So I am supposed to either sign up for $10 per month or trust somebody from the internet and run their executable on my machine?
Is there anybody here on HN that sees this as viable ways to get into blogging?
We totally need more and better ways to communicate online. But I just cannot see how this has any chance to take off.
They are generous enough to say that if you don't want to pay them money or have a different idea of what a blog should be, then take their software and make it into whatever you want it to be after inspecting their code.
Don't like that either? You can always come to HN and impugn their motives. Never let a good deed go unpunished.
If you want to "start blogging", you probably don't want to get a full instance, but more a blog on theirs: https://write.as/pricing
https://writefreely.org/hosting
Now I see that the prices you mention are linked on the bottom of that page.
As mentioned, it's an open source project.
It’s open source. You can read the source code and compile it yourself.