If you're a developer, you might start by using a static site generator and GitHub Pages. Stick to Markdown and start collecting and writing stuff. Sooner or later you'll get comments and regular readers. Then you might start to add editing or simply give other people access to GitHub. The editing experience of Markdown files in GitHub is not too bad and you get started in no time.
From my experience it's more often not the tools but the content.
For comments you could use https://giscus.app which integrates very nicely with GitHub.
Doing so you have *no* setup costs.
I'm aware that this is not exactly *self hosted* -- but it has the advantage that you have no upfront cost. And most of the static site generators are just that, you could host the output on any 5$ web server.
We use KC with PostgreSQL as backend data store. Backup is done by backing up the PostgreSQL database.
If you actually want to transport configuration across environments (DEV, QA, PROD), then you want to export realms and have it load by KC on startup or import it using the UI.
I‘m turning 50 this week. I wish I’d noticed sooner that life is always „now“, not some distant future. All that productivity talk is good, but don’t forget about yourself now.
Well, that really seems to be a very hard problem to me.
Tables for instance get quite complex pretty fast -- joined cells, text alignment, etc.
As for a format which -- not plain text, though -- that handles this is rich text. It's been around for quite some time.
IMHO the problem is in the difference between presentation and data. One group of consumers want the "data" and parse it, the other group of consumers want to basically have it "look the same in this app as in the other app, and don't make my think."