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.
Not counting WordPress, that I really (really!!!) dislike (just because; your mileage may vary), I would say that Writefreely is the closest to traditional blog platform with activitypub baked in.
You can try it on https://writefreely.org/instances