Not Totally Against Platforms
In my totally unscientific observation, the number of posts about coming to Bear as an antidote to social media and "modern internet" is matched only by the number of posts about leaving Bear to a hand-rolled, self-hosted personal website. It's of course up to you to bring your stuff anywhere you want to, in whatever medium you may want to. If you decide that the best form of your journalling/blogging/anything practice is by renting highway billboards or train station megatrons, it's valid (also tell me if you do so, I'd like to see).
I actually treat my bearblog as a personal site and build it as one. If you've been poking around my site, perhaps you've seen what fate befell my old (self-hosted) personal site. The gist of it: I had a period of being extremely underwater that I couldn't keep up with my bills (both in executive dysfunction sense and financial state) so my domain was overtaken by a Chinese bot and my hosting service deleted everything. In a stroke of wonderful bad luck, all three of my backups failed/malfunctioned (one local, two offsite). Having my actual, legal, full name parked on an online casino (that's almost 100% a scam) was embarrassing.
And that's not all.
I was a child of the old internet. I wrote my HTML in notepad, sketched my website layout on copy paper, I went through hosting services, I enjoyed carving my corner of the internet. As someone who was fairly interested in tech, I ended up installing a bunch of things and made my domain a playground for whatever thing struck my fancy. But code is fragile. What works in one browser might not work exactly the same next year, what you see in this browser may look different in another browser. The web-art-stuff I did in middle school doesn't appear correctly now. I gave up one of the things I made because keeping up with engine updates and changing specs was driving me crazy. In another bout of executive dysfunction, I accidentally dropped my entire database when trying to update the CMS (luckily that time my backups worked). I wish people wouldn't be so ready to underplay the upkeep that comes with the freedom, and it's not always romantic. Web stuff is only one of my (admittedly many) hobbies, and as I got older, it didn't make sense to me to spend that much time on maintenance. Most of the time I just need a container for my assorted digital ephemeras.
But plain HTML always works!
...Not really. And I'm going to be the first to say text posts are the best thing ever, but when I make non-blog stuff and you offer me web devving as a creative pursuit, you can't expect me to just deal with plain HTML.
Now that I am thankfully not a broke student anymore, I'll be able to afford to actually pay multiyear deal for my domain, so hopefully occurrence of total meltdown like before could be avoided. I plan to get a better hosting service too, but it would solely be my playground. My blog will stay here (or another reasonable hosted service, who knows), where someone can help me take care of it in a good balance between ease of use and control. I don't think platform in itself is a bad concept. As much as I like designing floor plans, I'd rather buy a complete building in a good housing complex to customize later, since I'd lived in a house that was perpetually under construction because it was built piecemeal on an empty plot. Sometimes I just want to live, do my own thing, without worrying about the living room because it's raining hard and we only got three walls built and no money to continue the project until some point in the unforeseen future (it seriously sucked. If you build your house piecemeal, make sure to prioritize which part to finish first).
Be careful with extremes. The big platforms may be bad due to the sheer impossibility of healthy scaling in the environment they were fostered in, but there are many smaller platforms that don't suck as much and can help you stay true to whatever goal you might have. You don't have to cook everything from scratch, however doable neighbor Amy thinks it is, however doable it actually is (if you haven't done so, likely you have an actual reason). If you do however, that's cool too.