[faical]

> For whatever reason I'm more motivated to maintain something I've built myself as compared to previous attempts with medium and such. The freedom to do whatever I want, however I want is nice. I can present things simply, with little to no adornment, avoid pushing trackers and ads on people, explicitly release my content under whatever copyright I want, etc.

Totally agree. For my blog (https://faical.dev) I have a very similar setup (S3 & Cloudflare) with HTML generated from Markdown using a small command line tool I built (https://github.com/ftchirou/article). For publishing, I push a Markdown file to a repo and a Bitrise workflow takes care of generating the HTML and uploading to S3.