[stoplight]

Sadly, it appears they have discontinued the free plan:

> But anyone who hasn’t created an account by December 31 [2021] at 11:59pm Eastern won’t be able to create an account via our open registration flow. Instead, they’ll need to choose a paid account, or get a Free account through another channel. Read on for details.

https://write.as/blog/changing-free-registrations

[toastercat]

Sad indeed. Fortunately, there are several public instances one can join (https://writefreely.org/instances), and again, still self-hostable.

Alternatively, there is also:

https://bearblog.dev/

https://rwtxt.com/

https://dev.to/

Or of course you can use a static-site generator and host on Neocities or Github Pages, but that's less simple than the above solutions.