I'm not saying it's as easy as Facebook, but it's not "you need to be a developer"-hard either.
Tangent:
I've now talked four friends who wanted to start blogging out of spending money on AWS instances and VPS providers because they were convinced this was the path they absolutely had to take just to start writing things using WordPress. These are not technical people.
Which makes me wonder where that impression is coming from. Surely it couldn't have been Wordpress.com because the site goes out of their way to show how easy it is to sign up and start blogging on their platform, but I've long wondered why they were all so eager to avoid taking the simplest path to their goals since none of them were above spending money to realize their goals of having a blog.
Awhile ago I was digging through Pinterest on topics related to blogging, finance, online business, etc.
A lot of these pins target millennials and moms (wow, especially moms).
The point of most of these sites is affiliate marketing; they've got deals with hostgator, bluehost, godaddy, whatever, and get kickbacks when users sign up.
So all these pinboardss about blogs about blogging advocate for the VPS route because it's how they make cash.
While you don't need to implement things, as a developer, I gave up on self hosting. Having N self-hosted services, and having to keep them up to date for security purposes (and worry about updates breaking things) was really not worth the effort.
Self hosting is a pain. Let's not kid ourselves. It seems easy initially, but over the years, you really feel like it's better just to pay someone to manage it all for you.
Tangent:
I've now talked four friends who wanted to start blogging out of spending money on AWS instances and VPS providers because they were convinced this was the path they absolutely had to take just to start writing things using WordPress. These are not technical people.
Which makes me wonder where that impression is coming from. Surely it couldn't have been Wordpress.com because the site goes out of their way to show how easy it is to sign up and start blogging on their platform, but I've long wondered why they were all so eager to avoid taking the simplest path to their goals since none of them were above spending money to realize their goals of having a blog.