...and enough people find your content to have a decent conversation without you having to learn marketing?

Try. My blog got 16 visitors from another blog today.

(edit: it is now 23!)

Won't make me rich.

But it makes me happy that I am part of rebuilding an old style web.

If you write about interesting stuff, post your website below and I might add a link and I don't care about nofollow and all that SEO stuff. Maybe 5 of my visitors visit you.

You won't get rich but you will be part of something.

I did, for 7 or 8 years. It was good for my writing skills (and fun) but it was a little like talking into a vacuum.

Activitypub is one solution. Write.as implements a blogging platform that federates with other platforms using the same protocol, such as Mastodon or Pleroma.

They still haven't implemented support for seeing comments on the blog post itself, but once they have that it seems to be exactly what you are looking for.

https://wordpress.com is relatively simple, prevents SPAM, and has tools to discover and follow other blogs.

WordPress has been around for quite a while, yes.