I've recently been focusing on self hosting what I can, and while looking for a simple straightforward, federated blogging platform I came across this and Plume as options. After a lot of effort trying to install Plume, I tried Writefreely and had just as many issues. I persevered and made a PR or two to try minorly improve the self hosting setup with my limited skills but it was a heavy amount of work compared to many other self hosted platforms.
I never managed to get federation working (which I presume is down to a misconfiguration on my part), images not being hostable seems like a bizarre feature to leave out as they are present on almost all blogs, and most recently I really dislike the thought process behind the micropayments from their blog about six months ago [0]. I would also echo what x4e said in their comment [1].
I stand corrected on any of these issues as I am very inexperienced with self hosting and it was about a year ago and projects do change, but from my experience, Writefreely wasn't what it said on the tin.
[0]: https://write.as/blog/monetize-your-writing-with-micropaymen...