And by that I mean,
An http server that serves word-like rich formatted text documents and includes a web-based rich formatting text editor to write and edit these documents.
With some searching I found these might be candidates
Ghost
WriteFreely / Write.as
Plume
And maybe the following editors in some kind of standalone mode
TipTap
Editor.js
Quill.js
CKEditor 5
Slate.js
There are probably thousands of different static website generators that can make a more beautiful website out of the box, for free.
SSG are really a pain in the ass to work with, especially if you want something other than the standard theme.
Maybe if you don’t know CSS?
I want something that is more akin to using microsoft word except it’s in the browser and not made by satan Something I can recomment to people and know they’re not going to come back to me and ask “what is a markdown code block”
StackEdit is a good rich text to markdown web application: https://stackedit.io/
As far as the editor, this is great. I pasted formatted text out of libre office into it and everything was fine except the images. Way better than a lot of the options here.
Althought one caveat, and it might be a big one,
It seems it can’t actually host files publicly, you need to publish them to a third party cloud hosting platform…
But other wise, it’s very nice…
There has to be a way !
Look into the GitHub integration. Your pipeline could be StackEdit -> GitHub + GitHub Actions -> Self-hosted final destination.