@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn't appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺
There's a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don't have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.
WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn't support members-only posts (like Ghost).
Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.
WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There's no shortage of WP plugins!)
As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn't appear to exist at present.
It's a real shame about Plume. I actually saw that notice on the Plume website, but thought as long as I can get it up and running, it can't be so bad.
I've spent the best part of this week trying to get WriteFreely up and running locally as I just want to host a couple blogs without having to agree to let LLMs harvest my musings, but alas, WriteFreely doesn't work with Docker and the community is MIA.
Ghost was something I was excited about but it only allows one blog per instance, so it's not even worth getting excited about the upcoming federation implementation.
WordPress as a company are happy to get into bed with LLMs, so I'm holding them at arms length.
As for Lemmy, it's far too cumbersome and not adept at blogging. But it's an amazing link aggregator.
I keep wondering if lemmy itself could do a decent job of this, and that being native to a communities style platform is a good thing for a blogging platform on the fediverse.
There's also a Fediverse plugin for WordPress if you already have a host. Caveat: I have only seen it on Fediverse directories. No idea whether it's any good.