More like Wordpress where you can choose between their hosted version or install your own instance. But yeah, these days even Wordpress is less of a shining example than it was this time last year.

A free account is an easy way to test out the platform, give it a test ride, see if it works for you. If it does, you can pay for a Pro (or Team) subscription, and you get to use your own domain, and keep all the posts you already made on the free account, with all their comments and replies and whatnots.

Or, if it works out, and you want to self host, you can do that, too!

The difference between write.as and medium and other enshittified things, though, is that write.as is not VC funded, and Matt has no interest in making an "exit". Even if there are things I disagree on with him (eg, CLAs), I trust Matt to not enshittify write.as anytime soon. He's been running things for almost a decade now, remarkably well.

That's the guy who developed writefreely.

Btw. I sometimes look at their development, I wait for a production ready docker compose setup. Using a config.ini instead of an .env file makes me sceptical.

Great question. Anytime you want to start your own blog on your own server, you can export your posts to that server. I'm pretty sure you can also export your blog to another WriteFreely blog. There is no lock-in.