Hey everyone, if you're looking for a fantastic blog engine, I want to tell you about Ghost: https://ghost.org
I found Ghost while looking for a new blog engine for my company. My first instinct was to use Medium as well, but I ended up hitting a lot of issues because it was impossible for us to customize it (add custom javascript, charts, disable the lame "highlights", custom domain was not free, etc...).
1. Ghost is open source, developed by a foundation in the open. They make their revenue open, their issue tracker, their code, everything.
2. Ghost is self-hostable, as well as hosted on a paid plan. The paid plan is a little pricy (https://ghost.org/pricing/) but I recommend it if this is for a company blog.
4. Ghost has an excellent featureset. It's powered by Markdown and has a wonderful markdown editor in its admin/authorship interface. It also supports authors, editors, contributors, drafts, publishing schedules, tags, etc.
Seriously, try it out. I'm not affiliated, just a huge fan. I want to see more people use and support these fantastic open source tools, rather than complain about Medium like there's no alternative.
As many others indicated, static sites are much better unless you need dynamic features. Static sites make deployments much easier, doesn't depend on any OS/runtime, doesn't lock you in to a particular database. You just write markdown and with little to no modification, the same thing could just work on Hugo, or Jekyll.
I use Jekyll; I used Hugo and Pelican in the past. They solve a very specific use case. But if you want to allow guest posting on your blog, a static site will not do. You need something that has drafts, that has a proper editor, that has a UI you can add and invite people to. Ghost solves that.
As a fan of Ghost’s design and preferring static sites, I started using Jekyll with the theme Jasper2, which was based on Ghost’s default theme Casper. Super easy to set up and use if you’re comfortable with not having the ghost editor, and with github pages hosting and publishing was a breeze.
Easy to use for non technical users is Publii https://getpublii.com
It works like a dynamic CMS but generates static output, comes with GUI and clean, lightweight free themes.
2. When I first discovered Ghost (last year) and I heard it's using NodeJS I was expecting a beautiful, responsive, SPA blog engine that is fast. After reviewing it and even trying to use it as a platform for a newspaper I found that (It's just wordpress and it's not using the power of javascript to it's full extent.)
Fast => I could and I did built a faster wordpress site.
SPA => Nope
Customizable => Nope.
For me it's not worth the extra capabilities instead of a static blog.
I found gatsby(1) great for all my use cases and with some extra work[2] is more dynamic that ghost.
Great! I'll happily advertise for Ghost. As I said I'm not affiliated but I am a fan. I especially am a fan because I have a huge respect for open source organizations that run their business like they do.
I'd love to have them support Postgres (they dropped support because of not enough developers working on it), but giving it the thumbs down for those reasons seems silly. You either self-host in which case you stuff that on its own docker instance and forget about it, or you use their hosted plan in which case why do you care what software/db engine they run?
I went through a bunch (including Ghost). Good product, but I eventually ended up using a static site with Netlify.
For the static site I used Middleman. It is one of the older generators, but if you're familiar with a Rails environment you can do everything you'll ever need.
Not for everyone, but super simple, extremely fast, and completely customizable. Netlify has also taken away all the pain. Simple build and deploy. Superfast DNS and CDN. LetsEncrypt out of the box. Worth a look.
That said, the missing piece from Medium isn't the editor/hosting -- it's is the syndication.
While I loved Ghost when it was launched, I've replaced my site with Hugo instead. Hugo + Netlify is free as in beer, and is a much better deal IMO. [1]
It's literally the only problem with Ghost. Wonderful product but boy... how many people are going to pay $29/month or $228/year to host their personal blog? Yeah, there's some serious added value: managed upgrades, managed backups, DDoS protection, CDN setup, etc., and that's wonderful, but still... if you're basically just writing as a hobby, it's too much. I really hope they look into offering some kind of $5-10 hobbyist plan for low-traffic blogs.
FWIW I don't think Ghost should be used on its paid plan for personal blogs. You can host it on a droplet or AWS free tier pretty easily, otherwise you can use Github pages.
I hope Ghost will at some point have a "static site generation" mode though.
