Or you could just use a Mastodon instance with a higher limit of characters, unless you really need intricate formatting and/or more than one picture.

Orrrrr Friendica.

I would suggest Write.as or running your own WriteFreely install using Yunohost.

Here's mine: https://writing.socl.bz/

I'm currently using write.as. It's a pretty bare-bones setup when in single user mode and doesn't give the kind of list view you might expect for readers - it loads everything onto a single page. I'm considering maybe using Ghost, which is another big name in the federated blogging space. Write.as doesn't come with comments by default, but I was able to add cactus-comments, but it was a huge PITA because it requires a matrix server.

I do, however, like the minimalist UI aspect of it. You can take a look at mine here. I was also able to get around the list thing by using pinned posts, which stay at the top, so I made an about, a directory, and subscribe pages.

Write.as will post to mastodon under an account that it creates and I have myself on mastodon as a verified owner of the blog site.

So, this is kind of a left-field suggestion but what about WAFRN (app.wafrn.net) - it's the Fediverse's version of Tumblr

Personally I use Hugo and host it on Codeberg Pages, it is super fast and the templating system is a godsend. If I wanted an easier solution I would go into Bearblog

Some people recommend omg.lol too.

I’ve tried all sorts of things and have settled on using Wordpress with a rss widget which publishes my rss feed from Mastodon (it picks up certain hashtags to avoid publishing everything - eg. #blog). It publishes pics and everything. It also works with Pixelfed (maybe not Bsky). There’s probably more elegant ways to do this - and ones involving activitypub - but this one works without much effort setting up.

Check out Hugo. Takes a little to setup but it's completely free. You can host for free using your GitHub and a provider, plenty of tutorials on how to do it (blanking on the providers name atm)