[dkarras]

>Why can't we just have a minimal place to just publish our thoughts, without having to use a static site generator or setup a Wordpress/Ghost instance?

Because if this gets even remotely successful (actually used by people) you'd need a way to pay for costs at minimum. So you either get people to pay (hard sell given the "free" competitors) or monetize by other means -> bloat

Self host (open source) and you're probably worse off than just using a static site generator.

Not trying to flame your effort here, just that there is a really fundamental reason for why we can't have nice things. This model only works... if it doesn't work (doesn't get popular, doesn't actually get used by people)

[milkey_mouse]

I don't know if this service allows uploading images, but if it doesn't, storing text is cheap. "Too cheap to meter," as they used to say about nuclear power (although that turned out to be a pipe dream). For simple sites like these GitHub & GitLab Pages is free, or NearlyFreeSpeech is "nearly free" as the name implies. Hell, set up an sdf.org account and serve out of public_html. One of my hopes for the future of computing is as storage, bandwidth and compute get more efficient and cheaper (and fees on financial transactions don't, and adblockers become more prevalent), people decide it's not worth the effort to charge users fractions of a penny for their use of a service. Having the site's admins cover the cost isn't a big deal if it's on the order of $5/month.

I would be more concerned about moderation than storage or bandwidth usage. It's more difficult for text to be illegal than images, but it's clearly still possible: hate speech, copyright violations, etc. (whether it should be is another argument...)

[e12e]

Maybe? https://neocities.org seems to be doing fine?