For non-technical people who have some interest in learning html / css and a free weekend, its even easier:
- https://www.codecademy.com/learn/make-a-website
- host for free on netlify
- maybe simple intro to git to make updating and deploying to netlify easier
anyone can learn basic html / css (in 6th grade we did a week long "build a website" project and everyone did it -- this was back in the late 90s), and with frameworks like bootstrap anyone can make an attractive looking site.
with just basic html / css knowledge and netlify, you can:
- self-host and write a blog
- post photo albums
- share videos and audio (link to youtube)
- share status updates
- create an online course
- create a curated list of interesting articles, photos, recipes, food (a la pinterest)
- conduct surveys (link to google forms or other free survey tools)
- create a mailing list / online following (link to google forms or use mailchimp)
- get creative and personalize your site's appearance
- create links to your friends sites
- publish short stories or even e-books
- communicate with people via email (just create an email address for your site and publish it). posting publicly doesnt have to be the normal way to socialize online
- and probably much more
the only downside is if you don't want everything to be public you'd need a simple backend / auth framework, and youd have to host on heroku or something (idk if netlify only does static sites?)
and if you can do this stuff, and find html / css interesting, it isn't that hard to learn enough python or js to build stuff like forms, comments, like buttons, RSS feeds, or simple CRUD apps
the open source software and free-tier saas products we have today make so much of this so easy