I'll add my recommendation here too. You can get going with it over at digital ocean with one of their single click images, whatever you call them, and run it fine for $5-$10 per month. I recommend $10, but I believe it'll still install and run fine for low traffic sites on the cheapest tier.
It's also really easy to install yourself. They've done a great job on it all around. If you have a blog, give it a shot. It's not a WordPress replacement if you use tons of plugins but it's great writing software.
DO recently upped their specs. Now you get 1 GB ram for $5/month, which are the specs of their previous $10/month tier. I'm going through this weekend and switching my $10 instance to a $5.
We use ghost as well, can't say enough good things about it. Digital Ocean also has a pre-configured droplet for it that makes installation / testing pretty seamless.
I'm a big fan of Ghost and have just set it up for a friend on free tier AWS for his travel blog.
DO droplets have gotten better/bigger lately, and with the one-click install it's a cinch. That said, if anyone's interested, I wrote a post on getting it running on a small VM which I'm currently rewriting for AWS free tier: https://www.danwalker.com/running-ghost-on-a-5-digital-ocean...
$19 for 50,000 views a month, only if you buy a whole year.
A $5 Google Compute server and NginX can serve 5,000 static assets a second easy. Even more with some optimization.
I don't know why your service doesn't scale to be as good as, if not better than that, since you can put more effort into static caching and optimization at scale.
I began using Ghost for a personal blog (on a micro AWS instance) a few months ago, and I'm very happy so far. I also "import" my Ghost articles to Medium - so that helps to get views while helping me maintain control of my publishing.
A blanket statement like 'Medium is bad' does not have enough nuance. Medium is for profit centralized service. You are trading freedom for convenience and access to an audience. It is for you to decide if this tradeoff is profitable.
For me, having Medium as the sole repository of my content does not seem like the right tradeoff. Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a month. Having complete control over the content is far more valuable than the audience that Medium brings. Mirroring posts to Medium can still allow me to reach that audience.
> You are trading freedom for convenience and access to an audience.
While this is certainly true, the understanding of platforms like Medium had been that they will not censor people for ideological reasons, or will do so only if the content is clearly illegal or disturbing. If they will freely censor people, there's not much point of their existence.
Indeed, there is not much of a point to their existence when they throw this away, other than being a virtue signalling magazine with unpaid authors that doesn't even follow their own vague ToS.
This week has been horrible for speech and freedom on the web. But surely a much needed reminder that suppressing speech does not work. The remedy is more speech, not less: http://prospect.org/article/remedy-more-speech
Without holding this uncompromising stance, I'm of the opinion that one cannot call themselves a liberal, in a liberal democracy. It is the cornerstone of a functioning, modern liberal democracy, and the recent trend of this self-censorship by big technology companies is worrying.
Assuming a site like Medium is going to stand for freedom of speech is foolish. Of course they aren’t. They are for profit.
This silly mindset is way too common. Don’t trust for profit companies like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc to be bastions of freedom of speech. They will do whatever is best for their shareholders.
Protecting freedom is why we need to keep it feasible and affordable to be able to host your own site.
Yeah that's until your CDN or hosting provider decides to censor your. Turns out those are a for profit centralised service too, way more often than not.
That doesn't really solve the problem, it just moves it to github. At least you have a clearer path to move your content to another platform, if needed.
Why do you even need a CDN? GitHub will host static sites for free and updating is a git push. S3 will as well for pennies a month unless your site is huge.
I don't believe you can use HTTPS with a custom domain (a domain that doesn't end in github.io or amazonaws.com), with GitHub pages or S3.
Two free choices I'm aware of, for hosting at a URL that both future-proofs your choice of hosting provider and provides end-to-end encryption to site visitors, are the free CloudFlare plan in front of GitHub or S3 (or any other static hosting service), and the free hosting plan on Netlify.
There is some bandwidth limit, though, and with CDN your site could also get better response times, since they will serve content from a server with better proximity to visitors.
Always publish on your own platform then syndicate it across all the relevant social media providers to get exposure.
It's a huge pain, especially now that most platforms are closed and don't provide automation (APIs, RSS), but it's really the most flexible solution.
