While I applaud the new wave of people publishing on their own blogs, I still feel this is too hard to do for non-tech folks. Here’s what I’d love to see:

A platform that includes

• free hosting
• the ability to buy a custom domain
• a simple CMS for writing posts
• an integrated RSS feed reader to “follow” your friends
• a “content stream” showing recent posts of blogs you subscribed to
• webmention support - see reactions to your post
• the ability to get it all up and running without ever touching code

I think Netlify / NetlifyCMS checks a lot of these boxes, but still requires some tech knowledge, i.e. you need to have a git repo and understand some of the basic concepts (“deploy”, “build”, “static”…)

Ideally, I’d like a page with a big “start your own blog” button, and a process that’s just as easy as signing up for Facebook.