There seems to be a lot of microblogging going around, but I want a place to put my writings that are much bigger. I know that having my own website is also an option, but I’m finding filtering ethical hosting providers and website builders to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be, and I’m afraid that even if I find them, it’s going to be too expensive.
Have a look for Friendica or Hubzilla.
Wordpress has an ActivityPub plugin to federate your content with Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey, and others, and will push their comments back to you.
Would you recommend WordPress as a hosting service? I’m not able to understand the structure of it all to figure out if it:'s ethical and what with the recent fights with WP Engine and stuff, I’m unsure how it all actually works.
Honestly I’d not recommend Wordpress at all. It’s quite outdated and therefore a pain in the ass to extend. There are more modern solutions like Craft CMS, Kirby CMS or Laravel with Filament, though ActivityPub support might differ depending on the platform.
I don’t think this person is looking to hack on, or even host their own service. I think they’re looking for a not very expensive turnkey SaaS.