It also makes syndicating to new providers a lot less painful since you'll have some standard raw form (e.g. Markdown) which you can create a manual or automated pipeline for.
Considering Liberapay is using Mastodon, I expected them to already know what they're getting themselves into. Especially with Medium's thickening walls.
Standard reminder that Markdown, while pleasant to author in, is perhaps one of the least standard formats ever (every implementation does things their own way; see Babelmark 2) and not a great archive format, largely as a result. (Markdown files don’t have version or flavor information embedded)
I hear org-mode is a good alternative. In the mean time, consider storing a permanent .html version upon publication of markdown
Standard reminder that Markdown, while having no formal standard, tends to be implemented in broadly compatible ways across various systems. Yes, there are edge cases -- yes, I've seen the lists comparing different renderers; yes, I've run into differences once in a while myself -- but in general, it turns out that the Markdown documents I wrote 15 years ago are still perfectly readable today, no matter what Markdown engine I drop them into. Or, you know, even if I don't drop them into a Markdown engine, because the entire point of Markdown is to be easily human-readable, without "looking like code," before rendering in the first place.
Markdown isn't the be-all and end-all of markup formats, and there are valid reasons for using formats with strict specifications (e.g., AsciiDoc or ReStructuredText for certain kinds of technical writing). But the chances of Markdown documents suddenly being woefully unreadable in 20 years are roughly in line with the chances of plain text Unicode documents being unreadable in 20 years.
Markdown is thirteen years old. This is older than HTML5, which introduced '<article>', '<section>', '<header>', '<footer>', '<figure>', and '<aside>'; and it's older than lots of modern CSS features. I've got archives in a variety of markup languages going back several decades; I've found old Markup easier to work with than old HTML or SGML. YMMV, though.
If your documents are available on the open web, you can visit them on the Wayback Machine to make sure they're cached as HTML. This is in some ways more reliable, and some ways less, than trying to keep track of your own HTML transcodes over decades. It's generally a more reliable way of making sure they're available after you disappear.
As a daily user of org mode for notes, agenda, todo lists and word-processing (I LOVE IT) I'd recommend against using it for sth. like a blog. I did try. First of all it's a moving target, new syntax is introduced not-infrequently. Then, the API is cumbersome at times, and it's also slow. My org-publish setup with an RSS exporting function bolted on took many tens of seconds to export, even when only a single file was modified. I migrated to Textile for my website. It's implementations are all compatible, and it's way more comprehensive than any version of markdown.
The major point of using markdown, or why I use it, is that it doesn't require a working implementation to be understood. I can open a markdown file in ed and still understand it. From what I've seen of RestructuredText and Org-mode, if i'm not using the implementation, it becomes a mess.
(I also always recommend to put anything that isn't widely implemented in Markdown in HTML instead since that will be reasonably parsable for the next couple decades.)
org-mode is even less standard than markdown. The one and only editor for it is emacs. I haven't seen another implementation that is even close to complete.
The question is what is your platform? Does it require running your own server in your bedroom, hiring a virtual machine, or maybe even anything like hosted WordPress counts as yours, because you pay for it directly? And you know even if you run your own bedroom server - even then you still rely on some companies, be it your internet provider or even electricity provider, and theoretically you can be switched off if you offend them enough. This is a complex world.
The “threat model” approach from security is useful here too. (Or Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery, if you're familiar with that domain, or want to learn it.)
What are the threats to your content availability — hosting provider censors you, hosting provider dies, your cloud servers die, your on-premise servers die or their storage is corrupted, your workstation dies or its storage is corrupted, you miss a bill, you lose your ability to pay bills at all?
How likely are these? What happens? How much do you care? How could you recover and re-publish your data? How quickly do you need to recover, if at all? How much (time, money) is it worth investing now, to reduce the risk of future data loss or the duration of an outage?
What does "your own platform" mean? Without relying on things like Tor, I don't believe it's possible to publish anything without relying on some large corporation who can pull your content with a day's notice. If not Medium, it'll be AWS or Google Cloud or your domain registrar. Anyone who cares about an open web should be, at minimum, calling out those who take down content on short notice without reason.
