And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
Not a showstopper for me since I don't expect anyone to be interested anyway, but might be for some.
You could use Claude, or you could use one of many static site builders.
For me, there is a large relative (percentual) difference in the perceived cognitive load. Perhaps not a huge actual difference, but when you are running tens of projects, everything counts.
Now I am not talking about actual reality but the psychological effect. It might be that some shared hosting site is in fact more reliable than GitHub Pages.
Obviously, a blog that you just forget is not that useful, but last site I created using this method was an advertisement site for a book. I have several blogs where I write occasionally.
Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted more blogs than I can count, so I don’t have any useful history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing for the last 20 years.
You can hate on Google all you like but it hasn't been killed by Google yet and has been a long time--and is simple, adequate, and free even if it doesn't handle all the more advanced use cases.
Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.
The thing that stopped me was much like what you said, learning curve and too much friction. Right now I have bearblog, mataroa.blog and nicheless, all with their own strength and flaws.
That was the conclusion I came to when I was muddling through various options last year. I had a Blogger blog already and decided to just roll in whatever professional content I wanted to add, which was the right solution for me. It helped that various folks I knew didn't bother having hard boundaries behind personal and professional content and that worked for me as well.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-depl...