Not counting WordPress, that I really (really!!!) dislike (just because; your mileage may vary), I would say that Writefreely is the closest to traditional blog platform with activitypub baked in.

You can try it on https://writefreely.org/instances

Really love podcasting. Last one I created was a decade ago, give or take, gotta do another soon. :-)

But I think you pretty much nailed the current state of affairs.

Weird, I had a bluesky add-on on my experimental friendica installation and have not noticed any messages other than the ones people I followed participated in.

I have since deleted it, so cannot figure out what they have done differently.

He was the founder… I did not know he had left.

I find it odd that people follow Jack Dorsey into another sewer in troves. They seem to like the previous Twitter experiment, while I find it repugnant.

The lesson today is that I don’t get the social media phenomenon. My bad. I hope they have a ton of fun.