Your own domains are orders of magnitude safer from that in general, so I think "our own domain + content in a form we can quickly mirror to another provider" qualifies as your own platform.
Domain registrars are orders of magnitude less likely to censor content than user-generated content sites. Hosting providers vary on this issue, but they're a commodity and some do take a hard non-censorship line.
I agree we should call out sites for censorship, but there's a strong case for people taking more control over their publishing.
The point is there are tons of cloud hosting / self hosting / hosting over tor... Do you think piratebay would have survived a medium take down if they centralized through a service like that.
I don't even understand why someone who has a hosting would want to write on medium when they can host their own blog, especially when in the case of liberapay and mastodon they say they are fighting for freedom but choose to wirte their posts in a closed, centralized service which also has user-hostile behavior.
I rarely click medium.com links, or any of their associated domains, hackernoon.com, etc.
The website sucks. It's crippled without JS, and squirmy and laggy when JS is enabled. Either way, it's very heavy on the network pipe.
Medium is in business of driving traffic, which means the content is likely to be mediocre.
It's content that is looking for an audience, as my comment's sibling states. Which means that it is probably not that compelling, otherwise the audience would find it.
It's written by someone who can't be bothered to set up their own website without all of these mis-features, nor understands the importance of doing so.
And for all of these reasons, the opinion of someone who publishes on Medium is worth a lot less to me.
The same goes for businessinsider.com, wsj.com, patch.com, nymag.com and all those other shitty sites that make me regret visiting them the moment I arrive. There can't be anything relevant enough on there that I can't live without. Just a big waste of my time and network resources.
I've blacklisted them in my hosts file, and haven't looked back.
Fun Fact: A single Medium blog page downloads more code and data than a multi user ERP & Accounting system I wrote for a large company back in the 80's (in terms of MB).
It always puzzled me how did they manage to get the amount of visitors they get? Is it just overabundance of marketing type people among Medium users that would spam their blogs to all corners of the Web?
Medium offers the potential for an audience who will read your work. It’s dead simple to use. The “claps” economy at least offers a glimmer of hope you could be compensated for your work. And, for a lot of folks, it can offer a sense of community. And honestly, hosting your own blog, while cheap, is often an annoyance to maintain.
I get e-mails ever once in a while asking if I'd like to write for a medium blog. I always ask how much they're paying and never get a reply.
I'm fine for writing in a spot I can get exposure, but you better pay me. Medium does pay a subset of their writers. I know when they started The Nib, they paid political cartoonists like Matt Bors. So they paid a small group to get others to contribute. They're pretty much the new Huffington Post.
How exactly does that happen btw? What are all the discovery mechanisms? Once the network is saturated like the Web, what does it do to allow new blogs to be discovered, besides just a "new on X topic" section and stuff people can do anyway to share urls?
I've got access to GCP and AWS, and a private account at a VPS provider with a server I can put anything on, and I still publish technical articles on medium for the simple reason that I get far more readers than I do when writing on my own blog.
Reading further down the thread, it seems they were suspended for violation of Medium's policy on cryptocurrencies... despite the fact that they have never written about cryptocurrencies.
Medium has a policy on cryptocurrency? Given the amount of problematic thought pieces submitted to HN from it (and the no-so-subtle advertisements for the author’s own crypto), you wouldn’t know it.
It does look like an obvious mistake, based on the cached content Librapay posted as an example and others I could pull up in Google's cache. Hope they get a quick turnaround with support.
I never understood why people who can use self-hosted wordpress and domain names would decide to give up control and put content on Medium. The stories featured on the front page seem a bit of an ideological bubble (I doubt any conservative bloggers would get any traction there.)
And the whole "log in to your email to log on" is IMO horrible design. I put Gmail in a separate browser to mitigate cookie tracking, having to log on to email then copy the login link to my main browser is much more annoying than using a password manager like every other site.
That is a bit like saying "I never understood why people who can self-host video put it on YouTube". Most times your content will never reach a significant audience (if this is your goal), platforms like Medium/YouTube/Flickr/500px make discovery easier.
