A custom website addresses most of your complaints:
- You may post at your own pace. People subscribed to your website may get notifications via e-mail, RSS, or whatever modern way the kids use now.
- The website is about you, so nobody may drown you out.
- Your site, your algorithm, if any at all.
- This is really a you problem, not the platform’s. You’ll always find something to trip and get depressed over, e.g. low hits in your analytics.
It needs more effort in marketing, but it’s not like platforms like Itch and Facebook do that for free, either.
To answer your questions,
- Most of the time, tech and programming-related things, but really whatever I feel like.
- Hobbyist.
- I do run a tangentially-related Discord guild, so the overlapping demographic helps, but the guild itself isn’t centered on me so I try not to spam it.
- The only external website I ever advertise at is Reddit, but results are always mixed, and I don’t really try that hard, anyway.
My analytics on Itch are satisfactory for me, with a mean of a hundred 7D impressions, with CTR bouncing between 0 and 4%.