I’ve heard of plume and writefreely/write.as but never used them. A friend is also asking for blogging platforms that are easy to use - they’re non techy.
Text formatting is done through Markdown (you can also use HTML is markdown is not enough for something specific) it doesn't handle images by default, but you can embedded images.
Cool! Do you mind expanding on how you ping it back to the fediverse?
I’ve heard of webmentions before used for comments and interactions with the fediverse, but haven’t heard of microformats. Would you mind explaining what/how you use them for?
So it depends a bit on how we define the fediverse. Technically I'm not using ActivityPub, although I wanted to implement it some day at least for my notes (like tweets) and photos.
Right now if I have a link in a post I check if the link has webmentions enabled, if yes then I send a webmention. On the other side when I get a webmention from someone, I doublecheck if they really linked to me, if so then I parse the HTML for microformats and parse out the author, an avatar, date of post and the content of the post, save it in my database and then show it as a comment underneth my own post like: https://jeena.net/notes/828
I’m pretty happy with writefreely. I’m currently using it to post a solo journaling RPG I recently completed, and I love the simplicity of the interface. It just gets out of the way and lets you post.