You're going from a simple CMS to video hosting is like saying why ride a bicycle when you can build a lamborghini from scratch. Sure some people have the bank roll to try and launch a youtube, very few, but everyone can afford to spin up a wordpress or some other sort of CMS on a one click host.
Slightly better discoverability and easier “subscriptions” are the main values of Medium for me. I find syndication ok at attracting readers to specific posts but not great at getting people to keep coming back (even with rss available).
I never liked medium, their comment UX is weird and annoying, the whole thing is just faceless, brandless and feels generic.
Mabye I'm old, but I find shared hosting with one click deployment of wordpress a better choice, but heck, most of the blogs I end up reading nowdays are tech blogs written by bright people who for some reason will not
1. deploy an existing blog engine to a shared host
2. host a blog on a vps
3. write a rudimentary blog engine
4. write a static generator (how much time could that be? a day?)
Yep, searching may be tricky, especially with rendered sites, but it's doable and I literally never used the search function on medium... but whatever. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.
If you really want to publish something and you're a lazy bum, just throw up a github repo, or a gist, it's still 100% more flexible than medium.
wordpress offers free hosting for unlimited traffic. You don't need to set up anything.
The smallest blog takes a long time to setup. I understand developers who don't want to run web services at work only to come home and run other web services.
Static site generator + static site hosting + JavaScript based comment system like disqus is a great combo. You can generate in a container off markdown using something like Hugo and host on S3. I’ve got free tier werker pulling my repo, building it, then deploying it to CloudFiles. All I do is commit the markdown changes to github.
Readit News
I found Ghost while looking for a new blog engine for my company. My first instinct was to use Medium as well, but I ended up hitting a lot of issues because it was impossible for us to customize it (add custom javascript, charts, disable the lame "highlights", custom domain was not free, etc...).
1. Ghost is open source, developed by a foundation in the open. They make their revenue open, their issue tracker, their code, everything.
2. Ghost is self-hostable, as well as hosted on a paid plan. The paid plan is a little pricy (https://ghost.org/pricing/) but I recommend it if this is for a company blog.
3. Ghost is beautiful out of the box. Here is the default theme: https://blog.ghost.org -- Here is a slightly customized theme: https://articles.hsreplay.net
4. Ghost has an excellent featureset. It's powered by Markdown and has a wonderful markdown editor in its admin/authorship interface. It also supports authors, editors, contributors, drafts, publishing schedules, tags, etc.
Seriously, try it out. I'm not affiliated, just a huge fan. I want to see more people use and support these fantastic open source tools, rather than complain about Medium like there's no alternative.
2. When I first discovered Ghost (last year) and I heard it's using NodeJS I was expecting a beautiful, responsive, SPA blog engine that is fast. After reviewing it and even trying to use it as a platform for a newspaper I found that (It's just wordpress and it's not using the power of javascript to it's full extent.)
Fast => I could and I did built a faster wordpress site.
SPA => Nope
Customizable => Nope.
For me it's not worth the extra capabilities instead of a static blog.
I found gatsby(1) great for all my use cases and with some extra work[2] is more dynamic that ghost.
1. gatsby - https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby
2. netlify + contentful - https://www.netlifycms.org/ + https://www.contentful.com/
(I would love to see a CMS that embraces SPA/PWA. On the other side I would hate to serve 1mb of JS just to show 4 paragraphs and 1 picture)
Great! I'll happily advertise for Ghost. As I said I'm not affiliated but I am a fan. I especially am a fan because I have a huge respect for open source organizations that run their business like they do.
This seems like a positive aspect for a blog? Most blogs are pretty far removed from being “applications”.
- requires exactly mysql, nodejs, nginx and at least 1GB RAM.
- the only supported setup is Ubuntu 16.04
- has some sort of ghost-cli application used for management.
At least for me: not enough fingers for "thumbs down".
For the static site I used Middleman. It is one of the older generators, but if you're familiar with a Rails environment you can do everything you'll ever need.
Not for everyone, but super simple, extremely fast, and completely customizable. Netlify has also taken away all the pain. Simple build and deploy. Superfast DNS and CDN. LetsEncrypt out of the box. Worth a look.
