Start writing first! Writing is much harder than figuring out hosting. If it were me, I'd start writing posts on GitHub Gists because it's easy.

Not personally a fan of CMSs, dynamic sites, or third-party platforms like Medium, Substack, Hashnode, etc. I would consider GitHub Pages, which you can set up with your custom domain, or perhaps some simple paid services like blot.im or pika.page. Try to keep it low-fuss.

True, writing is definitely the core of it. Was considering github pages as well, straight forward start for sure, and as you said, low fuss!

Don't use a CMS or third-party hosting. Use Hugo, or whatever the cool-kid approved static website generator is these days, and throw it on CloudFront/Cloudflare/wherever.

haha Hugo seems to be cool-kid approved, thinking of going with something around that - github pages etc. A CMS or third party hosting is definitely more work and also technically reduces the chances of discovery - at least that's what I feel initially

Whatever you do, have your own domain purchased by you.

good point, but do you think it makes a huge difference?

You, rather than your service provider, 'own' your identity be that email, web, other. For as long as the registration's kept, of course.

Your choice is your own. What to have resolving to 'you' is up to you.

Your branding is your own.

It misses being part of a 'community', or, a gated community. But the many flavours of federation seem to have reached critical mass to sustain resilience to another attempted murder a la RSS.

I get your point! More ownership is always a great idea, I've seen friends of mine lose accounts with thousands of people following them for no reason at all!