Looking through the writefreely.org instances on their website, a lot of the links are dead or closed for registration. The one that is open and working is promoting a paid version. Is hosting a writefreely instance heavy on resources, attracting the wrong people or just not “cool” enough?
It’s not difficult to self host. Pretty light on resources. Documentation on how to do so could use some work though. I believe I used a docker image to get up and running.
The main reason I personally don’t allow public signups on my instance is that US law is rather chaotic. If section 230 gets cancelled or repealed I don’t want to be held responsible for what some random person chose to write. It may not be a big risk at the moment but I don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with it.