I've been blogging on various platforms for around 20 years. I blog purely for my own benefit so can't speak to the marketing and traffic generation side of the

I've been blogging on various platforms for around 20 years. I blog purely for my own benefit so can't speak to the marketing and traffic generation side of the different platforms, but if you just want a nice space that is your own to post your writing to, I'd recommend self-hosting. I've used everything from Expage to Angelfire to Geocities to Vox at first. Different content platform providers keep coming, and at one point I felt the urge to jump from one platform to another. Self-hosting is the only thing that made that "what if I move to this OTHER place" feeling go away for me. Eventually I hosted a WordPress blog on one of those cheap shared-hosting providers, but now (and for the last 10-ish years) my preference is a basic static site generator (Hugo) deployed to S3. If you like the idea of a more interactive editing experience vs just markdown, there are platforms like Publii that will provide a visual editor for the static site, let you install themes, help you set up deployment to S3 or GitHub Pages, etc.