That said, the missing piece from Medium isn't the editor/hosting -- it's is the syndication.
https://github.com/yabwe/medium-editor
[1]: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/
It's literally the only problem with Ghost. Wonderful product but boy... how many people are going to pay $29/month or $228/year to host their personal blog? Yeah, there's some serious added value: managed upgrades, managed backups, DDoS protection, CDN setup, etc., and that's wonderful, but still... if you're basically just writing as a hobby, it's too much. I really hope they look into offering some kind of $5-10 hobbyist plan for low-traffic blogs.
I hope Ghost will at some point have a "static site generation" mode though.
It's also really easy to install yourself. They've done a great job on it all around. If you have a blog, give it a shot. It's not a WordPress replacement if you use tons of plugins but it's great writing software.
It's also really easy to theme.
DO droplets have gotten better/bigger lately, and with the one-click install it's a cinch. That said, if anyone's interested, I wrote a post on getting it running on a small VM which I'm currently rewriting for AWS free tier: https://www.danwalker.com/running-ghost-on-a-5-digital-ocean...
I don't know why your service doesn't scale to be as good as, if not better than that, since you can put more effort into static caching and optimization at scale.
Deleted Comment
For me, having Medium as the sole repository of my content does not seem like the right tradeoff. Maintaining a static site with a CDN costs less than 5$ a month. Having complete control over the content is far more valuable than the audience that Medium brings. Mirroring posts to Medium can still allow me to reach that audience.
While this is certainly true, the understanding of platforms like Medium had been that they will not censor people for ideological reasons, or will do so only if the content is clearly illegal or disturbing. If they will freely censor people, there's not much point of their existence.
They threw out their integrity as a publishing platform when they updated their ToS a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16431403
Indeed, there is not much of a point to their existence when they throw this away, other than being a virtue signalling magazine with unpaid authors that doesn't even follow their own vague ToS.
This week has been horrible for speech and freedom on the web. But surely a much needed reminder that suppressing speech does not work. The remedy is more speech, not less: http://prospect.org/article/remedy-more-speech
Without holding this uncompromising stance, I'm of the opinion that one cannot call themselves a liberal, in a liberal democracy. It is the cornerstone of a functioning, modern liberal democracy, and the recent trend of this self-censorship by big technology companies is worrying.
This silly mindset is way too common. Don’t trust for profit companies like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc to be bastions of freedom of speech. They will do whatever is best for their shareholders.
Protecting freedom is why we need to keep it feasible and affordable to be able to host your own site.
That's putting it mildly! I host a (small) static webpage on AWS S3 + CloudFront, and my monthly bill is 56 cents.
If it helps, envision Medium as a social network. You share to FB, TW, etc. Medium would be a slightly longer post.
I would appreciate publishers who follow your solution of doing both!
“Cool, where’d you go?”
“GitHub pages.”
“...”
Two free choices I'm aware of, for hosting at a URL that both future-proofs your choice of hosting provider and provides end-to-end encryption to site visitors, are the free CloudFlare plan in front of GitHub or S3 (or any other static hosting service), and the free hosting plan on Netlify.
It's a huge pain, especially now that most platforms are closed and don't provide automation (APIs, RSS), but it's really the most flexible solution.
It also makes syndicating to new providers a lot less painful since you'll have some standard raw form (e.g. Markdown) which you can create a manual or automated pipeline for.
Considering Liberapay is using Mastodon, I expected them to already know what they're getting themselves into. Especially with Medium's thickening walls.
I hear org-mode is a good alternative. In the mean time, consider storing a permanent .html version upon publication of markdown
Markdown isn't the be-all and end-all of markup formats, and there are valid reasons for using formats with strict specifications (e.g., AsciiDoc or ReStructuredText for certain kinds of technical writing). But the chances of Markdown documents suddenly being woefully unreadable in 20 years are roughly in line with the chances of plain text Unicode documents being unreadable in 20 years.
If your documents are available on the open web, you can visit them on the Wayback Machine to make sure they're cached as HTML. This is in some ways more reliable, and some ways less, than trying to keep track of your own HTML transcodes over decades. It's generally a more reliable way of making sure they're available after you disappear.
