Depending on exactly what features you actually need in term of things like commenting, you might want to look into a static site generator. Something like hugo woud probably do what you need in terms of translating the markdown into a blog. It has the advantage that you can them host the pages on a normal web server, rather than running a blogging platform, giving you a much lighter weight server footprint, and a much smaller attack surface too.
I’ve found Hetzner to be reasonable for VPSs and even bare metal servers, especially if you keep an eye on their auctions.
Whether you’re hosting it all at home, all on a remote server, or some combination of the two, it’s worth taking the time to first learn some form of automation tooling, so that your setup is reproducible and you know exactly how everything is set up. From the first time you have to rebuild everything due to a hardware failure trashing your server, or a careless rm -rf, you’ll be glad of it.
Ansible is a good place to start as it’s pretty straighforward to get going, and your playbook can grow with your requirements. If you’re using a lot of containers, make sure you understand docker, and maybe consider Kubenetes, especially if you want to split your workload across servers.
Flock has done its part in soaking up public anger at pervasive surveillance, and can now be left to fail. Companies like Axon will step in to the breach, be slightly less obviously awful, and receive much less public pushback.
This isn’t going away until the very governments that benefit from it pass laws against it. For there to be any chance of that happening there has to be even greater public pushback.
Hugo can handle images through its asset pipelines, so you should be able to just store them with your markdown. I agree it’s a little more friction than a blogging pkatform, but it does mean that you can just write your posts in your editor of choice and publish them with just a command, or if you’re feeling fancy, set up git to trigger publishing when you push.