather than masto's approach which is truncate text, but otherwise display the full post and image, and expand all when opening in the full view. glitch also has basic markdown.
with some user-custom CSS you have mostly a blog. with one additional step of allowing custom (sanitized on federation) jinja-ish HTML templates then you get just a literal blog.