The major point of using markdown, or why I use it, is that it doesn't require a working implementation to be understood. I can open a markdown file in ed and still understand it. From what I've seen of RestructuredText and Org-mode, if i'm not using the implementation, it becomes a mess.
(I also always recommend to put anything that isn't widely implemented in Markdown in HTML instead since that will be reasonably parsable for the next couple decades.)
What are the threats to your content availability — hosting provider censors you, hosting provider dies, your cloud servers die, your on-premise servers die or their storage is corrupted, your workstation dies or its storage is corrupted, you miss a bill, you lose your ability to pay bills at all?
How likely are these? What happens? How much do you care? How could you recover and re-publish your data? How quickly do you need to recover, if at all? How much (time, money) is it worth investing now, to reduce the risk of future data loss or the duration of an outage?
What does "your own platform" mean? Without relying on things like Tor, I don't believe it's possible to publish anything without relying on some large corporation who can pull your content with a day's notice. If not Medium, it'll be AWS or Google Cloud or your domain registrar. Anyone who cares about an open web should be, at minimum, calling out those who take down content on short notice without reason.
I agree we should call out sites for censorship, but there's a strong case for people taking more control over their publishing.
The website sucks. It's crippled without JS, and squirmy and laggy when JS is enabled. Either way, it's very heavy on the network pipe.
Medium is in business of driving traffic, which means the content is likely to be mediocre.
It's content that is looking for an audience, as my comment's sibling states. Which means that it is probably not that compelling, otherwise the audience would find it.
It's written by someone who can't be bothered to set up their own website without all of these mis-features, nor understands the importance of doing so.
And for all of these reasons, the opinion of someone who publishes on Medium is worth a lot less to me.
The same goes for businessinsider.com, wsj.com, patch.com, nymag.com and all those other shitty sites that make me regret visiting them the moment I arrive. There can't be anything relevant enough on there that I can't live without. Just a big waste of my time and network resources.
I've blacklisted them in my hosts file, and haven't looked back.
Fun Fact: A single Medium blog page downloads more code and data than a multi user ERP & Accounting system I wrote for a large company back in the 80's (in terms of MB).
It always puzzled me how did they manage to get the amount of visitors they get? Is it just overabundance of marketing type people among Medium users that would spam their blogs to all corners of the Web?
It's an SPA. What did you expect? That's the new M.O., unless you're a 90's relic like myself, in which case I appreciate your point but times change.
If you write good content and are consistent, it isn't that difficult to drive traffic to your own blog.
Blogging is easy with a good static site generator and netlify (free).
I'm fine for writing in a spot I can get exposure, but you better pay me. Medium does pay a subset of their writers. I know when they started The Nib, they paid political cartoonists like Matt Bors. So they paid a small group to get others to contribute. They're pretty much the new Huffington Post.
Dead Comment
And here's the policy page it links to: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000646167
And the whole "log in to your email to log on" is IMO horrible design. I put Gmail in a separate browser to mitigate cookie tracking, having to log on to email then copy the login link to my main browser is much more annoying than using a password manager like every other site.
Very little risk.
Mabye I'm old, but I find shared hosting with one click deployment of wordpress a better choice, but heck, most of the blogs I end up reading nowdays are tech blogs written by bright people who for some reason will not
1. deploy an existing blog engine to a shared host
2. host a blog on a vps
3. write a rudimentary blog engine
4. write a static generator (how much time could that be? a day?)
Yep, searching may be tricky, especially with rendered sites, but it's doable and I literally never used the search function on medium... but whatever. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.
If you really want to publish something and you're a lazy bum, just throw up a github repo, or a gist, it's still 100% more flexible than medium.
The smallest blog takes a long time to setup. I understand developers who don't want to run web services at work only to come home and run other web services.
You'd be surprised how much time you can sink in a high quality blog engine.
https://replyable.com/2017/03/disqus-is-your-data-worth-trad...
https://github.com/posativ/isso
and Discourse on a subdomain ($5/month for a Digital Ocean server).
https://blog.disqus.com/security-alert-user-info-breach