I’m adding some tech notes here, as they may help others that need to move their blog.

If you are moving your site to a self-hosted version of WordPress, you may find these tips useful:

• If you’re happy with your current theme, note that the same theme may not be available on the wordpress.org platform.
• I noticed that several posts where I used the Block editor aren’t rendering very well now. Not sure why that happened. I don’t have a lot of followers or a huge amount of posts — if you do, you will probably want to see how your new theme looks by using a local development environment first. I can manually update my posts fairly easily, as there aren’t many. If you have lots, you’ll want to be more careful before migrating!
• If you’re going to use the WordPress Importer plugin to move files, please note that it’s still NOT compatible with the latest WordPress version (as of the time of this writing). Install an older version of WordPress, move your files, then update your WordPress version.
• I changed my theme in the WordPress.com blog to a theme that is currently available on the WordPress.org platform. It made the transition easier, with less to edit and clean up.
• If you are moving from a paid plan on WordPress.com, the importer will move all sorts of items that may not be applicable to your WordPress.org installation. Instead of choosing to export all the files, I exported posts, then pages separately. Then, I imported them separately. When I tried to export all files and then do an import, lots of items were missing.
• I already had a domain, so I updated the nameservers first at my domain registrar. I still had to wait for DNS propagation — kept getting errors when I tried to log in to the WordPress admin area. Even after clearing my browser cookies and cache, I kept getting a redirect to the wordpress.com login. So, give yourself some time 🙂

Happy Blogging!