[seletz]

If you're a developer, you might start by using a static site generator and GitHub Pages. Stick to Markdown and start collecting and writing stuff. Sooner or later you'll get comments and regular readers. Then you might start to add editing or simply give other people access to GitHub. The editing experience of Markdown files in GitHub is not too bad and you get started in no time.

From my experience it's more often not the tools but the content.

For comments you could use https://giscus.app which integrates very nicely with GitHub.

Doing so you have *no* setup costs.

I'm aware that this is not exactly *self hosted* -- but it has the advantage that you have no upfront cost. And most of the static site generators are just that, you could host the output on any 5$ web server.