Ask HN: Should I blog on Medium for my open-source project, or self-host?

One point that people seem not to be mentioning here: Medium offers some discoverability. Self-hosting doesn't.

That's only a concern if you care about how many people read your blog, but if you do, it's a concern.

Medium's also very readable. If you choose your own theme for your blog, the chances are you'll hit a theme that's "less readable". Often, programming blogs are a LOT less readable. So that's worth considering too.

(All other points made elsewhere about control of your content, compatibility with FOSS philosophy, etc, are good ones too and I won't repeat them here.)

Cross-posting to both a self-hosted blog and Medium isn't a bad solution. Or use a custom domain, as suggested.

ReStructuredText with Sphinx is wonderful. The syntax isn't the most intuitive, however once you have overcome this small hurdle, it can boost your productivity enormously.

In terms of deployment, using Sphinx enables you to easily deploy to readthedocs.io, or github pages.

Since it is a static site generate, it also enables you to use bootstrap, any javascript front-end library you wish to use, so nothing stops you from having web-application type behaviour and interactions in your posts. It also integrates nicely with extensions, such as mermaid, to make graphs inline with your posts. It can include code snippets from code, offers syntax highlighting and a lot more.

This is the only important point. The question is 1% technology and 99% audience.

Medium looks great, is easy to work with, and blog posts are easy to migrate when you need to. I would start there at least until you get your project off the ground. If you reach the point that it's worth putting more time into your blogging you can look at alternatives.

I certainly wouldn't use Github pages - it's just as centralized/non-FOSS/etc., but more work and tends to look less good. Wordpress gives you self-hostability but means you're running on PHP. In the long term I'd hope for a sandstorm-based self-hostable blog that's as easy to use (and looks as good) as Medium, but I'm not aware of such a thing existing yet.

I agree with this, BUT.

I think when we say "audience", it can mean different things.

For example, Medium has potential to bring a huge "instant" audience, but there's a difference between instant audience and long term audience.

I just went and took a look at all the large open source projects, and they all have their own blog on their own domain. AND, what comes next is important. They have:

1. RSS feed button

2. Link to subscribe to the blog via email

I think these are important in the long term if you are thinking about looking at your open source project from a long term point of view. Medium may give you instant traffic, but most of them don't really care about what you have to say.

Whereas having your own custom domain with a way for people to subscribe via RSS or email will give you a long term audience who are actually genuinely interested in your project. And with those formats it is very likely that your message will reach them, compared to medium where it may just flow away from their timeline without them ever noticing.