This may be bold... it is!
This is a tentative first entry on the scribblanity blog on ministryofinternet.eu, just to try get a feel for how the writing experience is. As you might be able to tell from the title, I'm not markdown fluent yet.
At present, I'm pretty much just clicking things to see what happens. I have questions, which hopefully I can answer and go 'Ahhh...' as realisation strikes and adds another valuable learning experience.
I'm looking for a new home after writing a few different blogs on WordPress.com over the years.
That platform has got really heavy and complicated recently, and I don't remember how long ago it was now, but it got particularly so when they introduced (and have kept adding various gubbins to) the block editor Gutenberg.
My considered opinion about Gutenberg: still buggy nonsense, and the recent emphasis on full site editing, which pushes everyone towards becoming more website designer than writer, does even more to turn me away.
Drafting a post using it, I found myself constantly battling against the editor instead of simply thinking about what I was writing, so I'd easily get my simple little mind distracted out of the flow.
But if you choose to draft elsewhere to make it less distracting, perhaps Word, OneNote or Libre Writer, they managed to make importing the text that you'd written back into Gutenberg pretty janky, making a simple thing (copying and pasting some text) into a trial of patience. You'd be left correcting its various erroneous but non-optional block formatting decisions for ages.
If you did manage to draft in Gutenberg, then getting some simple text out of it to work on later, in an editor of your own choice, was only possible with circuitous workarounds involving previewing the piece and copying that text, rather than in the editor.
Fair enough, they can make their usability decisions, and rub their hands together with thoughts of catching professional designers now for their revenue if they like, and likewise, I can go elsewhere if those decisions don't suit me, so I was happy to let my Personal WordPress account run out and seek a simpler, flowing and less mentally intrusive writing and editing experience.
There is still a balance to be struck between actual ease of use and features though, and there is a danger that writefreely may stray into being too simple for me... but I'm here trying it out now, so we'll see.