I've been yelling about this for years, but please start & own your own blog.

Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people.

HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start).

Own your platform. Own your content. Own your voice. Use everything else as distribution methods - not core dependencies.

Agreed, but don't host your own wordpress unless you're planning to run a botnet. Everyone I know who's hosted their own wordpress in the past two decades has eventually regretted it.

I don't self-host Wordpress, my blog is a static site made with Jekyll and served by Nginx. A static site ages well.

That said I self-host other services, like Matomo or FreshRSS (also PHP apps that need a database).

The secret is in setting up auto-update policies. All the self-hosted services I host are in Docker and auto-updated [1] even if that means they can break.

Have been doing this for some time and worked great thus far, but granted self-hosting stuff is a continued investment, you can't just leave that server there to bit rot.

[1] https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower