If you are looking for a no-nonsense, simple blog platform consider Bear[1] - It's super simple to use, and has been solid for me for the past year. Plus the support (and dev - Herman Martinus here on HN[2]) is responsive and friendly.
For clarity, as a sibling comment has pointed out: while Bear is open-source, it is a platform and not managed hosting of individual blogs. If you're interested in self-hosting something that looks like Bear, there's a free Hugo template[1].
If you're happy using a platform, then Bear is super fast and built with longevity in mind (at both the tech and organisational level).
> Bear Blog has been built as a platform and not as an individual blog generator. It is more like Substack than Hugo. Due to this it isn't possible to individually self-host a Bear Blog.